Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Volume 2
In reply to a question asked by new people: "WHAT IS THIS
WORK ABOUT?" the answer is that it is for those who are looking
for something, who are not satisfied with what they have found in
life, and who feel that there must be something else beside success or
failure in life, and beside what they have been taught at school and
college and by their upbringing in general.
When a person feels that this life cannot be explained in terms of
itself, when he or she sees that life taken by itself without any added
explanation is largely meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot", a history
of crime and bloodshed and frustration, when such a person begins to
see that it is very doubtful whether there is any such thing as progress
and that everything begins and ends almost before it has begun, then
he or she is in a position to search for other meaning and new knowledge,
convinced that it must exist. And when people begin this research with
any sincerity and any real depth of feeling, they will be astonished to
find what a great number of memorials exist in the literature of the
past which point unmistakably towards another kind of knowledge
and meaning. In all this literature the theme is the same.