Jeanne De Salzmann Quotes

I have to see that the thought “I” is the greatest obstacle to consciousness of myself. Everything I know through my senses has a name. I am encumbered by names, which become more important than the things themselves. I name myself “I,” and in doing it as if I knew myself, I am accepting a thought that keeps me in ignorance. If I learn to separate myself from names, from thoughts, little by little I will come to know the nature of the mind and lift the veil it casts over me.

Truth cannot be thought.

We are under the domination of our thinking mind. This is our slavery.

What is too often missing is knowing what I want. And it is this that undermines my will to work. Without knowing what I want, I will not make any effort. I will sleep. Without wishing for a different quality in myself, to turn toward my higher possibilities, I will have nothing to lean on, nothing to support work. I must always, again and again, come back to this question: What do I wish?

There is no stairway to climb. I have to leap. To become conscious I must let go of all that is known. Really knowing is a state in which everything is observed, experienced, understood and—because it is unable to serve in the following moment—abandoned as useless.

We do not understand the moment of receiving an impression and why it is so important. We need to be present because it is the shock of the impression that drives us. If there is nobody here at the moment an impression is received, I react automatically, blindly, passively, and I am lost in the reaction.

If he withdraws into the higher part, he is distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them; he no longer knows or experiences his animal nature. If he slides into the other nature, he forgets everything that is not animal, and there is nothing to resist it; he is animal . . . not man. The animal always refuses the angel. The angel turns away from the animal. A conscious man is one who is always vigilant, always watchful, who remembers himself in both directions and has his two natures always confronted.

It is attention that gives the capacity to see.

I believe I need to pay attention when, in fact, I need to see and know my inattention.

Truth simply cannot be thought.

Consciousness of self as one is, without theories or conclusions, is meditation. When our thoughts and feelings blossom and die, we enter another sphere.

When the mind is without provocation or response, there is “abandonment.” Only in this state can we find the real.

Usually I look to the attitude of others in order to be convinced of my being. If they reject or ignore me, I doubt myself. If they accept me, I believe in myself.

Each act, everything we do—working with wood or stone, making a meal or a work of art, or thinking—can be either automatic or a creation. In my habitual state I always proceed by repetition.

How to understand the experience of feeling? We know what sensing is, an inner touch. Feeling requires another quality. It has nothing to do with “like” or “dislike,” and yet it is emotion. I feel sorrow or joy. Feeling is always rising up. Like fire it flares up, then dies away. And I feel “I am.” Pure feeling has no object. I can understand it only if I am capable of seeing without an idea, word or image, able to be in contact with what is. I begin to see that the world in which I live is a world of fictions. It is not real. The vision I have of myself is not a vision of my own reality. I see myself through the thinking, lost in my imagination of “I.

Our true nature, an unknown that cannot be named because it has no form, can be sensed in the stop between two thoughts or two perceptions. These moments of stop constitute an opening to a Presence that is without end, eternal.

Attention is the essential energy in man. And this energy can only appear when one is constantly occupied in seeing, in listening, in questioning—never in knowing with my thinking mind. We must give our complete attention to the question in front of us. The attention will not be total if we seek an answer. Total attention is the process of meditation.

I am writing a book on how to be in life, on the path to take in order to live on two levels. It will show how to find a balance, to go from one to the other, or rather to find the way in between. We have to see beyond, and through, our ordinary thinking in order to open to another mind. Otherwise, we remain at the threshold in front of the door, and the door does not open.

Solitude from what is ordinary, imaginary and false is something very great. It means that for the first time I know that “I am.” It is a solitude from all the known and from all that is not right now, in the present moment outside of time. This solitude appears as a void. But it is not a void of despair. It is a complete transformation of the quality of my thinking. When the mind is free of all talking, fears, desires and pettiness, it is silent. Then comes a sense of complete nothingness, the very essence of humility. At the same time, there is a feeling of truly entering another world, a world that seems more real. I am a particle of a greater reality. I experience solitude not because something is missing but because there is everything—everything is here.

As I try to remember myself, I see where my wish comes from. It is from my ordinary “I.” So long as the impulse comes from the possessiveness at the core of my personality, it will not bring the freedom necessary for a perception that is direct. When I see this . . . I have the impression of being a little freer. . . . But I wish to keep this freedom, and the way I wish comes again from possessiveness. It is like finding freedom from the influence only to fall back under it again, as though following a movement inward toward the more real and then a movement outward away from the real. If I am able to observe and live this, I will see that these two movements are not separate. They are one and the same process. And I need to feel them like the ebb and flow of a tide, with a keen attention that does not let itself be carried away and that, by its vision, keeps a balance.

What is important is to see that words and ideas enslave us in formulas and concepts. As long as we are trapped in a net of consoling belief, we lack the intensity and subtlety required for real exploration. Unless I understand this, my observation will remain based on forms, on what I know, and will not be enlivened by the spirit of discovery, as if for the first time. And it will be egocentric, with my ordinary “I” interpreting everything that is presented from its self-centered perspective.

We take consciousness as an object of observation. But we cannot see consciousness. It is consciousness that sees and that knows. I realize this if I experience it as coming from behind my body or from above. There is no observer, there is a knowing. Yet if I experience consciousness as in my body, it seems that the “I” is the body and consciousness an attribute of the body.

What do I understand today, and what do I need to understand? Understanding depends on my state of being, on my state of Presence. It is absurd to pretend in my sleep that I wish to work, while all the time dreaming that I can. Our efforts to work in life are, first of all, to discover how far we are from our highest possibilities. At the center of our work is the wish to live in a more real way. My lie is affirming myself without having the taste of truth, the taste of reality. We can be either an unconscious slave or a conscious servant.

A work together is necessary, cooperation to produce something—like a chain of beings seeking to be more conscious, whose efforts assist one another. Each person joining the chain has to find his place, a place that is determined by his usefulness. Then, by his attitude and actions, he either maintains and vivifies the chain at the place where he is the link, or he falls away and no longer participates in it.

In facing life, I am driven by the force of my ego. I take my life as a web of relations viewed from a center. I feel this center—it is me. I call this center “I,” and it is from here that I think and feel. The notion of “I” takes up all the room, and comes back even in my better moments of work. In this it is always a single part of me that takes over—sometimes my thought, sometimes my emotion, perhaps my body. They never act together. There is no sense of the whole.

When my brain can be active, sensitive, alive in a state of attentive immobility, there is a movement of an extraordinary quality that does not belong just to the thinking, the sensation or the emotion. It is a wholly different movement that leads to truth, to what we cannot name. The attention is total, without any distraction.

I have a sensation of myself, which my habitual thought calls “body,” but I do not know what it is, I have no name for what is here. I am aware of tensions, even the smallest, but I do not know what tension is. Then I feel breathing, which I do not know . . . in a body that I do not know, surrounded by people I do not know. . . . My mind becomes quiet.

My body is the first to refuse. It knows nothing of my wish and lives a life of its own.

No thought lasts; what appears must disappear. The disappearing is as important as the appearing.

We need to realize that our usual attention is not in contact with what it is perceiving, and as a result we do not really see.

The Fourth Way is a way of understanding, not of faith or obedience to a charismatic leader.

And it will remain lost unless I can relate to something higher. The first condition is to know in myself a different quality, higher than what I ordinarily am. Then my life will take on new meaning. Without this condition there can be no work. I must remember there is another life and at the same time experience the life that I am leading. This is awakening. I awake to these two realities.

There is in me something mysterious that nothing is able to grasp, something that no thought or feeling can help me know. It appears only when I am not caught in the web of my thoughts and emotions. It is the unknown, which cannot be grasped with what I know.

Truth cannot be though.

We always dream of reaching a place in order to remain there permanently. Yet permanence can only be found in movement.

It is only in the void that another reality can appear. At the same time, there is also in me an energy that is projected outward by my functions, taken by their inexhaustible reactions to impressions coming from both outside and inside. I do not have the attention necessary to confront all these impressions and reactions. But I am shocked when I see the speed with which I unknowingly react.

Our way is to live these ideas in order to understand them, and to pass on the teaching to others if and to the extent we are able to live it with them. Sowing ideas without living them is sowing ideas that are empty. Gurdjieff left us not only words and ideas to be transmitted, but a certain life to be lived, a drama to be played out with others around us, without which the work will remain imaginary.

What is necessary, in us and around us, is the creation of a certain level of energy, an attention that resists surrounding influences and does not let itself deteriorate. Then it has to receive a force that is more active, that will allow it not only to resist but to have an action and find a stable place between two currents of different levels. This possibility of equilibrium is the continuing challenge, the interval to be faced at every moment in the work for consciousness.

The child wants to have, the adult wants to be. The wish to be is behind all my manifestations. To learn to see is the first initiation into self-knowledge. We struggle not against something, we struggle for something. I believe I need to pay attention when, in fact, I need to see and know my inattention. When I begin to see, I begin to love what I see. Where our attention is, God is.

an interval that allows my energy, my attention, to change direction. It turns back toward me, and the question now touches me. This energy brings a vibration, a note that did not sound until now. It is subtle, very fine, but nevertheless communicates. I feel it. It is an impression I receive, an impression of a life in me. All my possibilities are here. What follows—whether I will open to the experience of Presence—depends on the way I receive this impression.

The first condition is to know in myself a different quality, higher than what I ordinarily am. Then my life will take on new meaning. Without this condition there can be no work. I must remember there is another life and at the same time experience the life that I am leading. This is awakening. I awake to these two realities. I need to understand that by myself, without a relation with something higher, I am nothing, I can do nothing. By myself alone, I can only remain lost in this circle of interests, I have no quality that allows me to escape. I can escape only if I feel my absolute nothingness and begin to feel the need for help. I must feel the need to relate myself to something higher, to open to another quality.

Our effort must always be clear—to be present, that is, to begin to remember myself. With the attention divided, I am present in two directions, as present as I can be. My attention is engaged in two opposite directions, and I am at the center. This is the act of self-remembering.

Thought is made up of accumulated knowledge in the form of images and associations, and it seizes an experience only to make it fit into categories of the known. Although it can entertain the new when it is quiet, the thinking immediately transforms it into something old, with an image that has already been the object of an experience. The image awakens an immediate reaction. This always repeats, so that there is never anything new.

Why is it that my mind never discovers anything new? I am a prisoner of all the impressions deposited in me. I am conditioned by the reservoir of my memory, the result engraved in me of the influences that have touched me. It is all that I have to answer with in life. Little by little, I unconsciously accept this state of conditioning, and the energy of my mind deteriorates. My mind is sapped in its vitality and strength. It simply accumulates more and more information. I can discipline my mind, polish my knowledge. It can even become brilliant. But I remain in the realm of the known. How could I go beyond this way of thinking so that something new could appear?

So, the struggle is to live with the desire, not refusing it or losing myself in it, until the mechanism of the thinking no longer has an action on me, and the attention is free.

The highest form of intelligence is meditation, an intense vigilance that liberates the mind from its reactions, and this alone, without any willful intervention, produces a state of tranquillity.

To see without thought is the discovery of reality.

If we do not feel deeply the beauty of life and its challenge, then life has no sense at all.

If I return each day to something absolutely sure, which I understand and of which I am convinced, I will see the way, the direction that will allow me to know how I am living. I will see myself enclosed in the narrow circle of my wishes and interests, taken by life. Yet by experiencing myself each day in another state, outside this circle, I will recognize that in reality I can escape, and I may even see that the circle does not exist.

The thought cannot open to another dimension, the vast space in which there is silence. And a feeling without limit cannot appear.

If I wish to understand them, I must live with them, not as a spectator but with affection, and without judging or excusing them. It is necessary to live with my thoughts, feelings and actions, to suffer them, from moment to moment.

Attention is the conscious force, the force of consciousness. It is a divine force.

Only a voluntary force can liberate me from the power of an involuntary force.

With conscious will, everything can be obtained.

Our experience of suffering is never voluntary. It is mechanical, a reaction of the machine. What is voluntary is to place oneself in conditions that bring about suffering and to stay in front. A conscious man no longer suffers—in consciousness one is happy. But suffering thus prepared is indispensable for transformation.

Reality has no continuity. It is beyond time, outside duration.

The passion we need is the passion to be.

am writing a book on how to be in life, on the path to take in order to live on two levels. It will show how to find a balance, to go from one to the other, or rather to find the way in between. We have to see beyond, and through, our ordinary thinking in order to open to another mind. Otherwise, we remain at the threshold in front of the door, and the door does not open.