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.

Following Artists

Don't have a writer to speak of. Listening to Dave Matthews right now, thinking of JLightner, a roommate, who just flew to see him thousands of miles away, play in New York. Tonight, I had fun watching/listening to comedic stand-up.  Ellen DeGeneres, P. Oneal, Craig F, even Tom Hanks was entertaining on cue with David Letterman.

The real story here remains the international economical crisis. There just doesn't seem to be any end to the limits our plans find pertinent and real. The machine doesn't exist anywhere except in our minds along with varying instructional accounts for its operation. Except here, under democratic rule, such social flaws were supposed to stop. Actually, we only succeeded in shining a light into our bottomless capacity to live the machine when our freedom has been attained.

I'm still thinking about how to channel my anger towards my family situation. So far, I've only succeeded in echoing the dysfunction and lived a series of intimate relationships designed to break my heart and create a feeling of being abandoned. I've got that one down, and I no longer am surprised when this demon raises its ugly head in my world and life anymore.

So it goes...

Along with this media swarm, there is the instinct to choke on all the dirt. Let me just say that without acknowledging my responsibility for the amount of dirt in close proximity to my person as being equal or greater, I would not be honest in speaking about that beyond my reach.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to note a recent observation regarding the value this personal blog actually has for me. There's something empowering about writing one's internal story out when one stays conscious of public access to its read. The focus and the result is completely different than identical literary aims I've had lacking this readership dimension. What is that difference?

In my head the difference has to do with something being read, and my influence over that event. Now with respect, I find this takes work, and I often seem less than competent or skilled in the task, but regardless.

I speak to love and listen for it, and yet my life fails to unfold in any sensible manner or reason. The answers exist but believe me when I say they do not make any difference with respect to the experience of one's being this way. This jumbled and unfocused thing is all I have and all I get, and this knowledge as well was supposed to be of great influence in some transformational context, but biting only resulted in my being hauled out of my flow. What is outside of one's flow is no less as valid and yet being outside the flow it remains foreign and insubstantial to life within the flow.

And, finding myself unable to carry anything else into this entry, I close. Hootie's Blowfish makes timeless into music for me now.

Inside "Focusing" work by Ann Cornell

The further I get into a book by Ann Cornell called, The Radical Acceptance of Everything, the more I see her work aligned in its efforts to what I've already come to embrace in the Fourth Way. There's no spiritual, historical background behind "focusing," but the success made by her and her colleagues greatly raises awareness in a way that repairs the wrong work and dysfunctionality of being human, rendering us the worst of machines. Concepts used for FOCUSING and those offered by the Fourth Way have completely different intents and exist on different scales of being. For the hearer, the ideas of focusing exist only insofar as are effective tools for direction and guidance for those engaged in the theraputic process itself. While Fourth Way concepts reveal an intellectual and descriptive mode or level of thinking about being human, Cornells concepts support a process between speaker and listener in which the listener is challenged semantically in precise ways which result in transformations to the awareness. The effect on awareness reflects a clearer and much wider field of reality we all seem pretty much blind to at present and in our past.

Just today, after reading anecdotes in which FOCUSING techniques were applied to obtain results, I found my own personal awareness significantly shifted. It's a very difficult process to withstand. In particular, the sorrow associated with recognizing how much of life is or was missed growing up. How unaware I was is overwhelmingly shocking as I see how I might just as easily been instructed as a child in a way leading to higher levels of awareness that we all actually need to be fully human and happy, in the first degree.

One of the most important distinctions I can offer at this time about the difference in the quality of awareness has to do with the idea of listening. The work of Cornell is all about focusing one's listening on what we have not been listening to and long ago forgot even existed. These PLACES and AREAS for which our awareness was withdrawn, continued to exist influencing us in such negative but hidden and unacknowledged ways.

So, now is the beginning of a real period of recovery in my life.

And all the time, while growing up, going to a psychotherapist, I was under the impression that I was either doomed or cursed in some way, somehow defective in my core and that my happiness was always going to be at best transient, always covering over the knowledge that in some permanent way I was not relevant to my world.

Well, with today's new insights among other recent ones, I have begun to feel encouraged to engage in relative work I can either devise or find to test out what's possible for the health and healing of my being-awareness. The core of it all is pure awareness, the evolution of it through higher consciousness. It's not really changing the process as much as it is evolving my ability to be aware, and in that higher awareness the process of life and its quality transforms by itself.

My issues, for now remain the same in general, though a lot of movement has taken place within these contexts in the last few days.  Family, love, money, health, happiness, liberty, justice, spirit, education. These remain my main and primary issues in life, today.

The non-expression of negativity

Anger wastes energy, our being, composes itself with ambient biological energies, though; capable of spiritualizing a soul through transforming energy, any wasted energies that our defects in character routinely and mechanically leak, should be understood unnecessary and opposed to one's real possibilities in this lifetime.

The true path of conscious evolution for man is through his learning to use his functions in a way to maximize what resources he has which may be applied and traded or consumed towards the goal of an evolution of self in higher consciousness.

I expect the reader to question just how much can be expected in the aftermath of any work aimed at precisely this goal, that of sorting out and healing the functions of our being, so that integrity is restored and energy isn't wasted. It's not easy to stop the wrong work of our being, to recover from negative expression in the expression of negativity but is easily one of the biggest steps towards the conservation of needless loss in our being, of energy needed to lay the foundation and bedrock to what's possible.

The only way to create higher being is through applying the energy for that higher being, available in raw form and limited quanitities, to our conscious self awareness, transforming it. The higher form of energy created using what little intent and attention we have to self-remember and contain what losses we are experiencing, allows for higher levels of consciousness which by definition must be based on non-mechanical being. For most of us this is a huge contradiction in terms as we 've grown up identifying our self and who we are with mechanical levels of the gross materiality as our soul passes through life since higher conscious levels are simply to hard to identify for the common individual.

However, without fail, most newborns forget who they are and any previous spiritual work and power they might have developed, and see themselves only in projections they make out in the world surrounding them with the help and guidance of their parents.

Through this process, such base levels of our energetic being bind and conentrate to form much higher potencies to start with, and also misunderstood and misused.  the given amounts of personal energy available for us and within us as we begin this work is quite small and incapable of being properly contained and consereved, especially in the beginning. My aim has nothing to do with sleep, or the drama of life which diverts the higher being from the brush fires that exist and about which not many care about or wish to provide any kind of solution for.

Transformation of our central energy of being takes time. Whereas, its loss can take place in a matter of moments with the right circumstances availalbe. At that time, sleep really does race to meet us, and our most important perspective in life, the condition of our work for pay can suffer wildly.

Over time, if one works well, the amount of effort required to maintain certain kinds of focus and attention consciously becomes noticeably smaller. The quanitity of energy we are focusing with our attention actually isn't becoming smaller but rather our personal power is rising.

Ultimately, our higher consciousness is a gift we receive from even greater heights of conscious being, while the energy transformations eventually go through a periodic cycling of storage before becoming needed or useful to our being's evolution. There are crossroads, grades, special needs and conditions requiring varying accumulations in order to leverage our progress as needed. These moments come in a harmonic accord with higher beings dedicated to our evolution and our based on what resources we have to meet such challenges as our pools of transformational resources are capable of. Successful challenges test the gain with loads quite outside but specific to internal structures of support. And, without the accumulated resources of transformation, our beings would lack what possibility they had at that moment for whatever powers of higher consciousness might be acquired.

So, we aim never to express negativity, and to succeed at this of course one first needs to understand negativity itself and just when and where how we express it as mechanical levels of being are fated to do. A careful examination will reveal an incredibly wasteful mechanical being for most people, which is entirely unknown, misunderstood and unconscious to them.