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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.
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.
AI Summary
The Way to Be Free by John Godolphin Bennett and Anthony G.E. Blake presents key insights from the Gurdjieff tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.