(L) {Addressing Cs} You have already said that all souls exist from the beginning, and that souls are not created as we go along through time. We asked about that some time ago when we were asking about Messages from Michael and so forth. And you've also talked about instances of large soul groups such as organic portals or whatever - group souls, souls of animals, and so on and so forth.
So basically, we already have kind of a system here that you have given that is quite different from what Gurdjieff proposed, which was that people had to GROW a soul. It was like something that if you didn't have it, when you died, you died. And if you were only partly crystallized, well then a certain number of days after you died, that you would be kind of like floating in some atmospheric area and then even that part of you would die. That's kind of what I got from reading this book. And I think that was partly from some of the ancient traditions, actually.
(Joe) That's what the Cs have said about kind of a "pool".
(L) Well, going into a pool is one thing – there is still soul involved even if it is a fragment of a larger soul - but here
Gurdjieff had the idea that there is no such thing as soul as we conceive it; a soul had to be “grown” or crystallized in a given lifetime and even then, it was material.
(Mikey) Which parts of Gurdjieff's teachings are still most useful to read?
A: Psychology, up to a point. [...]
Q: (Chu) What was Gurdjieff trying to achieve?
A: His own salvation and immortal life.
Q: (Joe) And was he successful?
A: Not by his terms. He was actually rather surprised!
Q: (Pierre) Was the surprise that after dying, he...
(Joe) That he got a lot wrong, yeah.
A: Yes [...]
(Joe) I wonder...
His own fixation on materialism and seeing the material universe as the be-all and end-all ... I mean, it kinda reflected in his approach to life. You talked about Idiots in Paris and the way he ate and how he abused himself with food and alcohol and bad living habits basically and probably caused himself an early death. The descriptions of the feasts he used to have were extreme, just eat and eat and eat...
(L) And that was contradictory to his whole thing: that you've got to learn about your machine in order to take care of it properly in order to preserve your life long enough in order to be able to have time enough to figure things out and to work on yourself.
(Joe) But how did he not see the negative health effects that he had from how he was eating?
(Pierre) In his mind, he was above it. (He thought he was crystallized and could do what he pleased.)