A la votre Monsieur Gurdjieff !

"Only he is not a nothing who has understood his nothingness and has worked on himself to change it."

"It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the "I Am", our real presence, can awaken."

Storing energy, negative emotions - Ouspensky

Q. Can energy be stored ?

A. Yes, energy can be stored when you are able to store it. But at first the question is not about storing but about not wasting. We would have enough energy for everything we want to do if we did not waste it on unnecessary things. For instance, the reason why we are so formatory is that we are too dull, we do not feel enough. We think we feel, but this is an illusion. And the reason why we feel so little is because we have no energy available for the emotional centre.
Leaks of energy were already spoken about, but the worst of all is expressing negative emotions. If you can stop the expression of negative emotions, you will save energy and never feel the lack of it.
We can only hope to become conscious beings if we use in the right way the energy that is now used in the wrong way. The machine can produce enough energy, but you can waste it on being angry or irritated or something like that, and then very little remains. The normal organism produces quite enough energy not only for all centres but also for storing. Production is all right, but expenditure is wrong. These leaks have to be studied, because with some kinds of leaks it is not worth going on until they are stopped, for the more one accumulates energy, the more will leak out. It would be like pouring water into a sieve. Certain negative emotions produce precisely such leaks. In certain situations some people go through a whole range of negative emotions so habitual that they do not even notice them. It may occupy only five minutes or five seconds, but it may be sufficient to spend all the energy their organism produced for twenty-four hours.
I want particularly to draw your attention to this idea of negative emotion and the state of negative emotion. This is really the second important point; the first referred to consciousness-that we are not conscious and that we can become conscious. It is necessary to realize that there is not a single useful negative emotion, useful in any sense. Negative emotions are all a sign of weakness. Next, we must realize that we can struggle with them; they can be conquered and destroyed, because there is no real centre for them. If they had a real centre, like instictive emotions, there would be no chance; we would remain for ever in the power of negative emotions. So it is lucky for us that they have no real centre; it is an artificial centre that works, and this artificial centre can be abolished. When this is done, we will feel much better for it. Even the realization that it is possible is very much, but we have many convictions, prejudices and even 'principles' about negative emotions, so it is very difficult to get rid of the idea that they are necessary. Try to think about it, and if you have any questions I will answer them.

Ouspensky in "The Fourth Way"

Meister Eckhart "It is not necessary to understand this"

Beati pauperes spiritu

Blessedness opened its mouth of wisdom and spoke: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Every angel and every saint and everything that was ever born must remain silent when the wisdom of the Father speaks; for all the wisdom of the angels and of all creatures is sheer nothingness before the groundless wisdom of God. And this wisdom has declared that the poor are blessed.

Now there exist two kinds of poverty: an external poverty, which is good and is praiseworthy in a person willing to take it upon himself or herself through the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he was himself poor on earth. Of this poverty I do not want to speak any further. For there is still another kind of poverty, an inner poverty, by which our Lord's word is to be understood when he says : "Blessed are the poor in spirit."

Now I beg you to be such poor to understand this speech. For I tell you by the eternal truth, if you are not equal to this truth of which we now want to speak, then you cannot understand me.

Various people have questioned me about what poverty is in itself and what a poor person is. That is what we want to answer. Bishop Albrecht says that a poor person is one who takes no satisfaction in any of the things that God ever created-and that is well said. But we say it better still and take poverty in a yet higher understanding: he is a poor person who wills nothing and knows nothing and has nothing. Of these three points we are going to speak and I beseech you for the love of God that you understand this truth if you can. But if you do not understand it, do not worry yourselves because of it, for the truth I want to talk about is of such a kind that only a few good people will understand it.

First, we say that one is a poor person who wills nothing. What this means, many people do not correctly understand. These are the people who in penitential exercise and external practices, of which they make a great deal, cling to their selfish I. The Lord have pity upon such people who know so little of the divine truth! Such people are called holy on account of external appearance, but inwardly they are asses, for they do not grasp the real meaning of divine truth. Indeed, these individuals too say that one is a poor person who wills nothing. However, they interpret this to mean that one should so live as to never fulfill one's own will in any way, but rather strive to fulfill the ever-beloved will of God. These people are right in their way, for their intention is good and for that we want to praise them. May God in his mercy grant them the kingdom of heaven. But in all divine truth, I say that these people are not poor people, nor do they resemble poor people. They are highly considered only in the eyes of those who know no better. I, however, say that they are asses who understand nothing of divine truth. Because of their good intentions, they may receive the kingdom of heaven. But of that poverty of which I now want to speak, they know nothing.

These days, if someone asks me what a poor person is who wills nothing, I answer and say: So long as a person has his own wish in him to fulfill even the ever-beloved will of God, if that is still a matter of his will, then this person does not yet possess the poverty of which we want to speak. Indeed, this person then still has a will with which he or she wants to satisfy God's will, and that is not the right poverty. For a human being to possess true poverty, he or she must be as free of his or her created will as they were when they did not yet exist. Thus I say to you in the name of divine truth, as long as you have the will, even the will to fulfill God's will, and as long as you have the desire for eternity and for God, to this very extent you are not properly poor, for the only one who is a poor person is one who wills nothing and desires nothing.

When I still stood in my first cause, there I had no God and was cause of myself. There I willed nothing, I desired nothing, for I was a pure being and a knower of myself in delight of the truth. There I willed myself and nothing else. What I willed, that I was; and what I was, that I willed. There I stood, free of God and of all things. But when I took leave from this state of free will and received my created being, then I had a God. Indeed, before creatures were, God was not yet "God"; rather, he was what he was. But when creatures came to be and when they received their created being, then God was no longer "God" in himself; rather, he was "God" in the creatures.

Now we say that God, insofar as he is "God," is not a perfect goal for creatures. Indeed, even the lowliest creature in God possesses as high a rank. And if a fly possessed reason and could consciously seek the eternal abyss of divine being out of which it has come, then we would say that God, with all he is as God, would still be incapable of fulfilling and satisfying this fly. Therefore we pray God to rid us of "God" so that we may grasp and eternally enjoy the truth where the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal. There is where I stood and willed what I was, and I was what I willed. So then we say, if people are to be poor in will, they must will and desire as little as they willed and desired when they were not yet. And in this way is a person poor who wills nothing.

Second, a poor person is one who knows nothing. We have said on other occasions that a person should live a life neither for himself, nor for the truth, nor for God. But now we say it differently and want to go further and say: Whoever achieves this poverty must so live that they not even know themselves to live, either for oneself or for truth or for God. One must be so free of all knowledge that he or she does not know or recognize or perceive that God lives in him or her; even more, one should be free of all knowledge that lives in him or her. For, when people still stood in God's eternal being, nothing else lived in them. What lived there was themselves. Hence we say that people should be as free of their own knowledge as when they were not yet, letting God accomplish whatever God wills. People should stand empty. Everything that ever came out of God once stood in pure activity. But the activity proper to people is to love and to know. It is a moot question, though, in which of these happiness primarily consists. Some authorities have said that it lies in knowing, some say it lies in loving, still others say that it lies in knowing and in loving. These are closer to the truth. We say, however, that it lies neither in knowing nor in loving. Rather, there is a something in the soul from which knowing and loving flow. It does not itself know and love as do the forces of the soul. Whoever comes to know this something knows what happiness consists in. It has neither before nor after, and it is in need of nothing additional, for it can neither gain nor lose. For this very reason it is deprived of understanding that God is acting within it. Moreover, it is that identical self which enjoys itself just as God does. Thus we say that people shall keep themselves free and void so that they neither understand nor know that God works in them. Only thus can people possess poverty. The masters say that God is a being, an intelligent being, and that he knows all things. We say, however: God is neither being nor intelligent nor does he know this or that. Thus God is free of all things, and therefore he is all things. Whoever is to be poor in spirit, then, must be poor of all his own understanding so that he knows nothing about God or creatures or himself. Therefore it is necessary that people desire not to understand or know anything at all of the works of God. In this way is a person able to be poor of one's own understanding.

Third, one is a poor person who has nothing. Many people have said that perfection consists in people possessing none of the material things of the earth. And indeed, that is certainly true in one sense: when one holds to it intentionally. But this is not the sense that I mean.

I have said before that one is a poor person who does not even will to fulfill God's will, that is, who so lives that he or she is empty both of his own will and of God's will, just as they were when they were not yet. About this poverty we say that it is the highest poverty . Second, we have said one is a poor person who himself understands nothing of God's activity in him or her. When one stands as free of understanding and knowing [as God stands void of all things], then that is the purest poverty. But the third kind of poverty of which we are now going to speak is the most difficult: that people have nothing.

Now give me your undivided attention. I have often said, and great masters say this too: people must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or outward, that they can become a proper home for God, wherein God may operate. But now we say it differently. If people stand free of all things, of all creatures, of God and of themselves, but if it still happens that God can find a place for acting in them, then we say: So long as that is so, these persons are not poor in the strictest poverty. For God does not desire that people reserve a place for him to work in. Rather, true poverty of spirit consists in keeping oneself so free of God and of all one's works that if God wants to act in the soul, God himself becomes the place wherein he wants to act-and this God likes to do. For when God finds a person as poor as this, God operates his own work and a person sustains God in him, and God is himself the place of his operation, since God is an agent who acts within himself. Here, in this poverty, people attain the eternal being that they once were, now are, and will eternally remain.

There is a saying of Saint Paul's which reads: "But by the grace of God I am what I am" (I Co. 15:10). My own saying, in contrast, seems to hold itself above grace and above being and above knowing and above willing and above desiring. How then can Saint Paul's word be true? To this one must respond that Saint Paul's words are true. God's grace was necessarily in him, and the grace of God accomplished in him the growth from accidental into essential being. When grace finished and had completed its work, Paul remained what he was.

Thus we say that a person must be so poor that he or she is no place and has no place wherein God could act. Where people still preserve some place in themselves, they preserve distinction. This is why I pray God to rid me of God; for my essential being is above God insofar as we consider God as the origin of creatures, indeed, in God's own being, where God is raised above all being and all distinctions, there I was myself, there I willed myself, and I knew myself to create this person that I am. Therefore I am cause of myself according to my being, which is eternal, but not according to my becoming, which is temporal. Therefore also I am unborn, and following the way of my unborn being I can never die. Following the way of my unborn being I have always been, I am now, and shall remain eternally. What I am by my [temporal] birth is destined to die and be annihilated, for it is mortal; therefore it must with time pass away. In my [eternal] birth all things were born, and I was cause of myself and of all things. If I had willed it, neither I nor any things would have come to be. And if I myself were not, God would not be either. That God is "God," of this I am the cause. If I were not, God would not be "God." It is not necessary, however, to understand this.

A great master says that his breakthrough is nobler than his flowing out, and this is true. When I flowed out from God, all things spoke: God is. But this cannot make me happy, for it makes me understand that I am a creature. In the breakthrough, on the other hand, where I stand free of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse which shall bring me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive wealth so vast that God cannot be enough for me in all that makes him God, and with all his divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for there I am an immovable cause that moves all things. Here, then, God finds no place in people, for people achieve with this poverty what they were in eternity and will remain forever. Here God is one with the spirit, and that is the strictest poverty one can find.

If anyone cannot understand this discourse, let them not trouble their hearts about it. For, as long as people do not equal this truth, they will not understand this speech. For this is an unveiled truth that has come immediately from the heart of God. That we may so live as to experience it eternally, so help us God. Amen.

Being a sly man (or a sly woman of course)

The sly man is not a cunning man. He doesn’t deceive others. Being a sly man is not being a little smart ass.

The sly man knows that work on oneself is work on himself, not on others. The sly man knows that it is pointless and fruitless to try to correct others. The sly man only corrects himself.

The sly man doesn’t judge others’s negative attitudes or behaviours. The sly man knows through work on himself that he is filled as much as others with negative attitudes or behaviours, sometimes even worse than others.

The sly man doesn’t criticize others’s opinions, philosophy or religion.

The sly man knows that all philosophy or religion bear some truth worthy of attention.

The sly man doesn’t show off with his knowledge. He knows that he doesn’t know anything.

The sly man is seeking the Truth. He’s not trying to know the “truth” of the “behind the scenes” of the political or social games, about which he couldn’t care less.

The sly man knows he is going to die. He reminds himself constantly about it, so he doesn’t forget.

The sly man knows that he is not going to “save the world”.

The sly man strives to achieve peace, harmony and freedom within so that he can share peace, harmony and freedom with others.

In Silence...

Forgotten Wisdom

If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have,
the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have,
the less secure people will be.
The more subsidies you have,
the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:
I let go of the law,
and people become honest.
I let go of economics,
and people become prosperous.
I let go of religion,
and people become serene.
I let go of all desire for the common good,
and the good becomes common as grass.

Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching 57

Master Han Shan

True Dharma seekers who live in the world use their daily activity as a polishing tool. Outwardly they may appear to be very busy, like flint striking steel, making sparks everywhere. But inwardly they silently grow. For although they may be working very hard, they are working for the sake of the work and not for the profits it will bring them. Unattached to the results of their labor, they transcend the frenetic to reach the Way's essential tranquillity. Doesn't a rough and tumbling stream also sparkle like striking flints - while it polishes into smoothness every stone in its path?

Han Shan

Sly Man's Wisdom

Never forget that any stick has two ends.
The devil can lead you to Paradise, and God, directly to Hell.

Gurdjieff

A born seeker by Henri Tracol

Man is a born seeker.
Equiped as he is by nature for vibrating to a vast range of impressions, is he not predestined to an endless wondering?  Bound by necessity to select from these impressions those suitable for conscious assimilation– and thereby to approach a genuine perception of his own identity– is he not singled out for continuous self-interrogation?
Such is his true vocation, his birthright.  He may forget it, deny it, bury it in the depths of his unconscious being; he may go astray, misuse this hidden gift and increase his own alienation from reality; he may even try to convince himself that he has reached, once and for all, the shores of eternal Truth.  No matter; this secret call is still alive, promting him from within to try, and to try increasingly, to realize the significance of his presence here on earth.  For he is here to awake, to remember and to search, again and still again.
Search for what? it could be asked.  Surely there must be a definitie aim, a purpose, a mark to be hit in due course.  Have we not been warned only too often by modern scientists that “if you don’t know what you are looking for, you will never know what you actually will find”?  According to their view, mathematical predictability must always prevail over the fertile challenge of uncertainty.  And none of them will listen if you venture to remark that to “know” beforehand inevitably means that you will never “find” anything.  Indeed there is no escape from the old bugbear of “whatness” unless we remember Scotus Erigena’s distum, “God does not know what He is, because He is not any ‘what’.”
This cannot but remind me of my last meeting with an aging friend who was about to undertake what he sensed would be his last journey to sacred places and wise men of the East.
Bidding him good-bye, I said, “I hope you will find what you are seeking.”  He replied with a peaceful smile, “Since I am really searching for nothing, maybe I shall find it.”
Let us get rid at once of a possible misunderstanding and clearly state that no real knowledge can ever be attained by mere chance.  There is such fascination in the shifting lure of existence that it draws our interest away from the immediate perception of the essential.  Letting oneself drift into persuasive “visions” and “discoveries”, no “search for the sake of searching,” is merely to indulge in daydreaming–a form of self-tyranny very much at variance with man’s objective needs.
Then how is one set about an authentic quest?  Instead of surrendering at once to the call of any particular “way”, one should first try with humility to discern some of the requisites for setting off on the right foot.
Is it not the first essential an act of recognition–recognition of the utter necessity of search itself, its priority, its urgency for him who aspires to awake and assume as fully as possible his inner and outer existence?
Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings and actions.  In that moment, he realizes–and this is the shadow side of recognition–how deeply ignorant he is of himself, how helplessly at the mercy of any suggestion that happens to act upon him at a given moment.
He may also awake–if only for a flash–to the light of a higher consciousness, which will grant him a glimpse of the world of hidden potentialities to which he essentially belongs, help him transcend his own limitations, and open the way to inner transformation.

Henri Tracol

Be "yourself"

There is a saying that is used frequently these days by spiritual teachers belonging to different traditions, or at least claiming their filiation to a spiritual tradition or another. It seems to be a kind of new “sesame” to help one to reach total freedom. This saying is : “Be yourself”. In a world where individualism (even though the term is highly misunderstood) in the form of the fulfillment of the individual has become the ultimate social achievement, it is no wonder that presenting the spiritual path as just being “oneself” is magnetically appealing. But is it really what true and genuine spirituality has to offer ?

All the spiritual teachings from different traditions, begin their teaching by informing us that in some way, there is something “wrong” within ourselves that is the main cause of our suffering. And they all agree with their own words that this cause is what is commonly known today as our ego or personality or “me”; in short : “oneself”. This “oneself”, this “me”, is exactly what one has to work on if one wants to realize who or what one really is and get rid of one’s suffering. In this light, it seems that the “be yourself” advice can lead to a huge confusion and misunderstandings about the actual spiritual path and consequently bring even more suffering. Even tough following a genuine spiritual path will lead one to be oneself ! (There is no spirituality without paradox)

Before being oneself, one needs to sort out what really is this oneself one takes for granted. Is “oneself" this collection of contradictory opinions, full of pretence, self-conceit, self-satisfaction, that gets upset over nothing and is always up to judge, to criticize and to give opinions about all and everything when in actuality one has no idea about what one is saying and is just repeating like a parrot what one heard or read somewhere and that was fitting with the mood of the moment ? Is this really “myself” ? Well if this is the case, what a piece of crap !