Consciousness

In relation to your first post

W: “But there is a fact here: Neither you nor R has an understanding of this teaching as I do. So, either you are going to learn from me or there is nothing more to discuss because I cannot learn from you.”

For me this is what makes you cultist. To think that you cannot learn from either one of us because we don’t hold Gurdjieff or his work as the absolute truth is so close minded that you in fact cannot learn from anything for it is not an attitude for learning. You are so active thinking that you are The Giver that you can’t receive the gift.

W.: Few years ago, a person gave me the task of leaving all I was doing with reference to my inner work and I obeyed this person and for a whole year I did all he asked me to do.”

This is very delicate. I have seen over a thousand people obeying another man for seventeen years and I did so myself. To think that because one obeyed someone others should obey one doesn’t speak about one’s consciousness but about the sad fact that one learnt to be an authoritarian like him and justify it. NO man today can or should ask obedience from another. We are ALL mature enough to be our selves. We can help each other but we cannot pretend to replace another’s will. The times of gurus is over, not because they were not great times but because we are no longer in a hierarchic order of being. The greater the Teacher the less he or she can condition other people to his will. We are no longer followers of each other; we are, each other, moving together towards the actualization of consciousness in our lives. That is a better teacher than giving one’s self up to another or pretending others give their self up to one for any length of time. It is not any individual who has “the word” “the knowing” or the “Will”. It is that the Word and the Knowing are already there and each individual has to have the Will to be that “nothingness”.

That “nothingness” cannot come through obedience to another but through “inspiration”. We can no longer “teach” each other to be but we can “inspire” each other to be and we cannot “inspire” each other with authoritarism.  The Fourth Way as presented by Gurdjieff is not about obedience no matter the tyranny of his own teaching. In this sense he was hardly different to Picasso. That “tyranic authoritarism” was an aspect of their times. It is about understanding not Gurdjieff, but life and more than understanding it, being it. The tremendous power of each individual is that each carries “life”. Nothing but one’s own will to live it consciously is needed to be conscious. What we are learning in consciousness is not that Gurdjieff was right but that life IS. The I AM traditionally been held as the top most ladder of being is nothing else but the IS of life or of being in which one’s self is the whole and the part at the same time. I AM has so badly been misinterpreted as an ego trip that it feeds every cult.

Your second post:

That is for you but not for me. It is Conscience and not consciousness that is in our actions and our humaneness. There is a very great difference between consciousness and conscience. It is obvious to me that you read Ous[ensky's A New Model of the Universe. I have never read nor will I ever read it. But a friend of mine sent me pdf of the book and I searched what he had to say about conscience and the word was not even mentioned one time. However, consciousness was mentioned 185 times. You check. A man or a woman can be in a high state of consciousness with having conscience. Consciousness is of the mind; Conscience is of feeling. It is feeling what we have to develop, not to love art with feeling, but to be able to be Christians.

I would appreciate it if you could share with us the passages in Gurdjieff that you think substantiates your statements here. Your understanding of consciousness and conscience are strange to me and your separation of mind as consciousness and conscience put to “feeling” and your idea that we do not need feelings for consciousness is nothing I’ve ever read, even in Gurdjieff. In my personal experience there can be no consciousness without conscience, they are two aspects of the same thing and consciousness has nothing to do with the lower intellectual centre or what I understand you call the mind. In the lower intellectual and emotional centres we can feel and think about laws but in states of consciousness we neither think nor feel, we are the laws. Consciousness is not of the mind but a quality of being. Of I. The mind and the emotions are realms within.

As for your last post you state that Picasso painted with consciousness and had no conscience and that is a very great shift from “hating” him as you were a couple of posts ago. It isn’t that I think Picasso was conscious, what I’ve been trying to say is that we can be conscious to Picasso’s work and life and not discard it even if he was not conscious and that even if he wasn’t conscious there is enough “life” in it for us to rejoice our soul with gratitude. I think we can view what was happening to the soul of mankind through Picasso’s work and understand what he added to “life” that we are now profiting from without in any way diminishing him or his work because he was “faulty”. Awareness of each other’s faults does not justify hatred to the extent of discarding each other which is another way of “killing” each other psychologically. We won't understand our times more fully by discarding Picasso and his work and understanding our times is an aspect of being conscious to our times, "knowing" and "being" not only our self but our selves.

Have a great day!