Being proud to speak the truth

 Never again shall we be afraid to speak the truth or afraid to upset the fragile minds of those who cannot handle the truth. Forever we shall be proud to speak the truth for it is a righteous action.

A Mask

One can study the sun and moon externally, but you have the sun and moon and God within you. We must always start with ourselves because we cannot see others through the mask they wear. Only if we know ourselves can we see another, for all people are alike inside. Others are like us, they have the same good intentions to change but they cannot.

-George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

The Wall of Society

We only bash our heads against the rocks for long enough to learn the lesson of who we are. This society provides us with many rocks for bashing. There are many dead ends for every road forward. Much of what I have learned has now become distilled down to a single distinction: the creative and the non creative. The creative must strive to exist in soil that allows them to grow. In an uncreative industry, environment or soil, someone who can see beyond what is material and has the gift of creativity can never grow.

It is useless to feel negativity towards the cogs of the uncreative machine. People may serve a purpose in this world even if they are as rigid as a stone and have a stick way up their ass. It's not for me to decide, it is for me only to not continue down the closed paths and dead ends. It is for me only to find the eternal way.

The 4th Way

The teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff cannot be reduced into a sensible description. The process of waking up from a state of dreamlike consciousness, from a mundane mechanical state of going through the motions is not easy to understand for many because it begins with an insult.

By all measures, telling someone that they are asleep at the wheel of their life is an insult. It is to say that you are not in control. If there is one thing that ego centric, highly programmed and reactive humans cannot be told, it is that they are not in control because their belief system and their surrounding economic system is based upon control. It undermines both the man and his nation to tell him that he is asleep. And yet for most people alive today, it is true. 

To awaken, I believe it is key to understand one concept, one which is unique to Gurdjieff, as far as I know. It is that our level of knowledge is greater than our level of being. What is a level of being? To Gurdjieff, it is the quality of food, air and mental impressions a person takes in. It is also what constitutes food for a being higher in the chain. How can a level of being be raised? Gurdjieff lays out that two fundamental practices exist for this: relaxation of muscles and self remembering. Self remembering stands in contrast to direct normal perception. At every moment, along with every outward perception, one must remember themselves.

The practice of remembering oneself goes hand in hand with elimination of wasteful mental energy. Daydreams, monologues and expression of negative emotions are all types of waste. It is one thing to understand the complexity, the variety, the ferocity of Gurdjieff's teachings and it is another to put them into practice. In my time as a human being, the teachings of Gurdjieff surpass any teaching on any subject in any format that I have ever encountered. The place to begin is the book written by his student Peter Ouspensky called In Search of The Miraculous.