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The following is from, pp. 224-228 of C.S. Nott's. TEACHINGS OF GURDJIEFF. A Pup il's Journal.

Where Nott quotes from several conversations by someone called PIN DER who worked very closely with Gurdjieff over many years...I think it is one o f the best "summing ups" on Gurdjieff's teachings and esotericism I have found.. ..print it out, digest it, and I am sure it will help to clarify what it is you seek and what may be found. I have put stars next to words that have specific meanings in Gurdjieff's teachi ngs... ____________________ "He said that Gurdjieff came to strike a big Doh*, to help the upflow of the Law of Seven* against the current of mechanical life*. Always, with any teacher, in the process of his work a few earnest strivers are netted. But in any case the Law of Seven flows on, if only from the friction arising from the enivitably ens uing squabbles and diferences--which needs must come but woe to him etc. Gurdjieff came to give us a New World, a new idea of God, of the purpose of life , of sex, of war. But who are 'Us'? 'Us' are those who accept him and his teachi ng and help to carry out this work*. This world of ours cannot be saved in our m easure of time. Had it been possible it would have been 'saved' long ago by the prophets and teachers who have been sent. Those who look for the world to be sav ed by a single teacher in a given time are shirking their own responsibility. Th ey wait in hope of a 'second 'coming' with no effort on their part--indulging in the 'disease of tomorrow'*. "If take, then take", says Gurdjieff. By working on ourselves we can 'take the a bleness' to become Sons of God, the Christos, the Anointed or Messiah, where the anointing is by token of the higher body*. But having slid down so far, the way back is long and difficult, we have forgotten. "The ox knoweth his owner, and t he ass his master's crib. But my people do not consider. They have forsaken the living waters, and hewn themselves out of broken cisterns." We are what we are through our failure to do our own prison chores, so we have t o tread the mill again and again. The treadmill is a good analogy, since it symb olizes the difficulties--the backslidings, the sighings, forgetfulness, self-rep roachings, settlings-up, tomorrowings; but we can take heart, since we are not c alled upon to do anything that every particle of the Absolute*--and Gurdjieff hi mself--has not had to do. Although Gurdjieff tempered the wind to his shorn lambs--to each a chance accord ing to his state of being* and understanding*--his shocks* annoyed some. People think that a man can be taught in a real school* as at a university; universitie s being now no more than re-formatory* apparatuses for conventional science, art , and literature, whereas their original function was to teach the universals. "The torn-off mask," says Lucretius, "lays bare the thing that is." Persona means mask, and the idea comes from objective schools*. Gurdjieff said: Kill our personality, the false-personality*, the false thing which we think is us. It has to die so that individuality may grow. To achieve his aim Gurdjieff, like all real teachers, had to play a role, playing at the same time several anc illary or sub-roles, working on himself for his own development. While spreading his teaching he had to adapt it to people of different levels of development. I n a group at meal-times, for example, he used hyperbole, exaggeration, joking, s eeming contradiction, saying something to one person while meaning it for anothe r; which was bewildering to some, who often took him literally and made strange statements on what they had misunderstood.

Every man would like to have a 'better world', but according to his own ideas. T he gangster's is more and better plunder; the communist wishes for the ant-like state, himself on top. The farther from reality the school of the world-betterer , or reformer, the more people will he attract, since he would leave everything to God, or the State, himself taking no responsibility. This is the opposite to 'accepting things' in Gurdjieff's sense, that is, in not fretting and worrying a bout what we cannot change. "What can't be cured must be endured". The hym says, "when wilt Thou save the people, O God of Mercy, when?" As if it d epended on God's whim. Only man can save himself; and God has given him every po ssible means and opportunity. We might as well ask a power-station to give us li ght and heat while with-holding the fuel. The organized Church says that salvati on is full and free, that man, to be saved, has only to "believe and be good". When the waggoner appealed to Jupiter to get his waggon out of the mud, Jupiter said, "first put your own shoulder to the wheel". Men cannot see that it is necessary first of all to do something about themselve s; for thousands of years they have been trying to re-form each other. If a man would set about working-on-himself* instead of praying to his far-off God to sav e the people, he would find that the kingdom of heaven is not indifferent to tho se who try. To see ourselves as we are--the old man--and to create the new man i s the Way of the Cross, esoteric religion. The Way of the Cross was the way of a ll objective teachers. All have to go down to Egypt and all have to be crucified . As Sakra, lord of Gods, says to King Yudhisthira at the end of his life on ear th, "All kings must behold Hell". They have to experience life in all its aspect s, play the devil with the devil--that old adversary Shaitan. And the succeesful doing of this is Holy Firm*, in contradistinction to being identified* with the Negative force, which is Shaitan. Mechanical life*, with its education, is very positive in this negative role. Th is chewing up is Trogoautoegocrat*--I feed on myself, eat myself up, and so aqui re 'I-Kracy', I-headhsip, power. Tria-Mazi-Kamno*, with three together I do. Maz i or mazy, deriving from metaxy. Kamno, 'do', as against kamno in classical Gree k meaning to 'toil and moil', to work and drudge laboriously, and only secondari ly to 'do'* in Gurdjieff's sense for which poiein and prassein had to be used. T he mechanical-stream-of-life* was contrived and adapted by Dame Rhea Persephone NATURE under necessity, who has left us in goloshes, not caring two hoots about any single one of us, concerned only with producing mass vibrations and so on. S he, although on a higher level than we, took no pains to foresee. We are among h er experiments. But the Everlasting has left us a remnant of which she could not deprive us. As Isaiah (1.9) says, "Except the Lord of hosts [that is, of heaven ] had left us a very small remnant, we had been as Sodom and Gomorrah". This has to do with Gurdjieff's particle* in BEELZEBUB'S TALES; but this particle, or re mnant, is powerless to EVOLVE* by specific gravity when the proper being-effort* is not directed towards it. Here, Dame Nature has to make an apologetic re-entr y. She has been compelled by higher powers* to keep and make available to us cer tain organs* otherwise than exclusively for her own use; she has had to bestow t his possibility upon us as part of her payment to powers above her. If she is no t concerned with the individuals but only with the mass, it is the same with us, who show little care for the individual cells in our tissues, though we care ve ry much baout the health of the organism in general, sometimes losing parts of i t for the good of the whole. As to the remnant, Perdita in The Winter's Tale, sa ys: "For I have heard it said that there is an art which in their piedness share s with great creating Nature". Polixenes: "Say there be, yet Nature is made bett er by no mean but Nature makes that mean; so over the art which you say adds to Nature, is an art that Nature makes...We marry a gentler scion to the wildest st ock and made conceive a bark of baser kind but bud of nobler race; this is an ar t which does mend Nature, change it rather, but the art itself is Nature."

We have to do all the preliminary chores, however irksome and wearisome and time -absorbing; yet "what we sow in tears we shall reap in joy". But we cannot begin to grow until we have formed the growing point, the moon*, i n ourselves. Our centre of gravity, along with that of the earth, is in the astr onomical moon, and so we lack the counterpart inoursleves --since we must "conta in of everything one representing the world". The forming of the moon* in us com es from the balancing of centres*, from Being-Parktdolgduty*, conscious labour* and voluntary suffering*; and the Five Strivings of Objective Morality*. The word 'lunatic' comes from objective schools; though it was long ago plain th at men were moonstruck; and the word 'lunatic' is now used facetiously or for th e obviously mad whose state is also ours, though in a less acute form. In the Gr eek myth, Selene the moon, who kissed Endymion to sleep, related to this. Endyma , a garment-wrapping, a body, a mere body-man, a being wrapped in a body. "Moreover", says Isaiah (30.26), "the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven day s, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound". And again (60.20): "Thy sun shall no more go down, neit her shall thy moon withdraw itself". And Revelation (12.1): "A woman clothed wit h the sun, and the moon under her feet". Ouspensky's pupils took tis all too lit erally, or too poetically, or from one aspect--that the earth must become a sun and the moon an earth. The moon is an inductive coil, setting up induced current s, sweeping up all wasted energy, lost for us, by our mechanicality. Objective s chools have known this, and about magnetism and electricity, from very ancient t imes; it has been left to the moderns--in the fever of industrialism brought abo ut by teeming myrmidons, ants--to exploit them. Gurdjieff spoke and wrote in a picture-form of speech, symbolical language, whic h is necessary for understanding, because words, being counters or characters of account, result in definitions, and definitions eventually freeze language, for when all is defined and determined it is lost, or leaves only a shallow impress ion on him who hears or uses the definitions. "The Tao which can be expressed in words is not the Eternal Tao." Allegory forces one to ponder to get at the meaning. This is a principle in all objective methods and techniques. There is no short cut to inner development. All teachers have spoken of this. Th ose who, having once taken up the work, leave it for a seemingly easeier way, wi ll, sooner, or later, have to begin again. Each of us has a duty. Each of us has a path to follow. Each has a task and must do it. Do I know what mine is? Again, it comes back to man himself, study of himself. Among the turmoil, the co mings and goings of ordinary life, we cannot escape the constant wish, conscious or unconscious, to know, to be, to understand. "If I ascend up into Heaven, Tho u art there; if I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there; If Itake the winds of th e morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Thy hand shall hold me." "I am fearfully and wonderfully made. My frame was not hidden from Thee when I was made in secret, and in Thy book were all my members written." Psalms "The book in which all mysteries lie is man himself; for he himself is the book of the being of all beings, seeing that he is the similtude of God." Jacob Boehe me. "I tell you, whosever you be that wish to explore the depths of Nature, if what

you seek is not found inside yourself you will never find it outside. O man, kno w thyself, for in thee is hidden the treasure of treasures." Isis Unveiled. "The Kingdom of GOd is within you. Seek therefore to know yourselves, and you sh all know that you are in the city and that you are the city." Jesus.

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