Inquorate - no one is offended by such discussion. Nor should anyone stop learning, far from it.
Private messages are not recommended, for everyone's protection.
Forum Personal Messages and Predators
As with all things we invest huge amounts of emotional energy and time into (that become our identity), when we discover that they are not helpful to the Work we tend to run screaming into the night.
Perhaps take a moment to consider how Ark feels?
A physicist of great intelligence who has chosen not to develop many of his theories and interests because of the world we live in. To paraphrase, he chose this because all of his research could be twisted, weaponised or generally used to suppress humanity. Take the devastation you feel, and imagine how much worse it was for him after a life time deeply studying his passion.
Can you see it is not just you that has felt this?
These things are Not being pointed out to hurt you or anyone else (although you undoubtedly Feel hurt by the idea), but to give you the knowledge to not walk into a trap/danger.
"Hey Budy, did you know you're walking in a mine field and could be blown up?" - that's it.
Such moments of devastation are perfect fuel for growth and Work on the self.
http://www.positivedisintegration.com/
Suffering, aloneness, self-doubt, sadness, inner conflict; these are our feelings that we have not learned to live with, that we have failed to appreciate, that we reject as destructive and completely negative, but in fact they are symptoms of an expanding consciousness. Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski has spent 45 years piecing together the complete picture of the growth of the human psyche from primitive integration at birth; the person with potential for development will experience growth as a loosening of the stable psychic structure accompanied by symptoms of psychoneuroses. Reality becomes multileveled, the choices between higher and lower realms of behavior occupy our thought and mark us as human. Dabrowski called this process positive disintegration, he declares that psychoneurosis is not an illness and he insists that development does not come through psychotherapy but that psychotherapy is automatic when the person is conscious of his development.
To Dabrowski, real therapy is autopsychotherapy; it is the self being aware of the self through a long inner investigation; a mapping of the inner environment. There are no techniques to eliminate symptoms because the symptoms constitute the very psychic richness from which grow an increasing awareness of body, mind, humanity and cosmos. Dabrowski gives birth to that process if he can.
Without intense and painful introspection and reflection, development is unlikely. Psychoneurotic symptoms should be embraced and transformed into anxieties about human problems of an ever higher order. If psychoneuroses continue to be classified as mental illness, then perhaps it is a sickness better than health.
“Without passing through very difficult experiences and even something like psychoneurosis and neurosis we cannot understand human beings and we cannot realize our multidimensional and multilevel development toward higher and higher levels.” Dabrowski.
If you came here with the desire to help humanity, no one is asking you to give that up.
Did Ark give up, or did he find other ways to use his skills to help humanity?
http://thecasswiki.net/index.php?title=Aim
In order to make progress in the Work, one must have an aim. Without aim, there is no consistent struggle and one is more or less adrift in the sea of A influences which simply make one run in circles.
The difficulty with the concept of aim is that one cannot know the precise path which one has not traveled. People may see flashes of something but they do not have a realistic assessment of the distance to travel. Thus, setting a too specific initial aim is silly and unrealistic. The aim will change as the goal and territory become better understood.
People have different motives for undertaking the Work. Some may wish knowledge, others to help the world, some to be master over themselves. In George Gurdjieff's words, only mastery over the self is a reasonable goal, since any other goals may only be reached through this first one. One may begin with the goal of "reaching enlightenment" and soon find that this must be scaled down to something much more immediate and attainable, such as remembering oneself at least once per day. One can have specific goals only for that which is at least in theory within reach.
Making specific checklists on what is or is not an acceptable learning experience or lesson of life is presumptuous and fruitless and actually goes counter to the goal of learning. Choosing a general direction is however necessary. This general direction can be described in terms of the service to others vs. service to self duality, of objectivity vs. forcing one's subjectivity onto the world, of wakefulness vs. waking sleep and so forth. Such basic values can provide a framework for placing the intrinsically unpredictable and unanticipatable events of a spiritual path in context.
