Ouspensky Quotes

When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

A religion contradicting science and a science contradicting religion are equally false.

Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.

There is something in us that keeps us where we find ourselves. I think this is the most awful thing of all.

There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.

Attaining consciousness is connected with the gradual liberation from mechanicalness, for man is fully and completely under mechanical laws.

I mean that you always know what results will come from one or another of your actions; but in a strange way you want to do one thing and get the result that could only come from another

There is no tyranny more ferocious than the tyranny of morality. Everything is sacrificed to it.

Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.

If one does not develop, one goes down. In life, in ordinary conditions everything goes down, or one capacity may develop at the expense of another.

a man can be given only what he can use; and he can use only that for which he has sacrificed something

We often think we express negative emotions, not because we cannot help it, but because we should express them.

Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and having fully realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine. First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable “I” or Ego. He is always different. One moment he is one, another moment he is another, the third moment he is a third, and so on, almost without end.

In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe; but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes.

Everything 'happens'. People can 'do' nothing. From the time we are born to the time we die things happen, happen, happen, and we think we are doing. This is our normal state in life, and even the smallest possibility to do something comes only through the work, and first only in oneself, not externally.

Many things are mechanical and should remain mechanical. But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings—that is what has to be studied and can and should be changed. Mechanical thinking is not worth a penny. You can think about many things mechanically, but you will get nothing from it.

Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so, he has no will, and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology-for that applies only to a developed man-but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.

Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.

I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard ‘new things’: that is, things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.”—Ouspensky

Whatever work a man may be doing, it is enough for him to try to do each action deliberately, with his mind, following every movement, and he will see that the quality of his work will change immediately.

Besides, all evil is relative. Something that is evil at one level of evolution can be good at an earlier stage because it provides the essential stimulus for development. But you want to judge everything by your own standards. You have reached a comparatively high level and so you see what you fight against as evil. Just think of the others, those who are at an earlier stage of development. Do not bar them from the path toward progress and evolution.

There is no question of faith or belief in all this. Quite the opposite,this system teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear and feel. Only in that way can you come to something.

There is practically no negative emotion which you cannot enjoy, and that is the most difficult thing to realize. Really some people get all their pleasures from negative emotions.

Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emotions! A. This is one of the worst illusions we have. We think that negative emotions are produced by circumstances, whereas all negative emotions are in us, inside us. This is a very important point. We always think our negative emotions are produced by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. We always think that. Our negative emotions are in ourselves and are produced by ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else's action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness. No negative emotion can be produced by external causes if we do not want it. We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes, and in this way we do not struggle with them.

Q. Why is it so difficult to control attention? A. Lack of habit. We are too accustomed to letting things happen. When we want to control attention or something else, we find it difficult, just as physical work is difficult if we are not accustomed to it.

Ouspensky was saying that hell on earth is life as we have always lived it, and heaven on earth is breaking free of our long-standing patterns.

Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us.

At one moment when I say 'I', one part of me is speaking,and at another moment when I say 'I', it is quite another 'I' speaking.

To change one's life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one's reactions.

When a man pities himself, he feels he is owed—like the dog. If you feel that you are owed, you will never begin truly to work on yourself.

It is a question of finding reasons, of thinking rightly, because expression of negative emotion is always based on some kind of wrong thinking.

I have become so accustomed to think “scientifically” that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him.

Q. Surely it is easier to be objective about other people than about oneself? A. No, it is more difficult. If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be coloured by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike. To be objective you must be free from it all. You can become objective to yourself in the state of self-consciousness: this is the first experience of coming into contact with the real object.

I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The "miraculous" was a penetration into this unknown reality.

Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today. Quite the reverse, if a man did nothing yesterday, no demands are made upon him today; if he did anything yesterday, it means that he must do more today. This certainly does not mean that it is better to do nothing. Whoever does nothing receives nothing

We do not imagine that the "masses" may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away.

Hay muchas personas caminando por las calles que en realidad están muertas; hay muchas en sus tumbas que están en realidad vivas.

In reality people would sacrifice anything rather than their negative emotions.

The microscopic living cell is more powerful than a volcano- the idea is more powerful than the geological cataclysm.

Civilisation never starts by natural growth, but only through artificial cultivation.

But the worst about a self-element is that its presence is never dreamed of till it is got rid of.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half awake. –Ouspensky & Gurdjeff

I saw clearly that something could be found there which had long since ceased to exist in Europe and I considered that the direction I had taken was the right one. But, at the same time, I

Não podemos tentar ser mais emocionais; quanto mais tentarmos, menos emocionais seremos. Podemos tentar ser conscientes e, se nos tornarmos mais conscientes, nos tornaremos mais emocionais.

History repeats itself because man remains at the same level of being—namely, he attracts again and again the same circumstances, feels the same things, says the same things, hopes the same things, believes the same things. And yet nothing actually changes. All the articles that were written in the last war are just the same as the articles written in this war, and will be for ever and ever. But what concerns us more is that the same idea applies to ourselves, to each individual person.

So we have to work in the midst of life, surrounded by all the misfortunes of life, and eventually life becomes our teacher—that is to say, we have to practise non-identifying in the midst of the happenings of life; we have to practise self-remembering in the midst of affairs; and we have to notice and separate ourselves from our negative emotions in the midst of all hurts and smarts in daily life.

We do not comprehend all these matters quite clearly, but in general it is plain that we think in space and time by perceptions TERTIUM ORGANUM ' only; but by concepts we think independently of space and time.

You will remember that every psychological or inner state finds some outer representation via the moving centre—that is, it is represented in some particular muscular movements or contractions, etc. You may have noticed that a state of worry is often reflected by a contracted wrinkling of the forehead or a twisting of the hands. States of joy never have this representation. Negative states, states of worry, or fear, or anxiety, or depression, represent themselves in the muscles by contraction, flexion, being bowed down, etc. (and often, also, by weakness in the muscles), whereas opposite emotional states are reflected into the moving centre as expansion, as standing upright, as extension of the limbs, relaxing of tension, and usually by a feeling of strength. To stop worry, people who worry and thereby frown too much or pucker up and corrugate their foreheads, clench their fists, almost cease breathing, etc., should begin here—by relaxing the muscles expressing the emotional state, and freeing the breath. Relaxing in general has behind it, esoterically speaking, the idea of preventing negative states. Negative states are less able to come when a person is in a state of relaxation. That is why it is said so often that it is necessary to practise relaxing every day, by passing the attention over the body and deliberately relaxing all tense muscles.

Meaning gives force and the more meaning this work has for you the more it will affect you emotionally and the more force will you obtain from it. For it is from the awakening of the emotional centre that the greatest force is derived.

you do not realize that one has to learn to speak the truth. it seems to you that it is enough to wish or to decide to do so. and i tell you that people comparatively rarely tell a deliberate lie. in most cases they think they speak the truth. and yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. they lie all the time, both to themselves and to others. therefore nobody ever understands either himself or anyone else. think - could there be such discord, such deep misunderstanding, and such hatred towards the views and opinions of others, if people were able to understand because they cannot help lying. to speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth. the wish alone is not enough. to speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. and this nobody wants to know.

You had my son. I had nothing else but you, and how you walked with me through Leningrad, across the Neva and Lake Ladoga and held my open back together and clotted my wounds, and washed my burns, and healed me, and saved me. I was hungry and you fed me. I had nothing but Lazarevo.” Alexander’s voice broke. “And your immortal blood. Tatiana, you were my only life force. You have no idea how hard I tried to get to you again. I gave myself up to the enemy, to the Germans for you. I got shot at for you and beaten for you and betrayed for you and convicted for you. All I wanted was to see you again. That you came back for me, it’s everything, Tatia. Don’t you understand? The rest is nothing to me. Germany, Kolyma, Dimitri, Nikolai Ouspensky, the Soviet Union, all of it, nothing. Forget them all, let them all go. You hear?” “I hear,” Tatiana said. We walk alone through this world, but if we’re lucky, we have a moment of belonging to something, to someone, that sustains us through a lifetime of loneliness.” .

Ouspensky, do you ever think of how many things you don't know?" Ouspensky laughed. "I like the beginning already". "Think of how many things you stumble to and say, how should I know?" "I never say that, sir" said Ouspensky. "I say, how the fuck should I know?

Thus space and time, defining everything that we cognize by sensuous means, are in themselves just forms of consciousness, categories of our intellect, the prism through which we regard the world—or in other words space and time do not represent properties of the world, but just properties of our knowledge of the world gained through our sensuous organism. Consequently the world, until by these means we come into relation to it, has neither extension in space nor existence in time; these are properties which we add to it.

No, Pasha,” whispered Alexander. “No.” He felt Pasha’s head. He closed Pasha’s eyes. For a few moments he stood over Pasha, and then he sank to the ground. Wrapping him tightly with the trench coat, Alexander took Pasha’s body into his arms and, cradling him from the cold, closed his own eyes. For the rest of the night Alexander sat on an empty road, his back against the tree, not moving, not opening his eyes, not speaking, holding Tatiana’s brother in his arms. If Ouspensky spoke to him, he did not hear. If he slept, he did not feel it, not the cold air, nor the hard ground, nor the rough bark of the tree against his back, against his head. When morning broke, and gray close light rose over Saxony, Alexander opened his eyes. Ouspensky was sleeping on his side, wrapped in his trench coat next to them. Pasha’s body was rigid, very cold. Alexander got up from under Pasha, washed his own face with whisky, rinsed out his mouth with whisky, and then got his titanium trench tool and started to carve a hole in the ground. Ouspensky woke up, helped him. It took them three hours of scraping at the earth, to make a hole a meter deep. Not deep enough, but it would have to do. Alexander covered Pasha’s face with the trench coat so the earth wouldn’t fall on it. With two small branches and a piece of string, Alexander made a cross and laid it on top of Pasha’s chest, and then they lifted him and lowered him into the hole, and Alexander, his teeth grit the entire time, filled the shallow grave with fresh dirt. On a wide thick branch, he carved out the name PASHA METANOV, and the date, Feb 25, 1945, and tying it to another longer branch made another cross and staked it into the ground. Alexander and Ouspensky

Ouspensky clearly indicates that all real initiation is self-initiation: “Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work he must do himself. Inner growth—a change of being—depends entirely upon the work a man must do on himself.”117

We regard the actions of an individual as originating in himself. We do not imagine that the "masses" may consist of automatons obeying external stimuli and may move, not under the influence of the will, consciousness, or inclination of individuals, but under the influence of external stimuli coming possibly from very far away.

Crooked is the path to eternity.

Even if a man has received certain material, he forgets to use it, forgets to observe himself; in other words, he falls asleep again and must always be awakened.

After I learned the first three numbers I was given to understand the Great Law of Four--the alpha and omega of all.

I am the Logos in the full aspect and the beginning of a new Logos.

Time does not flow, any more than space flows. It is we who are flowing, wanderers in a four dimensional universe.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

A man may not know what will happen as a result of other people’s actions or as the result of unknown causes, but he always knows all possible results of his own actions.

Did I dream all that and what did it mean?” he says to himself. “And what I see now, is this too a dream?

Q.Would it be correct to say that when learning anything like driving a car, intellectual function tells moving function what to do and that,when proficient, moving function works by itself¿

And I saw how under the concentration of these rays the mystic flowers of the waters open and receive the rays into themselves and how all Nature is constantly born from the union of two principles.

As long as they think they can do something by themselves they will not be able to make any use of a school, even if they find it. Schools exist only for those who need them, and who know that they need them.

Our thought has acquired many bad habits, and one of them is thinking without purpose. Our thinking has become automatic; we are quite satisfied if we think of and develop possible side-issues without having any idea why we are doing it. From the point of view of this system such thinking is useless. All study, all thinking and investigation must have one aim, one purpose in view, and this aim must be attaining consciousness.

If we do not do something to-day, how can we expect to do it to-morrow? If we can do it to-day, we must; nobody can put it off till to-morrow, because to-morrow we could do something else. We always think we have time.

His hand caressed her back. “You know what saved me through my years in the battalion and in prison?” he said. “You. I thought, if you could get out of Russia, through Finland, through the war, pregnant, with a dying doctor, with nothing but yourself, I could survive this. If you could get through Leningrad, as you every single morning got up and slid down the ice on the stairs to get your family water and their daily bread, I thought, I could get through this. If you survived that I could survive this.” “You don’t even know how badly I did the first years. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” “You had my son. I had nothing else but you, and how you walked with me through Leningrad, across the Neva and Lake Ladoga and held my open back together and clotted my wounds, and washed my burns, and healed me, and saved me. I was hungry and you fed me. I had nothing but Lazarevo.” Alexander’s voice broke. “And your immortal blood. Tatiana, you were my only life force. You have no idea how hard I tried to get to you again. I gave myself up to the enemy, to the Germans for you. I got shot at for you and beaten for you and betrayed for you and convicted for you. All I wanted was to see you again. That you came back for me, it’s everything, Tatia. Don’t you understand? The rest is nothing to me. Germany, Kolyma, Dimitri, Nikolai Ouspensky, the Soviet Union, all of it, nothing. Forget them all, let them all go. You hear?” “I hear,” Tatiana said. We walk alone through this world, but if we’re lucky, we have a moment of belonging to something, to someone, that sustains us through a lifetime of loneliness. For an evening minute I touched him again and grew red wings and was young again in the Summer Garden, and had hope and eternal life.

A man will not begin this work and will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possesses neither self-consciousness nor all that is connected with it, that is, unity or individuality, permanent "I," and will.

It is the sheer weight of the robot that makes us feel we are living in a ‘wooden world’. We can see for example that the moment Ouspensky or Ward returned from the mystical realm of perfect freedom and found themselves ‘back in the body’ they once again found themselves saddled with all their boring old habits and worries and neuroses, all their old sense of identity built up from the reactions of other people, and above all the dreary old heaviness, as if consciousness has turned into a leaden weight. This is the sensation that made the romantics feel that life is a kind of hell — or at the very least, purgatory. Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover. The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight. He takes over only when our energies are low. So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight. This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing. ‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling. Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced. Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glass wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator. This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp the place of objective rational judgements. Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times. This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle.

The most important factor in every function is: ‘Is it under our control or not?’ So when imagination is under our control we do not even call it imagination; we call it by various names—visualization, creative thinking, inventive thinking—you can find a name for each special case. But when it comes by itself and controls us so that we are in its power, then we call it imagination. Again, there is another side of imagination which we miss in ordinary understanding. This is that we imagine non-existent things—non-existent capacities, for instance. We ascribe to ourselves powers which we do not have; we imagine ourselves to be self-conscious although we are not. We have imaginary powers and imaginary self-consciousness and we imagine ourselves to be one, when really we are many different ‘I’s. There are many such things that we imagine about ourselves and other people. For instance, we imagine that we can ‘do’, that we have choice; we have no choice, we cannot ‘do’, things just happen to us.

Positivism is very good when it seeks an answer to the question of how something operates under given conditions; but when it makes the attempt to get outside of its definite conditions (space, time, causation), or presumes to affirm that nothing exists outside of these given conditions, then it is transcending its own proper sphere.

they are generally based on some kind of weakness, because at the basis of negative emotions there generally lies a kind of self-indulgence—one allows oneself. And if one does not allow oneself fears, one allows anger, and if one does not allow anger, one allows self-pity. Negative emotions are always based on some kind of permission.

And I tell you that people comparatively rarely tell a deliberate lie. In most cases they think they speak the truth. And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth. They lie all the time, both to themselves and to others. Therefore nobody ever understands either himself or anyone else.

Depende de como você entende essa palavra, "esotérico" significa interno. O esoterismo encerra a idéia da existência de um círculo interno da humanidade. Lembra-se de como a humanidade foi descrita como constituída de quatro círculos - o esotérico, o mesotérico e o exotérico, que formam o círculo interior, e o círculo exterior no qual vivemos? A idéia de esoterismo implica a idéia de transmissão do conhecimento; presume a existência de um grupo de pessoas a quem pertence um certo conhecimento. Não se deve compreender isso de alguma forma mística, porém mais precisamente, de forma concreta. Há muitas diferenças entre os círculos interno e externo. Por exemplo, muitas coisas que queremos descobrir ou criar só podem existir no círculo interno.

The 4th Way is based on understanding. The Work is the 4th Way—that is, it is not the Way of Fakir or the Way of Monk, or the Way of Yogi. In this Work understanding is the most powerful thing you can develop. Therefore it is necessary to begin to to try to understand what this Work teaches and see for oneself why it teaches it. What does that mean? It means in brief that you must understand for yourself why negative emotions must go, understand why self-justifying must go, why lying and deceit must go, why internal considering and grievances and making internal accounts must go. (Notice the Lord's Prayer says: "Forgive us as we forgive others.") You must understand for yourself why egotistical phantasies must go, why self-pity and sad regrets must go, why hating must go, why the state of inner sleep must go, why ignorance must go, why buffers and attitudes and pictures of yourself must go, why False Personality, with its two giants walking in front of you, Pride and Vanity, must go, why ignorance of oneself must be replaced by real uncritical self-knowledge through observation, why external considering is always necessary, and finally you must understand and see why Self-Remembering is utterly and totally necessary for you at all times if you want to awaken from the great sleep-inducing power of nature and the increasing mass-hypnotism of external life. All this is the Work and what it teaches —namely, what it is we have to do in order to awaken from the state of sleep in which we live.

all true art is in fact nothing but an attempt to transmit the sensation of ecstasy...evil always consists in the transforming of something great into something small...a living cell contains something that is lacking in a dead one...life and thought, are in the domain of the unmeasurable...the very great majority of our ideas are not the products of evolution but the product of the degeneration of ideas...Man is pre-eminently a transitional form...truth includes all in itself...Civilisation never starts by natural growth but only through artificial cultivation...People who think that something can be attained by their own efforts are as blind as those who are utterly ignorant of the possibilities of the new knowledge...Most people can except truth only in the form of a lie.

When I lifted the first veil and entered the outer court of the temple of initiation, I saw in half darkness the figure of a woman sitting on a high throne between two pillars of the the temple, one white and one black. Mystery emanated from her and was about her. Sacred symbols shone on her, and on her head a golden tiara surmounted by a two-horned Moon. To enter the Temple one must lift the second veil and pass between the two pillars. And to pass one must obtain the keys, read the book, and understand the symbols. Are you able to do this? She whispered to me “ learn to discern the real from the false. Listen only to the voice that is soundless. Look only on that which is invisible and remember that in thee thyself is the Temple and the gate to it, and the mystery, and the initiation.

You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

consists in the study of the Name of God in its manifestation. Jehovah in Hebrew is spelt by four letters, Yod, He, Vau and He--I. H. V. H. To these four letters is given the deepest symbolical meaning. The first letter expresses the active principle, the beginning or first cause, motion, energy, "I"; the second letter expresses the passive element, inertia, quietude, "not I;" the third, the balance of opposites, "form"; and the fourth, the result or latent energy.

will now have to divide certain centres into positive and negative divisions, first of all, and then fill in, here and there, at present only some of the subdivisions, giving approximate definitions of their functions. Let us begin with the Intellectual Centre. Note.—Only the Moving Part of the Intellectual Centre is in any detail charted in this diagram. Note here the difference between Emotional Part of Moving Part of Intellectual Centre and the Emotional Part of Intellectual Centre as a whole. Notice what is meant.

You see, all our ordinary views of things are no good, they do not lead anywhere. It is necessary to think differently, and this means to see things we do not see now, and not to see things we see now. And this last is perhaps the most difficult, because we are accustomed to see certain things: it is a great sacrifice not to see the things we are accustomed to see. We are accustomed to think that we live in a more or less comfortable world. Certainly there are unpleasant things, such as wars and revolutions, but on the whole it is a comfortable and well-meaning world. It is most difficult to get rid of this idea of a well-meaning world. And then we must understand that we do not see things themselves at all. We see like in Plato’s allegory of the cave only the reflections of things, so that what we see has lost all reality. We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our picture of things. This is the most interesting thing. Try to think about it.

We always think our negative emotions are produced by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. We always think that. Our negative emotions are in ourselves and are produced by ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else’s action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness. No negative emotion can be produced by external causes if we do not want it. We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes, and in this way we do not struggle with them.

Our mind and our language are very clumsy instruments and we have to deal with very subtle matters and subtle problems. At the same time we do not realize that by simplifying things, by imagining ourselves in a three-dimensional world, we make this world non-existent. We put ourselves in an impossible position, because if we take, for instance, the ordinary view of the past disappearing and the future not yet existent, then nothing exists. This is the only conclusion from this idea that is logically possible: either nothing exists or everything exists— there is no third alternative, so to speak.

Now if you could start the day from the sense of the utter mystery of your life you would begin to understand something about psycho-transformism. But you pick up your to-day self from your yesterday-self and so carry on everything as before. You think that the familiar is right and so remain the same. You do not understand what was meant when it was said that those born of the spirit are unpredictable. Now if you worship the same, you transform nothing. You turn even what might be new into the old. In that case, certainly, you do not remember yourself and you remain a machine. You remember only the wrong self —what is not you. So you carry all the negative states of yesterday into to-day untransformed.

Q. Positive means not negative? A. Yes, and much more besides. An emotion that cannot become negative gives enormous understanding, has an enormous cognitive value. It connects things that cannot be connected in an ordinary state. To have positive emotions is advised and recommended in religions, but they do not say how to get them. They say, ‘Have faith, have love’. How? Christ says, ‘Love your enemies’. It is not for us; we cannot even love our friends. It is the same as saying to a blind man, ‘You must see!’ A blind man cannot see, otherwise he would not be a blind man. That is what positive emotion means. Q. How can we learn to love our enemies? A. Learn to love yourself first—you do not love yourself enough; you love your false personality, not yourself. It is difficult to understand the New Testament or Buddhist writings, for they are notes taken in school. One line of these writings refers to one level and another to another level.

In the middle of the night, Alexander—with the moist towel still on his face—was startled out of sleep by the cheerful drunken whisper of Ouspensky, who was shaking him awake, while taking his hand and placing into it something soft and warm. It took Alexander a moment to recognize the softness and warmness as a large human breast, a breast still attached to a human female, albeit a not entirely sober human female, who breathed fire on him, kneeled near his bed and said something in Polish that sounded like, “Wake up, cowboy, paradise is here.” “Lieutenant,” said Alexander in Russian, “you’re going on the rack tomorrow.” “You will pray to me as if I’m your god tomorrow. She is bought and paid for. Have a good one.” Ouspensky lowered the flaps on the tent and disappeared. Sitting up and turning on his kerosene lamp, Alexander was faced with a young, boozy, not unattractive Polish face. For a minute as he sat up, they watched each other, he with weariness, she with drunken friendliness. “I speak Russian,” she said in Russian. “I’m going to get into trouble being here?” “Yes,” said Alexander. “You better go back.” “Oh, but your friend…” “He is not my friend. He is my sworn enemy. He has brought you here to poison you. You need to go back quickly.” He helped her sit up. Her swinging breasts were exposed through her open dress. Alexander was naked except for his BVDs. He watched her appraise him. “Captain,” she said, “you’re not telling me you are poison? You don’t look like poison.” She reached out for him. “You don’t feel like poison.” She paused, whispering, “At ease, soldier.” Moving away from her slightly—only slightly—Alexander started to put on his trousers. She stopped him by rubbing him. He sighed, moving her hand away. “You left a sweetheart behind? I can tell. You’re missing her. I see many men like you.” “I bet you do.” “They always feel better after they’re with me. So relieved. Come on. What’s the worst that can happen? You will enjoy yourself?” “Yes,” said Alexander. “That’s the worst that can happen.” She stuck out her hand holding a French letter. “Come on. Nothing to be afraid of.” “I’m not afraid,” said Alexander. “Oh, come on.” He buckled his belt. “Let’s go. I’ll walk you back.” “You have some chocolate?” she said, smiling. “I’ll suck you off for some chocolate.” Alexander wavered, lingering on her bare breasts. “As it turns out, I do have some chocolate,” he said, throbbing everywhere, including his heart. “You can have it all.” He paused. “And you don’t even have to suck me off.” The Polish girl’s eyes cleared for a moment. “Really?” “Really.” He reached into his bag and handed her some small pieces of chocolate wrapped in foil. Hungrily she shoved the bars into her mouth and swallowed them whole. Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Better the chocolate than me,” he said. The girl laughed. “Will you really walk me back?” she said. “Because the streets are not safe for a girl like me.” Alexander took his machine gun. “Let’s go.

To-day I want those who heard the last paper to consider the question as to whether they can agree that their acquired and unchallenged attitudes receive their secret force from this intractable and violent basis of what orthodox religion calls "unregenerate Man" —that is, Man not yet re-born in himself. I believe, from my own observation, that this is the case. Now when a man observes himself, he observes a lot of things that have their own importance, but he does not observe his attitudes. To speak with exaggeration, I may believe myself God—as so many lunatics do, which shews you how close this idea is to people. Since I believe myself God, I will never think of observing this in myself. Why? Because I take this attitude for granted. To believe oneself God is an attitude. So of course I will never think of observing that. Well, it is just the same with all attitudes. One simply accepts them—or, rather, one simply does not know that one has them, so one does not think of observing them. In fact, one simply cannot observe them and cannot hear anyone who is such a fool as to try to call attention to them. You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.

Thought does not grasp, does not convey, what is at times clearly felt. Thought is too slow, too short. There are no words and no forms to convey what one sees and knows in such moments. And it is impossible to fix these moments, to arrest them, to make them longer, more obedient for the will. There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood, and later repeating it to oneself. It disappears as dreams disappear. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.

De lo que está hablando Schwaller es, en resumen, de una clase diferente de conocimiento. En La diosa blanca, Robert Graves habla de conocimiento «lunar» y «solar». Nuestro tipo de conocimiento -el conocimiento racional- es «solar»; utiliza palabras y conceptos y fragmenta el objeto del conocimiento con la disección y el análisis. Pero las civilizaciones antiguas tenían conocimiento «lunar», un conocimiento intuitivo que captaba las cosas en su totalidad. Tal vez el asunto de que se trata resultaría más claro si hiciéramos referencia a otro pensador «esotérico» del siglo XX, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. En 1914, Gurdjieff dijo a su discípulo Ouspensky que hay una diferencia fundamental entre el «arte real» y el «arte subjetivo». El arte real no es sólo una expresión de los sentimientos del artista; es tan objetivo como las matemáticas, y siempre producirá la misma impresión en todas las personas que lo vean. La gran Esfinge de Egipto es una obra de arte de esta clase, así como algunas obras de arquitectura conocidas históricamente, ciertas estatuas de dioses y muchas otras cosas. Hay figuras de dioses y de varios seres mitológicos que pueden leerse como si fueran libros, sólo que no con la mente sino con las emociones, siempre y cuando estén suficientemente desarrolladas. Durante

Tudo no universo, a partir dos sistemas solares até o homem, e desde o homem até o átomo, ou evolui ou degenera, ou se desenvolve ou se desintegra. Mas nada evolui mecanicamente; só a degeneração e a destruição ocorrem mecanicamente. Aquilo que não pode evoluir conscientemente degenera-se.

Experiment with this—on such and such a day I slept so many hours and felt this way afterward. I ate x amount of food and was able to work for this long. In my forties my face began to line—science has told us this is the beginning of old age. How can the science that measures and combines and mixes and observes tell us what is behind the sleep?” Alexander laughed. “Ouspensky, science can measure how long we sleep, but can it tell us what we dreamed about? It will observe our reactions, it can tell if we twitched or laughed, or cried, but can it tell us what was inside our own head?

we change Being, even a little, as not disliking so easily, not identifying with every worry, our life alters. Unless we change Being the taste of our life and our actual life-situations remain nearly the same. Without positive ideas—that is, without contact with C influences via B influences—all the real meaning of Man perishes. He is cut off from influences that could change him. So he becomes wholly under the power of A influences. He then serves life and the big machines of life—politics, trade, war, mass-exercise, mass-propaganda, etc. He will not possess Magnetic Centre. He will not seek positive ideas. His inner mind is shut. His inner life dies, and, esoterically speaking, he becomes useless, meaningless, dead. Much was said in the Gospels about the quick and the dead and many warnings were given about Man being cut off, which can be understood far more distinctly from the Work-ideas. On the other hand, a culture comes to an end, and has to be destroyed, and the flood comes—namely, barbarism, violence, loss of truth. Then an Ark is made to survive the Flood and keep alive knowledge for the next culture. What do you think of this time in the light of these ideas?

In the long run for myself because I was interested in lots of other things – I have a very eclectic kind of mind and I like to check out lots of things and make connections and put things together. This was not the thing to do. It was kind of like: “Well, you’re studying this.” And it makes sense. You know: “You’re studying this teaching. You’ve come here to learn this. You’ve come here to learn geometry not something else. But that’s what we’re teaching.” But I just found in the end… like Ouspensky said himself … ‘This is a good way but its not my way. The way itself isn’t bad but its not the way I should go’… In the end you just have to trust yourself, I guess. And the whole point of these things is to get you to trust yourself, to get you to trust your own feelings. I write about different people and I see connections between them and to me it’s more important to see connections between them rather than: ‘We have the Truth’ and, you know ‘Only this way and if you don’t follow this way there’s no salvation outside the Church’ or something like that. I mean I can understand the need to keep your integrity and keep your identity but I think at this point its more important to be able to see the connections between these things. It’s like I said before when I was talking about this whole idea of second wind and the Gurdjieff Movement pushing into you… pushing past your limits and breaking into what he calls the accumulators. We have these things that carry our tanks of energy, basically and there’s a small one we use for everyday things and then we think: ‘Oh, I’m exhausted’ but if some emergency comes up, we can tap into the other one and so on and so on. So… seeing connections between all that stuff makes me feel like “Well, this is real. It’s about something real.” And I don’t care if it comes from the Sarmoung Brotherhood or if it comes from Gurdjieff’s own very fertile mind… and I suspect its, I don’t know 70:30 or 60:40. But it doesn’t matter, the source of it to me isn’t what’s important. I mean that’s the kind aura of the esoteric aura and this is a real tradition, that kind of thing. And I’m not particularly interested in that, I’m pragmatic, I’m saying ‘Well, does it work?’ And I think it does work, at least in that context, I can see it. But the other side of it becomes a whole way of life, kind of thing… and again, I’ve nothing against people who do that but that’s not something I’ve ever been attracted to. Where you know you have… you have, your whole aesthetic, everything around you somehow is connected or a part or emanates that. And I have too many interests to have any one thing – its just a grab bag of stuff back there…

Seth, entre la bruma del misterio masónico también se les llama El Hermano Terrible. Y desde que Gurdjieff y su más destacado discípulo Ouspensky difundieron las enseñanzas del despertar en su Instituto para el Desarrollo Armónico de la Humanidad o Cuarto Camino, se les comenzó a llamar Egos o Yoes.

and in the other, a sceptre in the form of an Egyptian cross--the sign of his power over birth. "I am The Great Law," the Emperor said. "I am the name of God. The four letters of his name are in me and I am in all.

We observe Personality which has been formed in passing Time by the action of life. We observe the different 'I's in it which have appeared at different periods of Time, chiefly through imitation. Essence is not of passing Time. It is not a temporal thing. In remembering oneself one does not remember the Personality but something prior to it that lies in the direction of Essence and can only be reached through it. To remember oneself in the Personality would be to strengthen it—to say "This is I" to it instead of "This is not I". If you say 'I' to the wrong thing you increase its power over you. You do not then separate from it. Life makes us identify with the Per- sonality. It naturally makes us identify with what it has itself created in us. The Work is to make us cease to identify with what life has created in us and is now doing to us. To remember oneself, to summon up the purest, subtlest feeling of 'I' in connection with some prominent side of Personality would be to identify still more with what life has formed round Essence. It would be like washing paint off with paint. The purest, subtlest, most luminous and total feeling of 'I' lies behind the multiple feeling of Personality and its uproar of ambitions, anxiety, violence and negativeness.