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Henry (H): Welcome to this week's SOTT podcast. I'm Henry.
Joe (J): I'm Joe.
Scott (S): I'm Scott.
J: And we're continuing our discussion with Laura. [L: Yes, thanks for having me.] In last week's podcast, we began a discussion of Gurdjieff (G). We were looking at some of the things that G wrote in his book, "Life is Real", and L's been pulling out details that have been ignored or glossed over by pretty much everybody else. We began by looking at some of G's last words to Mme de Salzmann on his deathbed. He said to her about his writings, "The essential thing, the first thing, is to prepare a nucleus of people capable of responding to the demand which will arise." L made the comment that she felt G was having something of a prophetic moment, that he was able to see something in the future and what was going to happen. He saw there was going to be a need for the development of a group of people who were working to see the world as objectively as possible. She also pulled out an overlooked quote from the same book, "Life is Real", where G was recounting an experience that he'd had on the 6th of November out in an area on the edge of the Gobi desert, and during this account he writes, "I was very much interested then, and even now my interest is not entirely vanished, in increasing the visibility of distant cosmic centers many thousand times through the use of a medium." Well, when we read this, it brought to mind a certain other experiment that's been going on for the last few years that L has been conducting: a scientific experiment, which is also the terms that G used. He was talking about his own telepathic abilities, and how in his experience out in the desert, or on the edge of the desert he was looking for a way to achieve some sort of self-memory, self-rememberance, where he was able to look at himself, look at his life, see what he should have done in any moment, and use it to see what he should do in the present moment. He realized the way to do this was to take this telepathic ability that he had developed, which had been his means of obtaining what he needed in life, this ability to influence people, and to say that he wasn't going to use it anymore for that purpose. And the one purpose that he allowed himself to continue to use it was in scientific investigation, and the scientific investigation, one of the instances, or the examples that he gives, is what I just mentioned: "increasing the visibility of distant cosmic centers many thousand times through the use of a medium". So we pick up from there.
L: What is interesting about the way that he phrases this, "distant cosmic centers", is the very fact that in our own experimental work, where we have the so-called "Cassiopaean Communication" they describe themselves as "we are you in the future". And they talk about thought centers, and of course it is extremely distant, cosmically speaking, so one can't help but wonder, or to draw a comparison between what G must have been doing using his abilities as a hypnotist and also his telepathic abilities in this mediumistic enterprise which nobody seems to be talking about, if they're aware of it. And then, as I said last week, the result of these thoughts that he was having at that particular period of time was that his aims split into two main goals: he had first of all his primary aim, which was described as, "to investigate from all sides and to understand the exact significance and purpose of the life of man", and he now had the second aim, which was that he "must discover at all costs some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which caused them to fall easily under the influence of mass hypnosis". The important point of this realization that G had, which so many people failed to really consider and to think about is the fact that he tells us that he came to these ideas, came to these understandings as the result of memories of "the sights of all sorts of terrors flowing from the violent events which I had witnessed, and finally from accumulated impressions arising from conversations with various revolutionaries in the previous several years", and that these memories and conversations have crystallized in him, little by little, as he writes, besides the previous unique aim, that inconquerable [sic] aim to try to help people to learn how to overcome the influence of mass hypnosis.
J: Well, the first thing that occurs to me about that is that it's a long way from G's description of, I suppose, what we understand as Work, is a long way from New Age, navel-gazing, and ascension, and various other kinds of blissful states. He describes his life as a very interesting one, as a very hard one where obviously, as he describes himself, he underwent difficult trials, was shot at least twice, and had various other unpleasant experiences, and it was these experiences that brought him to this point of clarity and understanding, and he also mentions that one of the things that brought him to this point was in talking with revolutionaries, and other people that weren't affected by a standard rule(??), that were very interesting and perhaps very driven people, but then he follows that up by saying that this brought him to this second aim, which was to understand how to prevent people from falling under mass hypnosis or psychosis.
L: Well, one has to think about, you know, the perspective, I mean, to really understand what he must have been thinking, the perspective of the so-called revolutionary. A revolutionary is an individual, generally, who is seeking ways and meanings to revolt against a mass hypnosis. And, obviously he was having conversations with them and their frustrations with achieving the goals of throwing off the yoke of mass hypnosis and mental domination and the power of the global elite, were the concerns with which G was concerned. These are things that concern us today also.
H: Probably he also saw that large numbers of these revolutionaries were perfectly willing to engage in the same sorts of mass suggestibility that the other side was using, and he came to the understanding that this was a cycle that had to be broken out of.
J: And the other thing is that he may have met revolutionaries who themselves were victims of mass hypnosis [L: Exactly], who were being controlled, and in fact this idea, you know we talk a lot on the Signs page about overthrowing the Bush regime, and this idea of changing this world, is essentially, can be a result of the propagation of illusion or a type of hypnosis, where people think if they can just take back the country, take back the government, everybody's going to be, the world's gonna turn out fine, and everything will be rosy. [L: Exactly.] But these two things that he came to, the first are the two unconquerable aims that he spent his life, or eventually tried to achieve, and the first one being understanding the nature of the life of humanity, and the second one, being, how to prevent people from falling under this mass hypnosis, perhaps what he kind of concluded or saw in stark reality was that, if nothing's done, then the purpose of life on Earth, or the purpose of human life on Earth, is to simply be victimized or subjected to this mass hypnosis and used for whatever purposes the powers that be deem.
L: Well, getting back to what you just said about the whole New Age ways and means of achieving enlightenment, giving over your will to a belief system, and contemplating your navel, or chanting "Om", or just think nice thoughts, or, that sort of thing, G's [J: A fountain of bliss] Yeah. G concludes this little discussion by saying, "So the idea which flashed into my consciousness on the evening of November 6th consisted of the following: in all probability, my experience during the last few days of horrible despair, and the unusually intense struggle of inner forces which expressed itself this morning in an almost delirious self-reasoning is really nothing else than the direct outcome of the self-reasoning that transpired in me when, in an almost similar state, thirty years ago, on the edge of the Gobi desert. So when I had more or less recovered I began just from here to continue my researches, but now for two definite aims instead of only one." And then he begins to discuss how he undertook to do this, that he is already written in some detail in one of the books of the third series of his writings, and he will say that "only after some years I find it necessary to originate somewhere an institution for the preparation of helper-instructors in order to be able to put into the lives of people what I had already learned". So, he was in the process of doing this, and he had selected Russia to be the appropriate place for this purpose, and then of course, the Russian revolution arose. So, that is what G talked about in terms of who he was and where he came from. Now the problem is, as we've already mentioned, is that most people involved in Fourth Way Works, don't necessarily follow any of this sort of thing, because as it happens we have several friends, members of our discussion groups, who are involved to some extent as a corollary activity with some G-ian-type schools. We have a couple in the United States, and so we understand what kinds of work they do, and what their focus is on, and we also have a couple in Europe, so that basically we have an insight into how the Fourth Way schools are following the so-called teachings of G, and from what we have been able to glean from this information is that, someway, somehow, they seem to have really lost the essence of what G was really all about and what made him the way he was.
L: Now there is another interesting perspective on this, it comes from Carlos Castaneda in his book, "The Fire from Within". Now, there's been a lot of discussion or argument or dispute about who or what Don Juan Matus really was; was he a real person, was he a real teacher, did Carlos Castaneda have contact with a real seer, or was he just making things up, because of course, you know, the last years of Castaneda's life it became fairly obvious that whatever had happened to him wasn't a very good thing because he went down a road that was not conducive to fulfilling any kinds of benevolent aims. Nevertheless, we can almost compare Castaneda to Ouspensky in the sense of the decline of their because neither of them was able to fully give up self-importance. I have always suspected that there was a combination of elements in what Castaneda wrote in his creation of Don Juan. I think that Don Juan may have been a real individual but he was also semi-mythical, that ideas that Castaneda himself formulated, or which came to him in a creative way, maybe even telepathically, were put into the mouth of Don Juan, in addition to a possible real individual who did teach some things along a certain line. So I think that then, when you look at this, you have to look at it as a creative process, but the point is, when you're reading it, to think about the fact that among the sources that Castaneda may have tapped for his work may in fact have been G himself. Because there are many things that come through in what Castaneda writes that are so similar to what G is writing, and of course the time period was such that he could easily have borrowed some of this information and incorporated it into his southwestern mythos, putting it into the mouth of Don Juan as I said. In this sense, I think it's important to look at this book, "The Fire from Within" where Carlos Castaneda writes about the subject of petty tyrants, because as we have just read from G, it was, in fact, petty tyrants that brought G to his level of understanding, that made him see things as he saw them and gave him his inconquerable [sic] drive to pursue these two particular aims. And, in this chapter on petty tyrants in the book, "The Fire from Within" Castaneda, Castaneda's Don Juan tells us about the seers of the Conquest, as he calls it, or the new seers. He says, "The new seers recommended that every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. I have followed that recommendation, and much of my endeavors with you has been geared to show you that without self-importance, we are invulnerable." And of course you can see that self-importance is undoubtedly what G was referring to when he was talking about he could see how he had done things in his life, and followed certain courses of action, but they always ended badly because he was not able to use that hindsight 20/20, because how many of us, through our own self-importance, do so many things in our lives that hindsight tells us, "Oh, I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have been proud, I shouldn't have been so arrogant, I shouldn't have been so pushy, I shouldn't have been this, I shouldn't have been that, I shouldn't have been stupid," and it's generally self-importance, believing that in the moment, when we are caught up in that moment, and caught up in the reactionary nature of our being, that we are in command of ourselves. So Don Juan further says, "Self-importance can't be fought with niceties." He said that "Seers, old and new, are divided into two categories. The first one is made up of those who are willing to exercise self-restraint, and can channel their activities toward pragmatic goals which would benefit other seers and man in general. The other category of seers consists of those who don't care about self-restraint, or about any pragmatic goals. It is the consensus among seers that the latter have failed to resolve the problem of self-importance." And right here you see the difference between two approaches: the approach of G and the approach of the Work, and the approach of the so-called New Age navel-gazing crowd. The New Age navel-gazing crowd don't care about restraint, they don't care about Working, and they certainly don't have any real, pragmatic goals. Their goals are for themselves alone. They want to achieve peace, tranquility, and they think, of course, that if they do this, someway, somehow it's going to make everything all nice and peaceful all over the world, and they in no way consider the courses of nature, and the way the universe wishes to conduct its own activities in the cosmos, and they certainly aren't engaged in any pragmatic goals to help humanity.
J: Although, they claim that they are.
L: Well, certainly, they claim they are. But pragmatic means [H: They're going to bring peace to the world by...] pragmatic means practical [H: um hm], to actually, you know, useful and worth, I mean, it's one thing to say, "Okay, we're going to all gather together, we're going to contemplate our navel, we're going to have a meditation for world peace." What is pragmatic about that? Absolutely nothing.
J: Well if that's nothing, well, as a comparison for example, between that, a group of people getting together, meditating, and hoping that they're going to stop war, and someone writing an essay or an editorial and putting it on a website that exposes the folly of war and the fact that it's being pushed, which might reach one person who might not go to war and save their life.
L: There's a big difference, exactly. So having divided the seers into the two categories, he also says about this that "self-importance is not something simple or naive. On the one hand, it is the core of everything that is good in us, and on the other hand, it is the core of everything that is rotten. To get rid of the self-importance that is rotten requires a masterpiece of strategy. Seers through the ages have given the highest praise to those who have accomplished it." So then they have a little further discussion, and Carlos Castaneda talks about, he's arguing that admonitions about self-importance reminded him of Catholic diaterns (? diatribes?), after a lifetime of being told about the evils of sin, that he had become callous. So Don Juan tells him, "Warriors fight self-importance as a matter of strategy, not of principle. Your mistake is to understand what I say in terms of morality." And Castaneda says, "I see you as a highly moral man, Don Juan." And Don Juan says, "You've noticed my impeccability, that's all." "Impeccability, as well as getting rid of self-importance, is too vague a concept to be of any value to me," Carlos says. And then Don Juan says, "Impeccability is nothing else but the proper use of energy." Now, any of you who have read "In Search of the Miraculous", and have read the passages that discuss conscience and morality will see that this is exactly the same concept that Don Juan is presenting here, that morality is not the same thing as impeccability, even though it can be perceived as such. G points out that what is moral in China is not moral in America, it's not an objective morality. And searching for an objective morality, is of course, the goal, searching for an objective conscience. He also points out that in terms of what is or is not moral, to somebody who has a definite goal, a definite aim, what is moral becomes anything that furthers that goal, and what is immoral is anything that hinders that goal. And of course, since we understand what G's goal was, which was to understand the nature of the human condition, and to awaken people to help them to overcome the influences of mass hypnosis, you can see that what he would consider to be moral and what he would consider to be immoral would be completely different, in many instances, from what anybody else would consider to be moral or immoral. So then Don Juan says, "Warriors take strategic inventories. They list everything they do. Then they decide which of those things can be changed in order to allow themselves a respite in terms of expending their energy." Now this, in a sense, is a very prosaic description of what G was talking about, that he went through this period of mentation, and seeing everything he had done, and how he could have done it differently, and was in this state of hyper-consciousness, being able to see himself, and being able to see himself see himself. And this amounts to, in a certain sense, taking a strategic inventory, listing everything you do, or have done, what you can change, realistically, in order to allow yourselves a respite in terms of your energy. And then he adds that "The strategic inventory covers not only behavioral patterns that were not essential to our survival and well-being". So then he says, going on talking about the strategy of becoming free of self-importance, and to free up energy for those things that are essential, that is, achieving one's goal, which is already been identified as goals, doing pragmatic things for the benefit of other seers and for humanity, the strategy is, he says, "Worked out by the seers of the Conquest, the unquestionable masters of stalking." Now, right here we have another clue: Conquest, the seers of the Conquest. Now, G was working out his strategy in the midst of wars and revolution, and talking to revolutionaries under extremely difficult circumstances, so once again we see a very strong comparison. He says that "The strategy consists of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called the attributes of warriorship." And they are: "control, discipline, forbearance, timing, and wilt. They pertain to the world of the warrior who is fighting to lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps the most important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called the petty tyrant. The petty tyrant is a tormentor: someone who either holds the power of life and death over warriors, or simply annoys them to distraction. Petty tyrants who persecute and inflict misery, but without actually causing anybody's death, are the first sub-class of petty tyrants. They were called little petty tyrants. The second consisted of petty tyrants who were only exasperating and bothersome to no end. They are called small-fry petty tyrants." And, he adds that "the little petty tyrants are further divided into four categories: one that torments with brutality and violence, another that does it by creating unbearable apprehension through deviousness, another which oppresses with sadness, and the last which torments by making warriors rage." So, we see right here that Don Juan is talking about the exact conditions in which G came to his realizations and his understandings. Conditions of being exposed to, subjected to petty tyrants, we also see that this is exactly the condition that prevails today on a global scale; in other words, we have the most marvelous petty tyrant that has ever been created, which is the global pathocratic system, the elite system of control which is trying to, well, basically lead us into a third world war, probably a nuclear war, in which millions if not billions of people will die. This is a fairly good little petty tyrant, as Don Juan would put it, and, just to give you an idea, he says, "What the new seers had in mind was a deadly maneuver, in which the petty tyrant is like a mountain peak, and the attributes of warriorship are like climbers who meet at the summit. Usually only four attributes are played. The fifth, wilt, is saved for ultimate confrontations," such as when warriors are facing the the firing squad, so to speak. And those four are control, forbearance, discipline, and timing. You know, anybody that thinks that they are going to operate in this world and bring about any change whatsoever, as G wished would happen, or hoped would happen, which was one of his unconquerable aims, to help release people from this mass hypnosis, they're going to have to use control, forbearance, discipline, and timing, and they're definitely going to have to get over their self-importance. So, Don Juan tells us again, "One of the greatest accomplishments of the seers of the Conquest was a construct called the three-phase progression. By understanding the nature of man" this is very important, this is a prerequisite, to understand the nature of man, "they were able to reach the incontestable conclusion, that if seers could hold their own facing petty tyrants, they could certainly face the unknown with impunity and could even stand in the presence of the unknowable. We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors obtain the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable." And then Don Juan finally adds, he says, "Let's go back to what I've said about the Conquest. The seers of that time couldn't have found a better ground. The Spaniards were petty tyrants who tested the seers' skills to the limit. After dealing with the conquerors, the seers were capable of facing anything. They were the lucky ones. At that time there were petty tyrants everywhere. After all those marvelous years of abundance of petty tyrants, things changed a great deal. Petty tyrants never again had that scope." Except now, of course. At the time that Castaneda was writing this, I'm sure he didn't foresee what was happening in the present time. "The perfect ingredient for the making of a superb seer is a petty tyrant with unlimited prerogatives. And so, we have a little bit of an understanding of where the work of Carlos Castaneda overlaps the work of G, and even the suspicion that Castaneda may have been influenced by the work of G. Of course, Castaneda asked Don Juan, "Do petty tyrants sometimes win, and destroy the warrior facing them?" "Of course," and this refers us back to the time of the Conquest, "There was a time when warriors died like flies," at the beginning of the conquest. "Their ranks were decimated. The petty tyrants could put anyone to death simply acting on a whim. Under that kind of pressure, seers freely achieved sublime states. It was then that the surviving seers had to exert themselves to the limit to find new ways to avoid the decimation of their numbers." Well, we can learn from this, or we can ignore this, but quite frankly I think that by comparing what G was about and what Don Juan was writing, or saying, what was put into the mouth of Don Juan, through the writings of Carlos Castaneda, who I believe was influenced by G, that we're looking at the very same thing at the present time. Don Juan said, "The new seers used petty tyrants not only to get rid of their self-importance, but to accomplish the very sophisticated maneuver of moving themselves out of this world." And then Don Juan asks, "How do you measure defeat? Anyone who joins the petty tyrant is defeated. To act in anger without control and discipline, to have no forbearance, is to be defeated." And this is what we see to a great extent in this so-called 9/11 truth movement, and anti-war movement, and all the different revolutionary movements, and I believe that that was something that G saw himself, and what he was seeing when he was communicating with these so-called revolutionaries. Notice it says: "To act in anger without control and discipline"- it doesn't say that you should never act in anger, certainly. Anger fuels your actions. You must be angry.
H: How can you look at what's going on in the world
H,L,J: And not be angry?!?
L: But you must act with control and discipline and forbearance. You must be angry, and you must act, and you must do, you must have an aim, and that is the true essence of a Fourth Way Work. This was G's Fourth Way Work, it was called a Fourth Way Work because he had a definite aim: to help people overcome the mass hypnosis that was leading to the destruction of this earth. This day and this time is the time is the time for a new Fourth Way Work (emphatic).
J: And as Castaneda and G mentioned, it's essential to understand human nature. But encompassed within human nature is, you know, ALL of human nature, that any natures out there that are not necessarily human-like, which is obviously a reference to our psychopaths. It's essential to understand the enemy, if you're going to engage in any kind of combat, and also the idea of timing, obviously, not responding irrationally in anger, and thereby exposing yourself or setting yourself up for defeat in advance, but understanding human nature will obviously play directly into that idea of timing and how you respond and when you respond and in what way you respond.
L: Yeah, and when you look at how G describes Fourth Way Work, how he describes his own activity, and he talks about Fourth Way Work only arises in certain periods of history when there is a particular aim, and it arises surrounding that aim, a group of people have an aim, they have a goal, and this is the essence of the Fourth Way Work. Now, in G's case he tells us quite clearly what his goals were, and why the Fourth Way schools that exist today do not see the necessity for the use of the gift we have of this wonderful petty tyrant on this planet, his goals were "to investigate from all sides and to understand the exact significance and purpose of the life of man" and "to discover at all costs some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which causes them to fall easily under the influence of mass hypnosis". And that is exactly the work that we are engaged in doing. I mean, both of those goals have been our primary goals from the very beginning, and I will have to say that, in my own case, that I began with the first one that G listed, "to investigate from all sides and to understand the exact significance and purpose of the life of man", and it is only through that, and through my use of hypnosis, again very similar to G, and, possibly a psychic ability, I don't claim to be a great psychic, even if I do communicate with "myself in the future", but using that in a scientific way to access information. By doing that, I was then led, through the activities of communicating with "myself in the future" to the second goal, which is to find a way to wake human beings up, to destroy this ability of mass hypnosis to control and influence them.
J: Yeah, and we should mention that there's obviously a very direct relationship there between those two aims of G, with the inner and the outer, the first one being to understand the nature of man, obviously to understand the nature of man is, for a man or a woman to understand the nature of man, of a human being, starts with themselves. And the second aim being then, to, having understood that, or made some progress in understanding yourself or understanding other human beings, then to try and find a way to solve the problems that are very clear, and in terms of the kind of Work that you mentioned, this is the kind of Work that we are engaged in, the Work with a capital "W", the Work of overcoming the self-importance, that's exactly the same as a battle, engaging in battle, a combat with yourself, because that part of yourself that Castaneda or Don Juan calls the "predator's mind" is possessed with exactly the same or very similar types of tendencies as you'll find in an external petty tyrant. The self-interest, the pettiness, the fickleness, the essentially self-importance and self-interest within yourself is what we see in the people that are causing the problems on the planet, that are the bane of humanity. So once you engage in this Work with yourself to overcome this, and with your own internal petty tyrant then you're able to, you have the skills, you have the experience to effectively combat external petty tyrants.
H: We see in the 9/11 movement that it's precisely this internal aspect that is missing. There are a bunch of people out there who are, who have seen that there is a mass hypnosis going on, who can see the problems, but because they aren't doing the Work on themselves, the 9/11 so-called truth movement [J: They have no skills.] they have no skills, and it's rife with in-fighting, [J: um hmm] it's rife with the problems that come from self-importance.
J: It's that susceptibility to, they haven't overcome [H: Exactly] [??] of themselves, that allows them to be moved by external forces. [H: Exactly.] So as Don Juan says, they're defeated before they start.
H: So if you don't begin by rooting out these aspects of yourself, then the external forces can manifest within you through them. And that's why you have to get rid of them.
J: You're like a lamb to the slaughter in terms of your susceptibility to being conned, to being, having your self-importance, your own ego appealed to, if you haven't dealt with that, and understood it and overcome it, you're lost.
H: And we've seen this happen to [J: Everybody!] to everybody.
J: All of them involved in [H: Exactly], they're all shorn down (??) with self-importance, self-interest, of ego, and they're not serving anybody, they're not serving humanity. They're serving themselves.
L: Well, let me just liven this up a little bit, I don't know if it'll lighten it up. I received a report from one of our members on his experience with a G group, and just to give people an idea of what many of them are into, you know, claiming to be the so-called "Fourth Way", yet not seeming to necessarily have the pressing and unconquerable aims of G. So he writes to me, "I went to the "Work" camp with the local G-ians, they don't occupy themselves with the external terror of the situation, but I did get to lay stones in a parking lot, and to rip out old stones, and to do heavy work under a burning sun, which was good. I washed dishes and set tables, and all manner of things, which are good for the soul. And there is an impulse of good will towards the fellow man among these people, and this creates a shift of emotional atmosphere, which again is good. And, constant stress narrows one's range, I noticed, so I got to feel sorrow and compassion for the world, and such emotions that are normally more dissociated." And then he says, "There is an influence that can be felt; receiving creates an impulse of responsibility and a wish to give back. It is painful to sense, however, that the need for a conscious core is known by these people, but there is a falling-apart and a factionalization and a decrease of co-linearity between the leaders, and they know it themselves; there is entropy there. And it is not obvious how to help the situation if it could be helped. Some group dynamic does exist; one participant mentioned being as a member in a structure like an ice-crystal, something that was forming even in spite of our egos, [a social-memory complex according to Ra] (is this the correspondent or L's observation?), so to say, so there is something, a formation of something that comes from people that come to work together, and there could be something like that, at least transiently, but it is beyond their reach." Then he says, "It's almost embarrassing to witness that even between the senior people of this group miscommunication takes place. Sometimes it is work, sometimes it is being worked upon us. Is it through grace, or is it through merit?" And then he says, "These G-ian people talk a lot about presence and being in the body and sensing. There exists also more with thinking-oriented G-ians, but this branch is out of Mme de Salzmann's, and the late Jean-Claude Luchensky(?)." So then, he goes on, "The emphasis is a lot on the experience and sensing developing attention, internal discipline, and a sense of bringing parts together, not in the sense of beating them up. There is a subtle distinction: it is assumed that theory is known, so the groups talk about specific personal and practical experiences. There were about seventy people there, but around half of them were long-time participants of more than twenty years, all staying at this big farm, a big pretty place with lots of room for this many people. The duration was eight days. You get up at six, group meditation at seven, physical work, lunch, group movements, dinner, closing on either side of midnight with a sitting. They do not say meditation even though people sit cross-legged on cushions in silence. Sometimes there are readings from workbooks, sometimes other joint activity; there is choir practices and performances, cooking, housekeeping, swimming in the river, long days, but not cool, or driving anyone past their limits." It certainly doesn't sound like it's going to do anything like what happened to G himself, or what happened to any of the seers of the Conquest, or what we could all accomplish if we make proper use of our current league of petty tyrants.
J: To finish up for this week I'd like to get back to something L mentioned last week, which was the date of G's experience on the edge of the Gobi desert, and then his experience some thirty years later when he was writing, "Life is Real". The date, November 6th, is also significant for him because, in 1927, it was the day that he finished writing his first draft of "All and Everything". And in the book, "The Struggle of the Magicians", William Patterson writes, "After three years of writing G completes the first draft of 'All and Everything', only to then realize, that for anyone not personally associated with him, the book will be unintelligible. 'All and Everything' is his logonomism (?? in Beelzebub somewhere), to be understood and actualized in a future time, that is, his last means of completing his mission, and it is unreadable. The shock of all the intentional effort he has made since his auto accident, which happened in 1924, the thought of now having to rewrite the whole book, suddenly strips him of the one thing that has never failed him: self-remembering. G no longer has the full sensing of the whole of himself. There is nothing to do but to begin again. But his health is bad, he has this foreboding that time is running out. He wrestles with the idea of suicide. G finds himself at what is conceivably the lowest point of his life. Finally freeing himself from these dark thoughts, he decides to begin the rewriting of 'All and Everything'. This is an important day in other respects. Orage and Jesse Dwight are" Orage was one of G's main pupils and someone G had worked with very very closely and had put in charge of the work in the United States. He says, "This is an important day in other respects. Orage and Jesse Dwight are in England for his divorce proceedings from his wife, Jeanne Walker. On this day, his divorce becomes final. Orage has promised G that once the divorce is final he would come to the Prieuré in France. Instead, Orage sends G a wire saying that he and Jesse were sailing back to New York. It's a crucial moment in Orage's life, and a definite fork in the road, for he has allowed Jesse to influence him to break his word to his teacher." Another point that Patterson makes in the book is the difference between Ouspensky and G, an important difference. When the second world war broke out, Ouspensky immediately left and moved to the safety of a farm that was provided for him in New Jersey, in the United States, and in doing so, he left about a thousand students alone to face the consequences of the war in England. And Patterson says that G, when he left Russia, whenever he moved, he brought all the students with him who wanted to come, and he took responsibility for them: feeding, clothing, housing them, and this says something very, very important about G, and about his aim.
H: All that, what it says to me, is that G's life was a pretty difficult one as we mentioned, he was led by this inner desire to know and to understand deeper truths led him into situations that were very difficult, which, in turn, crystallized in him this understanding about the nature of life, it's no walk in the park, and then how to do something about it, which in turn led him to this inner Work, and then to trying to understand how he could, essentially, convey this to humanity. He talked about this mass hypnosis, and this is a fairly innocuous term, but this mass hypnosis, I mean, we can read into it, that G understood that this wasn't a benevolent hypnosis. This was a situation where the masses of humanity were being deceived and hypnotized onto their own destruction. The only real logical explanation as to why G was driven to embark on in later life his efforts to convey this understanding, and this Work, and this understanding of human nature, and the problems of human nature and the problems of life to as many people as possible, and to establish this school in France and in America. And this was an impossible task, to try to convey this to ordinary people. He certainly understood that, but he embarked on it anyway, because he must have seen something extremely negative about the nature of life on Earth and the nature of humanity and where it's heading, and its future. He talks about, a little bit about the future, and about a specific point in time when a need will arise, and that a group of people need to be formed, to cater to this need that will arise. All of it conveys to me the extreme seriousness of what G understood about life.
J: One of the ways to form yourself comes in how you look at suffering. If there's one thing that's clear, in this brief recap that we've given of G's life, it's that he went through a tremendous amount of suffering, and that he saw a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. And back on the 6th of November, 1927, when Orage didn't go to the Prieuré, and he took the decision to return with his young wife to New York, G wrote him a letter. The subject of the letter was, "Suffering", and he explained in the letter the difference between voluntary suffering and intentional suffering. "There is suffering, and you will not be able to avoid suffering, but you need to be able to understand is that you can choose your suffering, and by choosing this suffering, you then begin to build that body inside that will align you with Truth. And the choice is up to you.
H: Well, we hope that answers some of our forum members, our readers' questions, and as we've already mentioned, if there are any further questions, or topics that you want us to discuss, then try and be a bit more specific, perhaps? People have specific interests...but other than that, we're going to leave it there, and we will see you next week.
