Depends on the amount of energy available. Keeping energy levels high is mandatory for good moods, though it's mostly natural for me anyway. There's still a bunch to discover and do on this adventure!
Sure is
“Unless”, said Mr. Ouspansky, in so many words, “Man believes in Greater Mind, he is useless for the Work. To believe in Greater Mind is to have a positive idea-and without positive ideas no one can develop. A man who think he is isolated, independent, that he knows and that he can do with his limited finite mind, with all its ignorance, starts from active Do, and then describes octave and so perishes. History is full of such examples. To think one can do is to start from a negative idea. To realize one cannot do and to study how to do and what is necessary is to start from a passive Do- that is, to begin an ascending octave.”
You might very well think that the idea that you can do-can, for instance, reform the world change other people, and so on- is a positive idea. On the contrary, it is a negative idea. It is as negative and idea as if you were to think that you could, without any very special knowledge, operate on a man’s brain. In this Work, people who think they can “do” are called Lunatics. Mr. Ouspensky once asked Mr. Gurdjieff what a man has to do to assimilate his teachings:
“What to do?” asked Mr. Gurdjieff, as though surprised. “It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has a thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.”
“How can we get rid of false ideas?” Mr. Ouspensky asked. “We depend on the forms of our perception. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception.”
Mr. Gurdjieff shook his head. “Again you speak of something different,” he said. “You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am nit speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions Man can be more or less deluded. As I have said before, man’s chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do and the first question all people ask is what are they to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befall a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him—all this happens in exactly that same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature of the atmosphere, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind. Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels—all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, cannot invent anything. It all happens.”-- Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Volume 3
By Maurice Nicoll
