Keeping the Work alive (Nicoll)

'It is important to keep the Work alive in oneself, to hear its ideas over and over, to think of them, and try to act from them. If it dies out in one through the demands and pressure of life, it may be difficult to awaken it again.

To habitually disagree is to use only the negative part of the center. It is to be intellectually in reverse, the wrong use of a center. But a person who thinks only on the side of affirmation will never grasp the system either. It will never become 'real' to him, for he will not have passed through any temptations in regard to it or struggled and worked it out for himself by degrees.'

-- Maurice Nicoll, from Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol 1.

Preparation for Higher Influences (Nicoll)

The whole Work is to prepare one for the reception of higher, subtler influences. Its knowledge must become one's own knowledge, if you want the Work results. One must study and make efforts for a long time, and think with the most genuine parts of oneself. Then one may become aware of being in contact internally with these ideas. 

-- Maurice Nicoll, from Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2

Breaking parameters of consensus reality (Castaneda)

It is the belief of the sorcerers of the most ancient lineage that there is an inherent amount of energy existing in each one of us, an amount which is not subject to the onslaughts of outside forces for augmenting it or for decreasing it.  They believe that this quantity of energy is sufficient to accomplish something which they deem to be the obsession of every sorcerer on Earth: breaking the parameters of normal perception.

They are convinced that our incapacity to break those parameters is induced by our culture and social milieu. They maintain that our culture and social milieu, our consensus reality, deploys our inherent energy in the process of fulfilling established behavioral patterns which don't allow us to break the parameters of normal perception.

Breaking those parameters is the unavoidable issue of mankind.  Breaking them means the entrance into unthinkable worlds of a pragmatic value in no way different from the value of our world of everyday life. We are obsessed with breaking those parameters and we fail miserably at it.

-- Carlos Castaneda, from Magical Passes (1998)

The guru's rap (Don James)

 

A guru's “rap” may not be brilliant, but there can still be a subtle higher consciousness with the person which will radiate out to the audience and raise their individual consciousnesses. You would think that this would not be possible, that the rap would have to be pitched on a high level if the speaker was high level, but this is not always the case. In the case of the highest gurus, the words they use imply that you have to be in the state of consciousness they're in to understand. They answer all questions in a similar way. They don't use those exact words, but they imply that meaning. Maybe it's their form of koan. If you try to practice what they tell you, it won't work, you have to actually see what they're pointing at in order to get it. Most Zen masters' talks are almost childlike in their lack of sophistication, but there is a deep awareness behind them. Other teachers are intellectually brilliant in what they say, but they have no higher consciousness behind it, just intellectual concepts.

Wisdom and the Astral Level (D. James)

There is a market for wisdom as it is human destiny to evolve. Until we evolve just a tiny bit beyond the normal level, it looks like we are not evolving as a species. We have better technology but we are destroying our planet and still have wars, greed, vanity and various other unevolved traits.

I believe in the astral level because I've personally experienced it many times. I didn't just read about it. I believe that the astral level is where we evolve to after here. And we live there like we live here in the material level. We live there and grow and learn. And reincarnate there like here. It seems logical. If it's not like that then I'll change my beliefs. Beliefs just help us to feel secure. Only knowledge has power. If you believe in energy sensitivity, being able to “feel” other peoples' level of consciousness, it helps you to seek those with knowledge of it so that you can learn it, and you can know it too.

-- D. James (1946-2022)

The Steppenwolf and the Outsider (Colin Wilson)

The outsider's basic problem is that he is stuck in a dreary, lukewarm civilization that was created for the “average man,” a culture based on mediocrity.

In Hesse's "Steppenwolf", the hero has temporarily abandoned the dream of the open road, with its elusive prospects of far horizons which always turn out to be as solid and ordinary as a backstreet in one's home town.  Hesse is honest enough to acknowledge that a man with a room of his own, a sufficient income, and plenty of books, can still feel as maladjusted as a romantic wanderer.  This, I saw, was the main problem: Our odd inability to stay in contact with reality.

Whenever I returned from a few weeks on the open road, I had an odd feeling of strength for a week or two; my home town no longer oppressed me. But the strength would leak away and I would again feel vulnerable and bored. What I wanted to discover was the basic discipline for developing strength and objectivity.

The intensity of the poet's response to existence means that the poet is obsessed by the need for contact with “the source of power and purpose” that lies inside us. All great poets become more spiritual as they attempt to establish contact with this source.

Hesse's Steppenwolf has freedom, in the physical and economic sense; so what is it that he lacks? I knew that if I could answer this question, I would have solved one of the basic problems of the century.

Steppenwolf was Hesse's closest approach to a solution, because it was his clearest statement of the problem. Why had the author failed? It was because he kept looking for his answer outside.

What is wrong with Steppenwolf is that he has no purpose or discipline. He sits in a passive state of mind, waiting to be moved by another's genius. Without external challenge, he ceases to make any effort. He becomes subject to that stringent spiritual law that says the less you put into life, the less you get out of it. The answer had to lie in a sense of inner purpose, and a rigid self-discipline. And so out of these insights I began to fashion the ideas of The Outsider.

-- Colin Wilson, from Three Essays: Hesse, Reich, Borges

a thing is a thing (sufism)

A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing.

-- Sufi saying 

death and birth concepts (wei wu wei)

 

“Death” and “birth” are only apparently separated
as a consequence of the conceptual extension
of the concept of matter in space and duration.

-- Wei Wu Wei, from Posthumous Pieces

matter and mind (jung)

Microphysics is moving into the unknown side of 'matter,' just as complex psychology is moving into the unknown side of the 'psyche.' The concept of the relativity of mass does not actually explain anything, and neither does the relativity of time and space; it is simply a formulation. These opposites only come into being through the projection onto space of what is in itself a non-spatial, transcendental, existence.

-- Carl Jung, Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Letters, 1932-1958

action in the world

One cannot help but perform action, over and over yet again, which is naught but true dharma, within in the realm of samsara; inaction is not possible, for even while the yogi is seated in contemplation, seemingly immobile, the great cosmos moves unceasingly.

-- Bhagavad Gita