We are seeking to approach the unknown, to open the door to what is hidden in us and pass beyond. It is necessary to submit entirely to an inner voice, to a feeling of the divine, of the sacred in us, but we can do it only in part. The sacred manifests as inner consciousness. The divine, God, must be found within. Truth, the only truth, is in consciousness.
Everything that exists is constituted of three forces. They can be represented as the Father, the active force; the Son, the passive force; and the Holy Spirit, the neutralizing force. The Father creates the Son. The Son returns to the Father. The force that descends is the one that wishes to return, to go back up.
In man it is the mind that is opposed to the body. The neutralizing force is the wish that unites them, connects them. Everything comes from the wish, the will. To represent God, it is necessary to represent three forces. Where the three forces are reunited, God is. Where our attention is, God is. When two forces are opposed and a third unites them, God is here. We can say, "Lord, have mercy on me." We can ask for help, to come to this in ourselves. Our aim is this, to contain, to unite these three forces within us...... to Be.
A new Way of Functioning
The state of my being today is conditioned by my way of thinking, feeling and sensing, which takes all my attention and restricts me to a narrow part of myself. In order for me to go beyond this, there must appear in me a new way of functioning. I have to discover the total ineffectiveness, the insufficiency, of my thoughts and feelings as a means to approach the true nature of myself. The automatic functioning of my thought and feeling comes between the world as it is -- what I really am -- and the perception I have of it. The state in which I live is without order, vision or aim. I am here without knowing why or what I serve.
Each of my functions responds to impressions as though it were alone, from its point of view based on what it knows. But the functions cannot separately perceive reality, which includes a much higher energy. Their force is too passive. For understanding in the light of consciousness, the functions must all be attuned and united in a single movement of availability. If there is any distance between them, the common aim is lost and the blind function acts according to its habit. Thus, the first thing to understand is this availability of my thought, my body and my feeling to receive together, at the same time, an impression that they cannot know in advance. Everything they know is not the immediate perception of what is here, now, when they are quiet. And I must pass through the disappointment of seeing that their intervention, in which I always believe, only brings images of the known instead of direct experience. Then perhaps I will begin to understand why this teaching places such importance on the fact that our centers work without any relation with each other. So long as a relation is not made, I cannot go beyond my habitual state of consciousness.
Can this relation be made? Do I feel as a fact, in a real way, that there is a lack of relation? Do I feel at this moment my lack of intelligence to know my own truth and the truth of what is in front of me? Do I see that I am held back by words, ideas and emotions, full of doubt, belief and fear? I need to realize by experience what this disconnection of my centers means. I have a certain sensation of myself, and my thought is on the sensation. But one or the other is always stronger. I am not one, not a unity.
This accord of my centers of energy and their functioning cannot be brought about by forcing. There must be a quieting, a letting go of their movement, in order for a balance of energy to appear between them. But something is missing. I feel I am always to passive. So the need for an energy appears, an attention that will stay free and not become fixed on anything. It is an attention that will contain everything and refuse nothing, that will not take sides or demand anything. It will be without possessiveness, without avidity, but always with a sincerity that comes from the need to remain free in order to know.
Awakening to a New Force
We wish to become conscious of the state and movement of energy in ourselves. This can only be done in the present moment. I need to be more active inside. I practice trying to be present, to awake. But every activity that I have not yet mastered provokes tension. I wish, and I am not capable. So I tense, and in this way create an obstacle to realizing my aim. I come up against this obstacle again and again until I become convinced of the falseness of my conception of effort -- that is, as a movement toward a result. Then I feel relieved, a letting go that is a clear sign of my own Presence...
In order to come to the total stillness in which I will be free to know, I must abandon both the pretension that I am able and my belief in what I know. I must see myself blindly believing, again and again, in what my thinking or my emotion tells me. I need to see myself as always fooled until I see the uselessness of it all, until I feel how poor I really am. Then a calm appears and perhaps I learn something new. In any case, it is like a door opening. All I can do is leave it open. What will follow I cannot forsee.
The quality of influence that reaches me depends on the quality of my Presence. And the quality of my Presence depends on the relation of my thought, my feeling and my sensation. In order to be attuned to a more subtle force, the attention of each part needs to concentrate, to become charged with a new meaning and power to relate voluntarily. In this way the thinking purifies itself, as do the feelins and sensation. Each plays its own role and functions in concert with the others for the same goal of being attuned with a more subtle Presence. This Presence needs to shine, to animate my body. It has an intelligence, a vision that is like a light in the darkness and thickness of my sleep.
As I am today, directed by my ego, I cannot know the very essence of my Being. Iam not prepared for this. A greater abandon, a greater magnetization toward my real "I", toward my "divine" nature, must take place. I feel the need for it, and I awaken to this wish, this life. I feel this intelligence awaken.
From ~ The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff, pgs. 27 & 46-49
Jeanne De Salzmann
Related Links:
The Holy Equation: The Fundamental Key to Inner Work
Sensing Exercises
Attention Exercises
Self-Obsevation Exercises
Self-Remembering Exercises
Meditation
