gurdjieff

Be Grateful to Everyone

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Our theme is “Be Grateful to Everyone”.

Work with this each and everyday. Put it before yourself as you get up in the morning, after morning exercise, as a reminding factor during the day.

There are the little things that constantly bother us about others; people we see – the way they behave, dress, move, treat others. Be Grateful to Everyone.

There are impersonal affronts we see on the news; how some behave toward their fellows, political leaders, commentators, celebrities, etc.

Then there are chronic, more personal, bigger situations in our life. Family members, in-laws, people we know well who have treated us badly and worse. Be Grateful to Everyone.

We need in our work to be-friend parts of ourselves that we shun.

To quote Trungpa, my teacher in this, “The slogan “Be grateful to everyone” is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, “Be grateful to everyone.” If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders.”

This theme is about learning from all situations and other people becoming our teachers. Not fighting others and situations, but embracing them with our inner presence, which opens us up to another force. We open up, open our hearts and minds to situations we would ordinarily be closed to and allow them to become our mentor.

Trungpa Rimpoche again, “”Be grateful to everyone” is getting at a complete change of attitude. It does not mean that if you’re mugged on the street you should smile knowingly and say, “Oh, I should be grateful for this,” before losing consciousness. This slogan actually gets at the guts of how we perfect ignorance through avoidance, not knowing that we’re eating poison, not knowing that we’re putting another layer of protection over our heart, not seeing through the whole thing.”

There are many layers to this theme. Don’t work on this with the mind, with thinking, work with this in actuality during the day. There is a good deal to find out about ourselves, our leaks of energy and our potential for Compassion.

After a Retreat

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When coming off a retreat we have to catch up, deal with many things, even cope with crises. Just keep coming back to the beginning, to remembering your self, your inner self. Keep watering your inner presence and inner life and accept our outer obligations and the automatism that will be present at times. Negativity directed toward oneself will put us in deep sleep and drain our energy. 

Here are the Lojong slogans which can serve as a reminder:

  • Be grateful to everyone
  • Don’t take pleasure contemplating others weaknesses.
  • Don’t malign others.
  • If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained.
  • Change your attitude, but remain natural. Reduce ego clinging, but be yourself.
  • Always maintain only a joyful mind.


With Blessings.

Gurdjieff-Bennett 3-Week Intensive

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BECOMING HUMAN: IMMERSION INTO THE DEPTH OF INNER LIFE

Opening to Compassionate Presence
August 1st – 21st 2014
Claymont Court, West Virginia
Jerry Toporovsky   Walter Goodwin

The Aim of this three week Intensive is to provide individuals with an immersive experience of the Work. It is difficult in ordinary life to go deep, to reach penetrating rooted levels of our inner life. This requires frequency, duration and intensity that will be provided by the intensive. Our aim is to get beyond the Do-Re-Mi of our personal work.

The first week will be mostly in silence, concentrating on Mind-fullness work, movements and practical work. After that we will begin daily themes, classes in art and creativity, in-depth psychology, history, and a survey of spiritual exercises and techniques that will include methods and approaches from many traditions, but concentrating on the Fourth Way.

Our work will attempt to understand the sources of the self in order to develop the tools within to help us cope with and transform the future. We will work on cultivating an attention that allows us to resist surrounding influences and that can connect us to an energy that can aim our entire being to the higher. It is time to seriously deepen our inner work.

We will work deeply with silence and mindfulness, the extraordinary work of of Mr Gurdjieff and JG Bennett, the Sufi concept of Fana, and the tools and insights from many traditions and ways of Being. We will explore history, psychology and creativity from the standpoint of Soul.

We hope this three week event will jump start a new ‘octave’ in our life and work and that the reality of Compassion will be felt in our lives. That is the aim.

The tuition for the three week event is $1545, which includes virtually everything.
The tuition is $1400 if paid in full by April 1.
The price for child care per child is $285 for the event.

If you are interested in applying or in obtaining more information, please contact the registrar:

bonnie_kutch@verizon.net

*************
summer intensive 2014 flyer

Ebb and Flow

Posted on by denynothing

The first thing is to separate the present moment from the present situation. In life there is a natural ebb and flow. One moment we are outward relating to the world around us, in another we are inwardly focused seeing our wish and connected to our inner life; asleep, then awake; caught up in reaction, grasping, daydreaming, then being with ourselves inwardly, connected to our presence. In this, we are all the same.

This back and forth, this ebb and flow is natural and we should accept it. We often don’t. We grasp at the one and reject the other. Fight sleep and negativity, and attempt to hold on to the ‘higher’ wakeful state. The mechanical animal and the divine are both in us. They are who we are.

To quote Jeanne De Salzmann:
“Man is only a promise of man until he can live with both natures present in himself and not withdraw into one or the other. If he withdraws into his highest part, he is distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them; he no longer knows or experiences his animal nature. If he slides into the other nature, he forgets everything that is not animal, and there is nothing to resist it; he is animal, not man. The animal always refuses the angel. The angel turns away from the animal”. –Reality of Being Page 21.

This back and forth see-saw becomes our reality, where we think that the inner good state is the real me and the sleeping part needs to be fought against. We create sometimes an inner war between our disparate parts that keeps us from real progress. What the Buddha called duality.

Neither of those two sides are what we are after. By accepting both parts of who we are, the ‘wolf and the sheep’ in Mr G’s language, we open to the potential of another energy coming in; one that is unseen, but clearly not “me”. Being present, relaxed, deeply relaxed, and opening to the unseen is an important part of our work. Sometime it is better to let go of our physical tensions, thoughts – even of the work – and emotional reactions, and just allow another attention to appear, rather than straining to make one materialize. Becoming free from the desire for a result.

Be aware of the ebb and flow – This is about vigilant consciousness and the transformation of our attention.

Jerry Toporovsky

To Replace All Negative Attitudes…

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TASK:

To replace all negative attitudes towards the existing world with a feeling of confidence and love towards the new world that is being born, towards the still unborn child that is the future humanity.

To arouse in oneself constantly this love for mankind. Every time one has a feeling of negativity, take this as a reminder that we human beings live on this earth to serve, particularly to serve the future. And to serve with love, with hope, with confidence, so that it is possible for mankind to be born again. Such a positive attitude could enter into our behavior, into our speech. But if this is to have some force for us we have to deprive ourselves of something else. That is, to acknowledge that one really can work against negativity. To take away energy which at present flows into negative thought, postures and feelings and transform them to the other.

This is a very hard thing that I am proposing to you because in all of us negative thinking is so ingrained. In the midst of feeling compassion one finds oneself judging, finding fault. This is a disease that has overcome humankind and we are all infected by it.

Some very lucky people have escaped this disease. It is very fortunate to know such people.  It is an extraordinary thing to see such healthy souls in the midst of so much disease. Very few have this robust love towards their enemies, but some have.

It is a technical matter. It is not a matter of thinking it would be nice to be like that. It is a matter of knowing how to bring oneself to that place where our attitudes are under our own control. Where it is possible for us to say: This, not That.

—J.G. Bennett, London, 1972

The Movement of Energy In Us Is Continuous…

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The movement of energy in us is continuous. It never stops. Rather it passes through phases of intense projection which we call tension, and phases of returning to oneself which we call letting go, relaxing. There cannot be continuous tension and there cannot be continuous relaxation. These two aspects are the very life of the movement of energy, the expression of our life. From its source in us, energy is projected outward through the channel of our functions toward an aim. In this movement the functions create a kind of center that we call “I”, and we believe that this projecting outward is the affirmation of our self. This “I”, around which our thoughts and emotions revolve, cannot let go. It lives in tension, is nourished by tensions.

This ordinary “I”, our ego, is always preoccupied with what pleases or displeases it ­­what “I” like or what “I” dislike ­­in a perpetual closing that becomes fixed. It desires, fights, defends itself, compares and judges all the time. It wants to be the first, to be admired and to make its force, its power, felt. This “I” is a center of possession in which all the experiences inscribed in our memory are accumulated. And it is from this center that I wish “to do” to change, to have more, to improve. I want to become this, to acquire that. This “I” always wants to possess more. With ambition, it always has to become something better. It has a fear of being nothing. Is not identification, at its core, based on fear?

Real security does not come by escaping from this mind or emotion. It is possible only when the mind and emotions are truly quiet, when the accumulating action of ambition and desire comes to an end.

In order to see what is, I have to recognize that my state cannot be permanent. It changes from moment to moment. This state of impermanence is my truth. I must not seek to avoid or place my hope in a rigidity that seems to help. I have to live, to experience this state of impermanence, and proceed from there. For this I have to listen to what whatever appears, and in order to really listen, I must not resist. This act of listening, of being present is a true liberation. I am aware of my reactions to everything that takes place in me. I cannot avoid reacting, but for reactions not to stop me, I must be able to go beyond them. I have to continue until I see that it is everything I know that keeps me from approaching the real, the unknown. I must feel all the conditioning of the known in order to be free of it. Then my search for silence, for tranquility, will be a quest not for security, but for freedom to receive the unknown.

When the mind is freer and truly quiet, there is a sense of insecurity, but with it there is complete security because the ordinary “I” is absent. My mind is no longer moved by the wish ³to do² on the part of my “I”, by its demands, even for my own inner growth. In this tranquility all the responses, reactions and movements of this “I” are left behind. My mind is at rest, stilled by the vision of what is.

From Reality of Being, by Jeanne de Salzmann

Our Work Requires That We Should Be Present

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The work, our work, requires that we should be present. To be present we have to be free from such obstacles as identification, losing ourselves in what we are engaged in. To be present, we have to be relaxed and this brings us to the world of tensions.

Tensions are not something inert, passive, just slowing up our development. We have to observe how they arise. We have to observe  that they arise in us from that which is hostile to the work. They represent in us a great force, our denying force. It is the center of egoism in us which defends itself by means of tensions.

It is essential that there should develop in us an active side which sees and experiences the need to relax. Once again, we need to observe, observe our inner gestures of refusal, our clutching at whatever we are lost in. By relaxation we can become free.

The way is clear. We need to learn to make a gesture of relaxation and to learn to renew it.

Mr. Bennett had a word for this–unhooking. We need to learn the art of unhooking, to make a movement of disengagement, or inwardly letting go. To do this we begin with work on physical tensions, letting go literally a hundred times a day. Later we see that to look for and relax only the superficial tensions does not do very much because under the influence of the underlying tensions they quickly return.

This week, wherever you are in this work, resolve to make some progress in the field of tensions. Superficial tensions can be
affected by a superficial effort of attention, the deeper ones require work of a more subtle kind. This week set yourself to go
deeper, for tensions are the opposition to our work.

Pierre Elliot
Claymont Society, 1976