On another day -- in 1936, I think -- we were all lunching with Gurdjieff in his Paris flat. I had been feeling hopeless about ever being strong enough to do the inner work that he demanded.
He had asked one of the pupils to give up smoking for a while and to turn her longing for a cigarette into what he called an 'intentional contact' between the ordinary world and a higher world. I felt that his words were especially offered to meet my need, and I quote them -- with slight paraphrasings to make his meaning clear:
Gurdjieff said:
'I will tell you one thing that will make you rich for life. There are two struggles -- an Inner-world struggle and an Outer-world struggle. But these two worlds can never make contact with each other, to make data for Third World; even God cannot give the possibility for contact between Inner-world and Outer-world struggle; neither can your heredity give it.
'Only one thing can give it: you must make an intentional contact between the two worlds; then you can make data which crystallize for the Third World of man, called by the ancients the World of the Soul.
'I can give you a small example which will perhaps give you the "taste" of this intentional contact. You, for example, when you give up cigarettes. You have an Outer-world struggle (not to buy, not to take, but remember always to break habit); and you have an Inner-world struggle (you imagine how it was when you could smoke -- you imagine it in a different way, more keen, and with more longing); and it will seem (with this Inner-world imagining) even more desirable than it had ever been. You will have made this cigarette an Intentional Contact between the two struggles, and even by this small effort you will have made data for the Third World.
'This can be a thing for power. I will tell you one very important thing to say, each time when the longing to smoke comes. You say it the first time, and maybe notice nothing. You say it a second time, and maybe nothing. Say it a third time, and perhaps something will happen. Say: "I wish the result of this suffering to become my own, for Being". Yes, you can call that kind of wishing suffering, because it is suffering.
'This saying can maybe take force from your animal and give it to Being. And you can do this for many things -- for any denial of something that is a slavery. A force such as this has special results, special emanations.
'Man is man -- he can never be another thing. But he can make his body work for another part of him -- his mind. If it is easy to subdue the body, then the exercise is no good. If the body will lie down at once, nothing happens. The greater weakness the body has, the more labour it does, the more it can give to the mind, and to Being.
Oh yes, say the Christians, this is exactly what we do. We resist temptation, we renounce, we become better human beings.
This is not true.
It is true that they often do renounce, or try to renounce, or think that they have renounced. Then they forget that they have renounced, they feel remorseful, and they begin all over again to renounce. In every case they remain exactly the same kind of people they were in the beginning. The only results they achieve are that, at intervals, they behave more kindly towards other people; or they become more intolerant and cruel towards them (the stake for dissenters).
Some people become fanatical renouncers. And, since the exercise of will (so-called) produces strength in anyone, they sometimes become very strong people -- strong enough to make a great impact upon others; strong enough to kill them.
All this will and effort is haphazard, none of it has any relation to a conscious self-directed activity for a conscious aim. The Gurdjieff technique for this development is a unique activity, and it has not been presented in any literature, science or teaching in the way it was presented by him.
The great science of transformation -- the birth of the soul, that conscious 'second birth' which parallels automatic (physical) birth and for which Gurdjieff had such a marvellous phrase: 'the arising of the presence of man' ... this transformation demands years of study and practice for its incorporation. 'Past joys', he said, 'are as useless to man in the present as the snows of last year which leave no trace by which one can remember what they were. Only the imprints of conscious labour and intentional suffering are Real, and can be used for obtaining good.'
This good comes to you step by step, in great 'discoveries' -- for instance, like the one that teaches you why anger is so often an expression of self-love. I shall never forget the day when I first 'learned' this truth. I had spent a week of frenzied anger and rebellion over everything Gurdjieff was asking me to do. The conscious labour was too difficult, the voluntary suffering too unendurable, too impossible, too unreasonable. And then, in one lighted moment, I had a picture of myself, my state, and its cause. I rushed to the rue des Colonels Renard and said, 'Mr. Gurdjieff, I see now that it was because of my vanity and self-love that I was so angry.'
He didn't speak for a moment, then he smiled at me. 'You not know?' he said.
'No,' I said, 'I hadn't the faintest idea.'
Never, never, shall I forget the way he smiled, or the intonation he put into those three words. Never shall I fail to remember them as I watch myself making other discoveries that will take me as long a time; and never shall I fail to find comfort in six other words of his: 'He who goes slow goes far.' [...]
When you have finally grasped the meaning of transformation and realized how false your picture of yourself has been, when you have discovered the kind of person you really are, and heard (as Maurice Nicoll says) the little song you've been singing all your life... this is the moment when you can say that you've begun at the beginning. You will never be entirely your old self again -- that is, you will know forever that that is what you were, and are, and will be over and over, but with this difference: the hair's-breadth difference that you now know it, and can never forget it, and therefore you will stop short of feeling, or showing, the intolerance you have always felt; you will begin to behave towards others as you would like them to behave towards you -- the difference being that you will now know how they want you to behave, and you will know how to help them behave well towards you. You will see that you are they and they are you, and that if everyone could experience this searing revelation the idea of war would never have arisen.
