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Die in the Streets
Michael Kell, M.D., Ph. D.,
interviewed William Patrick
Patterson on his weekly radio show
Mind, Body, Senses over
VoiceAmerica: Health, Wellness
Network. Here are extracts.
Michael John Kell: Today we’re going to be talking to William Patterson, a
longtime student of Lord Pentland, who was a student of Gurdjieff and
Ouspensky. And we’ll be talking about his new book, Spiritual Survival in a
Radically Changing WorldTime, The Fourth Way and Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff didn’t
write that much, but his students really did.
William Patrick Patterson: Well, he wrote All and Everything, three series of
books. The first book is 1,248 pages, so that’s fairly long. But what we need to
understand with Mr. Gurdjieff, I think, is that at a very early age he came to what
he called “a complete sensation of myself.” In other words, Being. And he looked
around and he saw all the suffering, all the misery, and violence. And the
question dawned on him—“What is the sense and significance of life on Earth
and human life in particular?” He felt that the ancient wisdom societies
understood this question and had the answer. And that was the reason he went
to Egypt. He said he was initiated four times into the Egyptian mysteries. And he
recognized that there was, as he said, “a Christianity before Christ.” And it is this
that Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teaching is based upon—the ancient prehistoric
Egyptian religion, which was the religion of Being.
Now over time elements of that teaching spread northward, so Gurdjieff
made a second journey into the Hindu Kush and Tibet and gathered various
elements and reformulated them into the teaching he called The Fourth Way.
MJK: I am curious about the references to esoteric Christianity, “a
Christianity before Christ.” Did people ever press him harder about this, force
him to be more explanatory?
WPP: No, no one did. But the basis of the Work is that we’re not here,
consciously, though we think we are. We’re mechanical and we don’t realize this.
MJK: Gurdjieff was really saying you have to get yourself into the physical
world, so you know you’re in your body, know what you are doing right now.
WPP: That’s right.
MJK: Now it may be automatic or it may not but it’s really like entered
into physicality.
WPP: But the question is how to we get there? We get there through
attention. So where is our attention normally located? It’s located in the head
brain. We’re always talking to ourselves about ourselves, futureizing or
dwelling on the past. If we can redirect the attention down into the body and
then breathe into that and sustain it, then the body will start to come alive. We’ll
be embodied. We’ll have an anchor in physical reality.
Otherwise we’re just a thought, a feeling, an impulse and those are all
changing. So once we’re anchored in physical reality then we can observe what is
actually going on. This is called selfobservation in the Work. I divide my
attention between the inside and the outside (usually the attention is either all
outside or I’m all inside). So this takes an act of will, and it opens us to a new
level of consciousness. And then I begin to observe my reactions. Usually they
are not in accord with my selfimage.
MJK: I know I don’t need to tell you about Buddhism, but I’m fond of
some of the Buddha’s sayings. He had the habit of not answering questions
unless forced. People claimed he didn’t answer, but he actually did answer; they
just didn’t understand the answer. Like the statement that the world neither
exists nor does not exist, it’s both at the same time. People thought he was
talking nonsense.
WPP: The Buddha also said that emptiness is form and form is emptiness.
Now what perceives that? That’s the third thing, which is what is usually
missing. You know, I feel empty or there’s all form, and so the idea of emptiness
as form and form as emptiness I understand on a psychological level. But the
next level is the consciousness of emptiness is form, consciousness of form is
emptiness. And that takes a relatively silent mind that is disabused with my
personal story.
MJK: Gurdjieff used to make the distinction between physical suffering
and unnecessary psychological suffering. It can actually become a place of
objective reasoning if one is aware. In a sense I guess we could say at least one
meaning is to finally see the world as clearly as it can be seen by a human being,
which means it is not going to be exactly the same for everyone, but it’s the
clearest we can do.
WPP: But we have to realize…
MJK: …instant perception?
WPP: …reason is anchored in the awareness of the body. So the talking to
myself stops and I go beyond what Gurdjieff calls the “formatory apparatus”
into the silence of Mind. There what the Buddha is saying makes perfect sense
because you’re experiencing it as you perceive it.
Now, just to go back a minute to the teaching that Gurdjieff brought, he
said its origin was “prehistoric Egypt.” Therefore it is before Christianity,
Buddhism and Islam. There are certain correlations between Buddhism and the
Gurdjieff teaching. But Gurdjieffians would say that Buddhism was simply
taking elements of what was originally The Fourth Way. But whether that’s true
or not, the aim in Buddhism is for what Tibetans call the “mere I” to realize itself
as shunyata, full solid emptiness. Whereas in the Gurdjieff Work the aim is to
become an individual, a sacred individual. So those are two different
orientations.
MJK: From my perspective I think that the Buddhists had misinterpreted
what the Buddha said because it was added to. Adding always makes it more
complicated and things are never complicated in nature. Emptiness is not the
emptiness that people think of.
WPP: That’s right.
MJK: Emptiness is not a psychological concept.
WPP: Emptiness is not alienation, right? That’s a psychological experience.
MJK: Right. It seems to me that the truth of the matter is there is the
physical world and mind uses the physical brain, but mind is not something in
itself, it’s the offshoot of the brain. Awareness and physicality are the two
primary forces, and awareness actually disseminates matter, in our case the
brain.
WPP: What if all is Mind and within Mind the brain is appearing and
operating. What if it’s just the reverse [of the Mind being an offshoot]? That
we’re living in Mind but we’re not conscious of it. We’re conscious of the
contents of consciousness but not of consciousness itself.
MJK: That’s definitely true. Awareness as an independent force, you
know, not a force but an energy.
WPP: Let me ask a different kind of question. What worldtime do we live
in, which is what I begin with in Spiritual Survival. How can you ask a question
about what you’re in? It’s like a fish in water asking that question. But if we look
back in time, we’ll see that past worldtimes were those of the huntergatherer,
then the agrarian, the industrial, then at the turn of the 20th century we had the
scientificindustrial, and now what I would call the Technological.
Each of these worldtimes organized man in a certain way and
contributed to his identity, what he thought of himself, the purpose of life, and so
forth. Where we are now is at the cusp of the Technological, but some of the
industrial world still exists. But what is this Technological worldtime? Is it
different than us? Aristotle said that “Man is a rational animal.” So there are two
sides to our nature—rational and animal. And I would suppose at some point
prehistoric man (if it was a man) was watching lightning hitting a tree and
igniting and suddenly he made the intuitive leap to rubbing two sticks together
and thereby making friction to produce the spark of fire and so using his brain in
another way. And from that moment on we have the application of the rational
to Nature which over time has resulted in our Technological worldtime.
Technology, for many people, is very threatening. And I think
understanding what Technology is will enable us to spiritually survive this
Technological worldtime, for Technology is really just the rational part of the
mind developed to an extraordinary degree. So if I can understand my own
mind then I can begin to understand Technology in itself, and I’ll be able to relate
to it rightly. Otherwise, we can be taken over by our identification with
Technology and we could lose our spiritual possibility and heritage.
MJK: That’s a very good point. Gurdjieff talked about man maybe going
the way of the social insect. Was he seeing that technology was the issue in those
days or was it something else? I remember that he talked about the bees and the
ants once being an advanced race.
WPP: When we look back at what the seminal spiritual figures have said,
there is Moses with the 12 commandments and sin, Buddha with life is suffering,
Christ with divine love, and Mohammed with all is Allah. And here Gurdjieff
comes saying from the very beginning that man is a machine. That is, we are
already what we most fear. And he was saying that in 1912. We operate
mechanically and we don’t know it. It doesn’t mean we’re not intelligent, it
doesn’t mean we don’t have talent and skills. But it means things are operating
mechanically; we are being lived rather than actually living.
MJK: When you first heard that man is mechanical did you actually revolt
against it, or did you say I can see why this is true but I’ve got to research it more
to make sure?
WPP: I believed I wasn’t mechanical but everyone else was. [Laughs]
Everybody rejects that the moment they hear it. But if you really observe
yourself, for example, people who are listening now are probably sitting down,
they are not standing. Well, did we intentionally sit down in the chair or were we
sat down by the instinctive center? And the way we’re sitting now, did we
choose that or did the instinctivemoving center choose this because it’s most
comfortable for us?
MJK: The question is, having had the experience are you aware of the
experience? Whether it’s true or not true, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, you know
you had an experience and whether it’s psychological or not is not important, so
we don’t have to answer the question. All your centers were working and you
learned something.
WPP: Right. As Gurdjieff would say, we not only live mechanically, we
live in false personality, and the growth of essence, he says, stops at around eight
or nine years of age. So we’re all really very young in terms of essence. So as I
become more and more aware of myself, the ideas that I have about myself—
which are rooted in false personality—weaken. And that gives space for essence
to grow. And behind essence is Being.
I begin to recognize the difference between consciousness and the contents
of conscious. And I see how the attention so quickly identifies with the
foreground—the contents—and not the background. And so if I can train myself
to have awareness of both at the same time, then the conscious absorption of the
impressions of the physical world can begin to raise me to a higher and higher
level of the experiencing of consciousness. Of course it’s not me that is
experiencing it, consciousness is experiencing itself.
It’s like most people appear to have bodies, but they’re rarely aware of
them. They’re only aware of the body when there is desire, fear, lust, sickness,
and as soon as that passes we’re back up in our heads talking to ourselves.
But what’s happened is that consciousness has gotten trapped in the
various centers. And whatever center works the best—instinctive, emotional,
intellectual—that’s the center we most identify with. And that’s where we build
our identity, and our selfimage—who we think we are. So it’s the extraction of
consciousness from the identification with centers that leads to real being.
It’s like the Hindu idea of the goose in the bottle. How does the goose get
out of the bottle? Because any way it tries it’s going to break the bottle and kill
itself. It has to realize, as consciousness, it’s never been in the bottle.
MJK: I had this dream as a kid that Frankenstein caught me. And I
laughed and told him that he can’t kill me. He asks why. I tell him because I’m
awake and you’re not. It seemed very logical in a dream, you know, but it can’t
be. I can’t be the goose.
Now let me ask a final question I’ve been wondering about: did Gurdjieff
ever pick a successor? It doesn’t appear to me that he did. His student J.G.
Bennett, for example, tried but didn’t quite pass the test.
WPP: It isn’t in the lexicon of the Work to appoint someone. It’s with the
students themselves—after the teacher has passed—that one of them is strong
enough to lead and the others accept it. And in this case it was Madame de
Salzmann, who had been with Gurdjieff since 1919 in Tiflis and was an assistant
group leader with him through the 1940s. So the mantle of leadership passed to
her.
Before he died Gurdjieff said to Lord John Pentland, my teacher, that
“You will be my Paul, you will spread the teaching.” And that’s what he did; he
spread the teaching in America. So when the teacher passes…then the student
steps up.
First printed in The Gurdjieff Journal.
William Patrick Patterson is the author of seven books on The Fourth Way, the
latest of which is "Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing WorldTime."