Transformation means: kick off the mask of our personality so the essence of who we really are can come out. Easier said than done. Or is it? In her book "The Unknowable Guddjieff," Margaret Anderson says, "I am carrying with me, wherever I go, a huge sack. In it is my personality--that manifesting 'animal' which expressed itself so incessantly for so many years, and that now lie dormant in the sack, stirring only faintly from time to time in its likes, dislikes, pleasures, rebellions, happiness, angers and obsessions."
There is an old Russian saying: 'A hunchback can be straightened only in the tomb.' Just so, a man must die to become changed.
I wish you not to be Nonentity. So first I make you feel like nonentity. Only from there can you begin.
It is nothing to know your nonentityness, you must experience it personally.
To know mentally is nothing, worth nothing. You must have a third kind of knowledge.
The great science of transformation--the birth of the soul, that conscious 'second birth' which parallels automatic (physical) birth and for which Gurdjieff had such a marvelous phrase: 'the arising of the presence of man'...this transformation demands years of study and practice for its incorporation. 'Past joys,' he said, 'are as useless to man in the present as the snows of last year which leave no trace by which one can remember what they were. Only the imprints of conscious labor and intentional suffering are Real, and can be used for obtaining good.'
When you have finally grasped the meaning of transformation and realized how false your picture of yourself has been, when you have discovered the kind of person you really are, and heard the little song you've been singing all your life...this is the moment when you can say that you've begun at the beginning.
There is an old Russian saying: 'A hunchback can be straightened only in the tomb.' Just so, a man must die to become changed.
I wish you not to be Nonentity. So first I make you feel like nonentity. Only from there can you begin.
It is nothing to know your nonentityness, you must experience it personally.
To know mentally is nothing, worth nothing. You must have a third kind of knowledge.
The great science of transformation--the birth of the soul, that conscious 'second birth' which parallels automatic (physical) birth and for which Gurdjieff had such a marvelous phrase: 'the arising of the presence of man'...this transformation demands years of study and practice for its incorporation. 'Past joys,' he said, 'are as useless to man in the present as the snows of last year which leave no trace by which one can remember what they were. Only the imprints of conscious labor and intentional suffering are Real, and can be used for obtaining good.'
When you have finally grasped the meaning of transformation and realized how false your picture of yourself has been, when you have discovered the kind of person you really are, and heard the little song you've been singing all your life...this is the moment when you can say that you've begun at the beginning.
