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WHAT IF WE HAD COME TODAY KNOWING NOTHING ABOUT THE FOURTH WAY?
What if we'd really
searched and we knock on the door,
enter, and for the first time hear about
the Ray of Creation, the Diagram of
Every Living Thing, the Food Diagram,
inner considering, imagination, buffers,
self-remembering, self-observation, that
we have to make a soul, that we didn't get
one gratis? If we were to hear all this right
now for the first time—what would be
our state?
That was the experience in April 1915
in Moscow when Ouspensky first met Mr.
Gurdjieff. To Ouspensky, widely read in
matters esoteric, these ideas were all amazingly
new. He had been searching
unsuccessfully for what he called "a new
or forgotten road," "a teaching of a more
rational kind." Until Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous
appeared in 1950,
there were no articles, no books, no lectures
on the ideas he heard at Gurdjieff's
table; these ideas were not in the marketplace.
When Ouspensky returned to St.
Petersburg he burst into Phillipoff's café to
meet another seeker and exclaimed—"I have found the miracle!"
We Think We Know
Gurdjieff gave him everything he
was searching for, and more. But as we
know, it was not enough. Isn't that also
our experience? No matter what we are
given, in time it's not enough. Why is
that? Why is it never enough? When we
are introduced to a whole scale of ideas
(even though we don't really understand
them), when we are struck with the sense
and feeling that we are hearing as close a
formulation of the truth as we have ever
experienced—why is that not enough?
Before Gurdjieff died he said he
wanted the First Series of All and Everything
to be spread far and wide. But immediately
after his death the French press attacked the
Gurdjieff Work and some students wrote
very nasty articles (which 20 or 30 years
later they apologized for). But the offense
had been given. So right at the beginning of
the new octave—metaphorically, let us say,
right when you're pulled out of the womb
and you're slapped—well, it makes you
duck a bit, no? Anyway, the book was published,
but it wasn't taken far and wide. And
in 1963, the Second Series, Meetings with Remarkable Men,
was published. There
were no plans to publish the Third Series,
Life Is Real Only Then When 'I Am.'
The most esoteric of the three series, the decision
was not to publish it. But John Bennett
believed it should be published—this
knowledge was too important, too valuable
to society to be withheld. And so in 1975 he
published it. Now what is the result of publishing
it? How many people have really
studied the book? Is society any better?
Knowledge—A Passing Presence
Helping humanity. A very democratic
idea, very humanistic, idealistic. But isn't
the idea behind it that if we just had enough
knowledge, we wouldn't do what we do? If
we just understood what we were doing, we
would act more intelligently. Well, to a
degree that's true, but the problem lies in
the words knowing and understanding.
One can have information and even knowledge,
to some degree; conventionally speaking,
know and understand it. But it is on our
level. "Knowledge is a passing presence," as
Gurdjieff says. It is state specific. A lower
level of vibration cannot know and understand
that of a higher level. The higher
encompasses the lower, not the lower the
higher. So giving society more knowledge is
not going to make any difference. The ideas
will all be taken in the wrong way. In fact,
doing so may cause just the reverse of what
is intended. Interestingly, Gurdjieff warned
Bennett about this. He told him, "With too
much knowledge, the inner barrier may
become insurmountable." But Bennett, for
all his many remarkable gifts, never appears
to have understood what Gurdjieff said.
In India it's said that the Upanishads
were kept secret, were spoken about only
among the Brahmans, the priestly class.
All the lower classes—Kshatriya, the warriors;
Vaisya, businessmen; Sudras,
untouchables—were not allowed to hear
these ideas. Those who did break this
taboo had hot liquid glass poured in their
ears. Why? It must have something to do
with knowledge, with esoteric knowledge,
its power to transform and, equally, to corrupt.
Knowledge is a snake. In the right
hands it can lead to wisdom; in the wrong,
it is poisonous. All knowledge in the service
of egoism only enriches kundabuffer,
self-love and vanity.
The other day I received a book catalog
from MIT. Let me read you a couple of
descriptions of the books being published.
Thomas Metzinger's Being No One
speaks of "the self-model theory of subjectivity."
According to the author: "No such things as
selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or
was a self. All that exists are phenomenal
selves, as they appear in conscious experience.
The phenomenal self, however, is not
a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content
of a 'transparent self-model.'"
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