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.
The theme
is always that a man can undergo a definite and pre-arranged transformation
in himself, that he can undergo a distinct and certain
development, a real evolution or re-birth, if he knows and understands
gradually what he has to do. That is to say, all this literature, which
constitutes a part of what are called "B" influences in this Work, has
the same object. A man has to die in some specific and definite way to
himself, to certain sides of himself. And if he dies in the right way, he
is born again as a new man, another kind of man, called in this Work
a Conscious Man as distinct from a mechanical man. He will then know
the meaning of his life on this earth—namely, that it is not an end in
itself but a means to another end—for it is by means of a certain kind of
struggle against what life has laid down in us that the end or purpose
of Man's existence is achieved. If everything were easy, there would be
no re-birth, but, as this Work teaches, Man cannot be re-born rightly
nor can he die rightly—that is, he cannot see the right things to die to
in himself—unless he first awakens.
In many esoteric fragments of the past, you will find references to
re-birth and to dying.
In the Gospels, for instance, you will find such
references, and also references to awakening. You will find the word
'watch' often used: this should be translated as 'awaken'. But you will
not find these ideas, which are the central theme of Esoteric Psychology,
arranged in the right order. A man must awaken first, before he can
die aright. And if he awakens first, and dies in the right way to himself,
he may be re-born if there is anything worth while and sufficiently strong
and real in him. It will depend upon the quality of the person in the
deepest sense. Nothing 'pseudo', nothing false, will be of any use here.
But we have not said enough about this process because, although it is
necessary that a man should awaken first of all, he must be taught
what he must work on in himself and observe in order to awaken. And
for this he must find a Teacher and a Teaching—that is, a Teaching
that is not arbitrary, invented by ordinary people, but one that comes
from those who have awakened and left behind them instructions to
those in prison in the sleep of life, who wish to get out, to awaken.
Therefore he will have to search, to seek and even if he does find something
it will not be at all easy for him to establish contact with it.
He may be
tested from the very first moment or it may be that he is tested years
later. In some schools of awakening, in the past, a person had to keep
silence for two or three or even five years, or do the most menial tasks,
or perform labours that were always being frustrated, and so on, before
he was taught anything, or he would perhaps be treated in some rough way so that his pride and vanity were touched and he might become
offended. You know how in the Gospels it is said that people were
continually being offended and how Christ was always attacking vanity,
pride, self-esteem, self-complacency, and the idea that one knows what
is right and wrong already.
A person must search, seek. I will try to explain to you what seeking
means.
There is a phrase: "Seek and ye shall find." The meaning of
this is that unless you yourself seek, you yourself will not find. Someone
may bring you, let us say, to this Work. You may not ever have thought
seriously about the meaning of your existence or of life or of anything of
that kind, or you may have searched a little and thought that it was too
confusing, or you may have been quite unable to distinguish between
Truth and Falsity in what you found. Now supposing that you hear
something of this teaching and it falls a little on your understanding
and not simply on your two ears, then your search for this Work will
begin and you may be able to find it, but you may be in the Work for
many many years and never have searched for it and so never have found
it.
Your search means two things. You may have had to spend a long
time in trying to find a real teaching in the world and you may have
passed through many stages of thought and endeavour and danger
before you have made any contact with the object of your search. Or
you may have made contact perhaps even accidentally, straightaway,
and imagine that your search is at an end instead of realizing that it has
only just begun.