(Expectations, identification, and the multi-world nature of man)
Identification with the future diminishes our chances and closes down our potential; it brings us into a lower level world. It was not until I had understood all this for myself and became quite convinced of it that I found I was able to get rid of expectations and stop worrying about the future.
People laughed at this and Gurdjieff did not like it when they laughed. I believe that he meant it seriously: people should carry Beelzebub3 around with them, read it on the train, in cafes, waiting rooms and so on.
What is perfectly legitimate and harmless in psychostatic people cannot be allowed in people who have the possibility of transformation. It is extremely awkward. Say to one’s parents and family what they want to hear. This is “external considering” and it is the right thing to do. It is not insincere. To tell people things that they do not want to hear is interfering with their lives, which is worse than insincerity.
Even in order to breathe properly, we have to be in more than one world. Breathing is different in each of the worlds. The significance of the zikr5 is an action that belongs to the second world. The significance of food and its possibilities of transformation is that man should be able to live in more than one world. The last words of the last book that Gurdjieff wrote say it is possible for man to live equally in three worlds.
What we have to do is to free ourselves from expectation and all the blind habits of thought that bring us down. If something has awakened for you about all this, then it is a most precious possession and you must do everything you can to substantiate it. It is an unlimited way.
(Personality as empty automation; the terror of seeing no one home)
People live their lives on a level of themselves where there is hardly any freedom or capacity to determine what will happen. That is personality. As I said to one of the groups earlier today, it is a very hard thing to accept that the personality is really helpless and empty. It has no more capacity for independent initiative than a suit of clothes. A suit of clothes will move about and change its shape if it has a body inside it that will move about, but ordinarily it is inert. It is the same with personality. It will move about so long as there are various urges arising in us and as long as there are situations coming from outside. You can see this time and time again and still not be convinced about it. For example, in the stop exercise you may see many times that at that moment there is nobody there and you can even say to yourself, “Well, now I can really see that there is no ‘I’ in my personality; it is just an automation,” but it still doesn’t come home to you. You can see it a hundred times and it does not come home. One reason is that it is terrifying. “If I am empty, if there is no one there, what is to become of me?” So we shut it off and the realization does not become part of us.
Everything worthwhile depends on our liberation from personality and our coming into essence, so that essence has the initiative.
She also became aware that there was a possibility of deciding to stop smoking. Something like this has to be reinforced by the decision exercise,6 because, as she was describing to us, the personality will start inventing reasons for smoking again. This is partly connected with the personality not wanting to give up the position it has occupied in us until now.
The personality will channel everything through the formatory apparatus. Again and again people have essence perceptions, but always their personality intercepts them when they come into their consciousness and turns them into words, emotions, or anything except the simple direct awareness. This messing about with what we see is a tremendous thief of opportunity.
So we sat talking all night and then in the morning I drove down to the coast. At one moment the whole thing became clear to me. I saw how I was living my life in an unreal way, that everything was just words and I had no contact with reality at all. I saw that there was nothing I could expect; that nothing could happen to my personality. It didn’t matter whether it was good or bad, clever or stupid, it had no potential.
We are not after making life into something grim and hard. People I know who live in this way are very happy people indeed. I must say that every time I have disciplined myself—and I am not trying to pretend that I am a well-disciplined person—I have always had greater rejoicing and satisfaction and feelings of freedom and well-being. Making discipline into something grim and hard is entirely a matter of our own egoism: we turn it into a virtue and begin to think of ourselves as “better.” It seems that whenever we do something good our self-love swallows it up. But this will not happen if we keep ourselves in a state of rejoicing, because rejoicing and self-love are not compatible with each other.
up. It is very much due to your imagination, connected with the feeling that you won’t be accepted, that you won’t be understood, that if you try something it won’t come off properly and you will fail. If you have experienced the taste of being able to get out of this negative imagination, you must also see that you do not lose it. So it is a good thing that you got yourself to speak this evening.
What is inner considering? One aspect is making demands—even if they are hidden demands that do not show on the outside—on other people. Instead of being concerned with understanding other people we are concerned with whether they will understand us. We even demand that they should understand us and make life easier for us by understanding our difficulties. This is a real obstacle and prevents us from reaching our own essence. The reason for it is real but it is misinterpreted. You have a lack of confidence; you do not know how people will respond, or you fear that they will not respond in an encouraging way to anything that you might say or do. At the bottom of it all there is something that knows that you are out of contact with your own self.
something is missing because of the separation between the personality and the “I,” or fundamentally, between the “I” and the centers which are working without their Master. For everyone, this produces a latent feeling of insecurity. Everyone is insecure until they know that the “I” and their centers are connected with one another. We want to know that there is someone in us who can take decisions, is not afraid of taking them and facing their consequences. When there is that, this kind of suffering gives way.
(The hidden pattern behind apparent disorder)
Pattern Sometimes in reading Beelzebub’s Tales to you I have shown that there is a pattern beneath the surface. Sometimes some of you have seen it for yourselves. One of the purposes of our kind of work is to develop the power to discern the hidden pattern in things. You will remember Gurdjieff describing how it is possible by knowing one part of the human body to know all the rest. That is what it is like to see the pattern. One way of expressing this idea is to say that there is hidden order behind the apparent disorder, or a hidden purpose behind the visible absence of purpose.
We labor under the misapprehension that we have to think up what we have to do. The truth is that this is not our responsibility, because the pattern of things is far greater than we can imagine.
You must always remember the principle of beginning with what is commensurate with your powers. Gurdjieff always said that people try to do what is too big for them and they neglect to do what is within their power.
We, because we are three-brained-beings, have a capacity for creating order. Certainly insects produce miracles of orderly patterning, but it is not their own intentional and conscious action. It is the creative action of some extraordinary intelligence that, for some reason not easy to understand, brought these prodigious powers of the insects into the visible world.
For the man who is looked upon as someone who can achieve what he sets out to do, it is extraordinarily hard to maintain the awareness that he simply has the capacity to read the course of events and adapt himself to them, not to influence them.
Sometimes we have the feeling, “If I had not panicked, something would have happened to me.” What makes us panic is the inability to accept our own nothingness: it looks as if there is a darkness ahead of us and we are frightened of going into that darkness. It is not at all something to be afraid of, but it is impossible to know what it is until one goes through it.
(Permanence of the shift; personality as automaton whose perceptions it steals)
This doesn’t mean that our personality has to be destroyed or put out of action. But our whole attitude towards it has to change. The shift of perspective has to be made permanent. One thing that can help us a lot is to see the complete mechanicalness of our associations. The trouble is that we accept that only sometimes. We think that sometimes we are asleep and sometimes not. It is very difficult to accept that the very nature of our personality is to be an automaton. That is why it comes under all kinds of influences that are unnatural and absurd for it to come under. Its opinions, attitudes, interests, and so on, can be changed without its even noticing. What matters for us in our time here is to look at ourselves from all sides—when we are doing movements, doing the morning exercise, or when we have this spontaneous waking up. The frequency of the spontaneous moments is greatly increased by the efforts we are making. The reward of making efforts is not, in general, to bring about change; it is to create possibilities for us, to open the way to our having spontaneous experiences. But the trouble is that we can make the efforts, we can have the spontaneous perceptions and, at the very moment when something good is coming into our hands, we throw it away by letting our personality steal it.
The itoklanoz way of living is that of a marionette with a lot of threads attached to different parts, each of which are producing reactions and behavior manifestations. With the foolasnitamnian there is something that is holding it together and it is woven according to a purpose that goes beyond the present. For each one of us there is a pattern of life which is our destiny.
(Trusting the unmanifest; destiny as the pattern of life)
studied the fire walkers in Fiji and elsewhere. The fire walkers said that you simply had to trust yourself to the fire. You can see that it is like that—if you trust the fire then it will not burn you.
The manifest relies by its nature on the unmanifest, but it requires a special kind of decision for the manifest to throw away the props and allow itself to be directed by something it cannot see or understand until it begins to manifest. Then one can say, “Well, that’s what it’s about; that’s how it is.”