T had had a real stumbling block about faith, because faith seemed so muddy, and muddled and blurry in terms of the meaning, and connecting with it. So her struggle, in a way, was thinking about what would mean something to her, and instead of faith, she was thinking about truth.
She felt more connected with that word, because it connected with her general experience of what she would like life to be like, and what it was actually like, and there were lots of struggles at work at the moment - the usual group dynamics which spring out of nowhere - and it was just people being people and struggling with their own difficuties of being in a work situation. She had had another real problem with hope. It felt like a delusion into the future which she could no longer relate to.
RM had found that faith was a very meaningful thing for him. He had realised he was a product of his faith. He had faith in all sorts of things, most of it nonsense, but he had been given ideas about things, and he had believed in them, and then he had faith in them.
It had tripped him up throughout his life, and he realised what a huge illusion it was. He saw the faith that other people had, and he discussed it with them, and when people in black suits came to his door, and asked him if he believed in Jesus, he would ask them, Do you? Faith was starting to be much more shaky for him. Hope was usually for things he desired, and the opposite side of desire was fear, so whenever he desired something, he was afraid he might not get it, and the stronger the desire, the stronger the fear. In some ways he needed to let go of hope, if anything, and just be present.
In respect of hope, RG thought we could hope for anything we wanted, everybody wanted the best for themselves. She hoped she would be rich tomorrow, and young forever. She had come to realise that at the end of the day, as much as we thought we were honest about our destiny, we were not. Love was actually the only thing we needed.
L was not sure how useful these three things were. In Stock Market trading, faith in a system, and hope that a trade will work, were not good approaches. Faith, for him as a composer, was faith in inspiration, he took that very seriously, though he would say it was more confidence than faith. He said the word confidence is built on the Latin root fides which is associated with faith. He had also discovered that in the Russian Orthodox Church, the associated saints, Vera (Faith), Nadezhda (Hope) and Liubov' (Love), shared the same name-day, September 17.
For N, faith was not a faith in a religious sense, it was almost a faith, or belief, that the world will continue in the same way, the sun will come up every day, assumptions about the world that we all make at some level. So faith, he found, was not something he worked with a lot, he would almost accept it as a prerequisite, but sometimes one's faith was shaken by certain events. Hope was sometimes present in his thinking, in terms of wanting a positive outcome to certain situations that may be around. So he did observe it, but did not necessarily place a lot of belief in it. When he was in the right sort of presence, he did feel love, when he did not have any expectation about any situation, and then, because of the acceptance, there was just a feeling of good will which came out, which had a joyfulness attached to it as well.
LD had taken the challenge as it was, starting first of all with in moments of presence, so the first condition was being present, and trying to be aware of feelings, so no thoughts of faith, love and hope. So the first fact for her was to try to be present and feel, and after that feeling faith, love and hope. She started from faith, and found that these three were inseparable. After the first attempt, she tried to separate them, to prove they weren't inseparable, and she could not separate them. So when, in the moments of presence that she felt faith, or love, or hope, she felt she could not have one feeling without the other two, they all came together.
Responding to T's remarks about life as it actually is, GC did not think that was possible without her. There was no life as it actually is, unless there was someone there to perceive it, and the illusion that anyone was perceiving life as it actually is, he thought, was wrong. What anyone was actually doing was creating the life that they were perceiving.
K said there were instances - he did not know if this thing happened to everybody - sometimes when he woke, first thing in the morning, he didn't know who he was. His mind then went out on a chase, with a real hunger for information - who am I? - who am I? - and then it rushed in. What rushed in? And then he had to question what that thing was. Whether the consciousness is the pure, unformed state when he first woke and he really didn't know who he was, when he had no identity, when he couldn't remember his name. It didn't happen often, but it did happen, and he equated that with the information that came in. How valid is that information? It is valid for a particular route that he takes and goes along, but only for that, because obviously there was a wealth of information out there, that he probably can't pick up. So he had faith in that collection, that package of information that comes to him, and within that there was a kind of faith in concepts.
K recalled that RG had said that when we were born, we had no identity, we didn't know who we were, even our name had been given to us. So there were two kinds of thing: things that had been given to us from the environment or from our parents, and things that we see ourselves. The way RG sees it is not the way that K perceives it. K's world was completely different from RG's but when we were born we were like a blank piece of paper, no identity, no name, no religion. L quoted a definition of faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something. So in terms of what RG said, maybe it was complete faith that RG was RG. RG said she was not really sure, if it was really her, if she believed what she was. RM said that if she had complete faith in it, she would believe in it, completely. She would be sure, but she would be wrong. RG said that maybe we were not what we believed we were. RM said faith was to be sure of something that may not be true. LD said it was true for us. RM asked, but was it true? K said that in the moment when he did not know who he was, there was a kind of panic. It was just a function of the mind that craved this information, this identity, but it was not really needed. Obviously, if he did not know who he was, he still had the senses working, he could still feel pain, he could still be moved by things. K then wondered whether, in that moment, he could just surrender, and not really want to know who he was, and forget about that. MO said that the thing that might surrender, was the same as what was coming in, in his experience.
The reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
Clearly to represent and to substantiate in yourself the understanding just why such a peculiar craze arose in the individuality of that Persian king and became proper only to him, you must know that ... Harnahoom ... invented that any old metal you like, abundant on the surface of that planet, could easily be turned into the rare metal ‘gold’ and all it was necessary to know for this was just one very small ‘secret’.
RM found this described something that he was doing all the time. The king had this idea he could have something magical. Though he did not know what it was, he thought somebody would. So he was chasing for something that may or may not exist and he was willing to destroy everything in order to find it. He was totally self centred in his search for some great pleasure that he hadn't yet achieved.
... His serious thinking first led his Reason to the understanding that, without any doubt, one or other of the learned beings of his community was aware of this ‘secret’ also, but since among beings of that clan, this strict keeping of a ‘professional’ mystery was very strongly developed, nobody, of course, was willing to reveal it.
GC said that this was nonsense. This was just religion. It was always just out of your grasp. Gurdjieff himself was just trying to turn a profit, and trying to propagate the idea that he had got the secret. GC recommended the last chapter of Meetings With Remarkable Men (The Material Question), in which Gurdjieff gave examples of how he had acted in a comparable way. T said it was extremely difficult to get people to think for themselves. The king wanted the secret, he wanted to be told what was the truth. That was the default position, usually, because then people did not have to do their own thinking.
... Hassein interrupted Beelzebub with the following words:
"Dear Grandfather, I do not understand why the issuing of the required vibrations for the purpose of the actualization of this most great cosmic process should depend on a definite region of the surface of the planet.”
To this question of his grandson, Beelzebub replied as follows:
As before long I intend to make the special question of those terrifying processes of reciprocal destruction which they call ‘wars’ the theme of my tales concerning the three-brained beings of the planet Earth, it is better to defer this question of yours also until this special tale, because then, I think, you will understand it well.
... When the peculiar Persian king I mentioned began, thanks to the hordes in subjection to him, to conquer beings of other communities and to seize by force the learned among them, he assigned as a place for their congregation and existence the said city of Babylon, to which they were taken in order that this lord of half the then continent of Asia could thereafter freely examine them in the hope that one of them might perhaps happen to know the secret of turning cheap metal into the metal gold.
MO said that he found that when Gurdjieff spoke about the base metals, it was quite interesting, because what were the base metals? Was it our anger, sadness, the human experience? And could that be transformed into good will, love, which you could say was gold? Was it possible, if you were so focused on thinking, to transform feelings, and allow the emotional intelligence? Was it possible, if we were so focused on finding another idea? Because we had found many ideas over hundreds of years. Had it stopped the wars? So how did you transform the base metal into gold? That was the question.
She felt more connected with that word, because it connected with her general experience of what she would like life to be like, and what it was actually like, and there were lots of struggles at work at the moment - the usual group dynamics which spring out of nowhere - and it was just people being people and struggling with their own difficuties of being in a work situation. She had had another real problem with hope. It felt like a delusion into the future which she could no longer relate to.
RM had found that faith was a very meaningful thing for him. He had realised he was a product of his faith. He had faith in all sorts of things, most of it nonsense, but he had been given ideas about things, and he had believed in them, and then he had faith in them.
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In moments of presence, try to be aware of feelings of faith, hope and love. See whether they all appear together, or if you have to work on one more than the others.
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In respect of hope, RG thought we could hope for anything we wanted, everybody wanted the best for themselves. She hoped she would be rich tomorrow, and young forever. She had come to realise that at the end of the day, as much as we thought we were honest about our destiny, we were not. Love was actually the only thing we needed.
L was not sure how useful these three things were. In Stock Market trading, faith in a system, and hope that a trade will work, were not good approaches. Faith, for him as a composer, was faith in inspiration, he took that very seriously, though he would say it was more confidence than faith. He said the word confidence is built on the Latin root fides which is associated with faith. He had also discovered that in the Russian Orthodox Church, the associated saints, Vera (Faith), Nadezhda (Hope) and Liubov' (Love), shared the same name-day, September 17.
For N, faith was not a faith in a religious sense, it was almost a faith, or belief, that the world will continue in the same way, the sun will come up every day, assumptions about the world that we all make at some level. So faith, he found, was not something he worked with a lot, he would almost accept it as a prerequisite, but sometimes one's faith was shaken by certain events. Hope was sometimes present in his thinking, in terms of wanting a positive outcome to certain situations that may be around. So he did observe it, but did not necessarily place a lot of belief in it. When he was in the right sort of presence, he did feel love, when he did not have any expectation about any situation, and then, because of the acceptance, there was just a feeling of good will which came out, which had a joyfulness attached to it as well.
LD had taken the challenge as it was, starting first of all with in moments of presence, so the first condition was being present, and trying to be aware of feelings, so no thoughts of faith, love and hope. So the first fact for her was to try to be present and feel, and after that feeling faith, love and hope. She started from faith, and found that these three were inseparable. After the first attempt, she tried to separate them, to prove they weren't inseparable, and she could not separate them. So when, in the moments of presence that she felt faith, or love, or hope, she felt she could not have one feeling without the other two, they all came together.
Source: Quantamagazine |
K recalled that RG had said that when we were born, we had no identity, we didn't know who we were, even our name had been given to us. So there were two kinds of thing: things that had been given to us from the environment or from our parents, and things that we see ourselves. The way RG sees it is not the way that K perceives it. K's world was completely different from RG's but when we were born we were like a blank piece of paper, no identity, no name, no religion. L quoted a definition of faith: complete trust or confidence in someone or something. So in terms of what RG said, maybe it was complete faith that RG was RG. RG said she was not really sure, if it was really her, if she believed what she was. RM said that if she had complete faith in it, she would believe in it, completely. She would be sure, but she would be wrong. RG said that maybe we were not what we believed we were. RM said faith was to be sure of something that may not be true. LD said it was true for us. RM asked, but was it true? K said that in the moment when he did not know who he was, there was a kind of panic. It was just a function of the mind that craved this information, this identity, but it was not really needed. Obviously, if he did not know who he was, he still had the senses working, he could still feel pain, he could still be moved by things. K then wondered whether, in that moment, he could just surrender, and not really want to know who he was, and forget about that. MO said that the thing that might surrender, was the same as what was coming in, in his experience.
The reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
Clearly to represent and to substantiate in yourself the understanding just why such a peculiar craze arose in the individuality of that Persian king and became proper only to him, you must know that ... Harnahoom ... invented that any old metal you like, abundant on the surface of that planet, could easily be turned into the rare metal ‘gold’ and all it was necessary to know for this was just one very small ‘secret’.
RM found this described something that he was doing all the time. The king had this idea he could have something magical. Though he did not know what it was, he thought somebody would. So he was chasing for something that may or may not exist and he was willing to destroy everything in order to find it. He was totally self centred in his search for some great pleasure that he hadn't yet achieved.
... His serious thinking first led his Reason to the understanding that, without any doubt, one or other of the learned beings of his community was aware of this ‘secret’ also, but since among beings of that clan, this strict keeping of a ‘professional’ mystery was very strongly developed, nobody, of course, was willing to reveal it.
GC said that this was nonsense. This was just religion. It was always just out of your grasp. Gurdjieff himself was just trying to turn a profit, and trying to propagate the idea that he had got the secret. GC recommended the last chapter of Meetings With Remarkable Men (The Material Question), in which Gurdjieff gave examples of how he had acted in a comparable way. T said it was extremely difficult to get people to think for themselves. The king wanted the secret, he wanted to be told what was the truth. That was the default position, usually, because then people did not have to do their own thinking.
... Hassein interrupted Beelzebub with the following words:
"Dear Grandfather, I do not understand why the issuing of the required vibrations for the purpose of the actualization of this most great cosmic process should depend on a definite region of the surface of the planet.”
To this question of his grandson, Beelzebub replied as follows:
As before long I intend to make the special question of those terrifying processes of reciprocal destruction which they call ‘wars’ the theme of my tales concerning the three-brained beings of the planet Earth, it is better to defer this question of yours also until this special tale, because then, I think, you will understand it well.
... When the peculiar Persian king I mentioned began, thanks to the hordes in subjection to him, to conquer beings of other communities and to seize by force the learned among them, he assigned as a place for their congregation and existence the said city of Babylon, to which they were taken in order that this lord of half the then continent of Asia could thereafter freely examine them in the hope that one of them might perhaps happen to know the secret of turning cheap metal into the metal gold.
An Alchemist Jacob Toorenvliet 1679 |
