Gurdjieff’s thinking is spreading. It represents a new way to see yourself and the world – these ideas should be explored by many of us.
We are often wondering what modern civilisation has become. Many say that money, power, greed, selfishness are at the root of the problems the world is seeing. People are increasingly looking for the meaning of life, and to find a personal willed way of conducting our life.
We are locked in patterns of thinking – e.g how to win a cyberwar when we should be thinking about how to stop wars – our thinking is groupthinking, your own I is lost, you become a machine thinking like everybody else, and you have already been manipulated into passivity. Your contribution to what is going on is near nothing, you perform a routine job to earn a living, your life is shallow, narrow and not what it could be.
Do you need to change this? Do you have the will to change this? First of all you must assure yourself that your I is awake.
It is not easy – there are powers and forces involved stopping you: you are lazy, wish to be comfortable, your interaction with others become difficult, political and economic forces want you to be docile and serve you entertainment to achieve their aims.
You can find your own I and manifest it through the way you live if you want it hard enough.
If you want to be this new person, an awake person seeing what happens, you must first observe yourself so that you see clearly what you do, so that you know yourself thoroughly.
The aim is to develop a conscious relationship between intellect, emotion and movement , i.e. what you think, feel and do.
Gurdjieff postulates that there is a wholeness in the world, things are connected in ecology or cosmology, there is a depth psychology, a new consciousness, we need to revise human history, he proposes a specialized music of octaves integrating man and cosmos, he gives spiritually instructive dance exercises to find consciousness and inner balance, a blending of science and alternative thinking. It seems everything is connected and that there is a wholeness which is similar to deep ecology.
Gurdjieff has instituted the practice of the Work as the way to move forward for individuals. To find your own way you have to start a personal Work. By doing this you are entering a metaphysical domain – it may seem exotic and esoteric – it is easy to lose yourself or not find substance in these ideas. The process of building understanding of Gurdjieff’s ideas is hard and entails finding new levels as you go along. If you succeed you will find wisdom.
We all need to think along the lines given us by Gurdjieff’s ideas – to try to find insight into what we – our Is – and the collective world is doing and where we all are going.
So therefore think metaphysics – it is a big word – to find inner balance so you can find your real I and contribute to a better world. It is really about seeing the richness of the world by waking your I, to become really alive.
“Life is real only then, when I am”
See Gurdjieff literature: Futurethrills Store by Amazon See also writing by CG Jung, Arne Naess
