Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Redux of Fourth Way Introduction @ UCSB

There's a story involved which represents my introduction to Gurdjieff's Work, called The Fourth Way. As freshman at UCSB, I was in the book store early and often. I ran across a small compilation of lectures by a man named Ouspensky, perhaps Gurdjieff's most famous student, and a huge intellect who eventually wrote a book called The Fourth Way, really a compendium of G's lectures which are considered the basic layout of his Theory of All and Everything.

But to introduce this work, Ouspensky would say there are 3 basic ideas necessary to understand in order to even stand a chance of being in the Work. 1: Man cannot do. 2: Man lies about everything 3: We are not 1, but we are legion (meaning a person is not properly identified as a single individual, but a legion ~ an alignment with many others including those who work with the Enneagram which was one Gurdjieff's principle tools used in self-observation. ...

Now, I stood there and read his Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution, and at the end was a challenge give regarding a reader personally verifying their being awake or not, present or not. Given any destination mapped to time and space, one simply commits themselves to staying conscious the entire trip and then when they actually reach the destination, and if a person is awake at that moment, that's a fairly rare and humongous achievement. So, the trip back to my dorm was as short 1/4 mile past all the other dorms and the eucalyptus trees which form a forest in which UCSB is built, right on the coast, at Goleta Point. My dorm wasn't more than 100 yards from the ocean.

And so I set out, and then 2 weeks later, I suddenly had the experience of waking up, or being conscious, as Gurdjieff puts it as Self-Remembering. I've been in this work now for 35 years, and believe when I say that is a beast (story) of a different nature. At any rate, Self-Remembering simply means a conscious effort at retaining a small percentage of one's attention to be directed by one's will and that direction inward to one's self. For everyone, this begins with a persistent failure with maintaining the state. And that is what Gurdjieff tells everyone, that somebody could ask men if they were awake and the very asking of that question produces a shock to the mind, in effect waking them up. And for a short moment or two, that person looks and in looking finds he/she is awake and thus responds I"m awake only in the very next moment they cease being awake and go back to sleep.

The point here is that being awake is a specific conscious choice and effort. Evolving one's consciousness to a HIGHER level or state, requires some consciousness to being with, and makes sense that it would require a higher conscious effort than currently being made in order for any positive results to occur. And finally, this is what all that other stuff is designed to support. It really is the only value that means anything in life, because if you're awake, what are you? Well, most people exist exactly as that, as a machine. The point here being that I certainly made it home that night in UCSB. How did that happen if I was asleep. We're all machines with mechanical functions to move, emote, think, etc., but none of which have anything to do with consciousness or Self. G called us 3 brained beings. But, the first step in G's work, is called Self-Observation, but that is only valuable insofar as a person builds up a psychic photo album of themselves expressing various different identifications within their own minds. This will possibly give rise later to a series of identifications leading ultimately to a permanent "I".

So, that was making a long story short! LOL Hope it helped you understand my earlier words, thanks for asking for this clarification.

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