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24801 |
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Date: August 28, 2017 at 20:45:39
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: positive ideas... |
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Now to return to positive ideas.
"Unless", said Mr. Ouspensky,
in so many words, "Man believes in
Greater Mind, he is useless for the
Work. To believe in Greater Mind
is to have a positive idea—and
without positive ideas no one can
develop. A man who thinks he is
isolated, independent, that he knows and that he
can do
with his limited
finite mind, with all its igno
rance, starts from active
Do,
and then
describes a descending octave and so perishes. History is full of such
examples. To think one can do is
to start from a negative idea. To
realize one
cannot do
and to study how to do an
d what is necessary is
to start from a passive
Do
—that is, to begin an ascending octave."
Mr. Ouspensky used often to talk in this way.
You might very well think that the idea that you
can do
—can, for
instance, reform the world, chan
ge other people, and so on—is a
positive idea. On the contrary, it is a negative idea. It is as negative
an idea as if you were to think that
you could, without any very special
knowledge, operate on a man's brain. In this Work, people who think
they can do are called Lunatics.
Mr. Ouspensky once asked Mr.
Gurdjieff what a man has to do to assimilate his teachings:
"What
to do?"
asked Mr. Gurdjieff, as though surprised. "It is
impossible
to do
anything. A man must first of all
understand
certain
things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly
about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning
to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong
foundation and the result will be worse than before."
"How can we get rid of false ideas?" Mr. Ouspensky asked. "We
depend on the forms of our perception. False ideas are produced by
the forms of our perception."
Mr. Gurdjieff shook his head. "Again you speak of something
different," he said. "You speak of
errors arising from perceptions but
I am not speaking of these. With
in the limits of given perceptions
Man can be more or less deluded. As I have said before, man's chief
delusion is his conviction that he can
do.
All people think that they can
do, all people want to do and the first question all people ask is what
are they to do. But actually no
body does anything and nobody can
do anything. This is the first
thing that must be understood.
Everything
happens.
All that befalls a man, all that
is done by him, all that comes
from him—
all this happens
—and it happens in exactly the same way as
rain falls as a result of a change
in the temperature of the atmosphere,
as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.
Man is a machine. All his deeds, ac
tions, words, thoughts, feelings,
convictions, opinions and habits are
the results of external influences,
external impressions. Out of hims
elf a man cannot produce a single
thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels—all
this happens. Man cannot discover
anything, cannot invent anything.
It all happens."
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Responses:
[24802] [24803] [24813] |
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24802 |
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Date: August 28, 2017 at 20:48:15
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: positive ideas... |
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Negative ideas have very great attractive power. A negative idea,
such as that the Universe is meaningless, can draw millions into its
vortex and hold them as in pris
on. This takes away the chance of
individual growth from them and so renders them subjects for mass-
suggestion. This is the effect of negative ideas—namely, to destroy
individual importance and meaning
and inner individual thought and
make a man dependent on the outs
ide and so more and more under
the power of external life. We here
catch a glimpse of the meaning of
negative ideas as distinguished from po
sitive ideas. A positive idea puts
a man less and less under the power of
the outside, of external life.
You remember that it is constantly
repeated in the Work that as long
as life is the Third Force, you cannot change. That is, this inner
development, possible for Man, which all esoteric teaching is about,
cannot take place. The Work says that unless a man has undergone his
destined development he remains in the experiment of creating a self-
developing organism on Earth, as di
stinct from the animals and plants,
etc., that form the main bulk of
Organic Life. Life, as Third or
Neutralizing Force, keeps outer Personality active and inner Essence
passive. Yes, but one must begin to po
nder for oneself as to what this
means. The real man remains un
developed by life. Only another
force, coming from another direct
ion and having another range of
ideas, can bring about the lessening
of the life-formed Personality, with
its craving for visible rewards, and lead to the stirring and awakening
of the inner man—the essential man—the development of which is the
object of esoteric teaching.
Now, to interrupt the theme for a moment—what does esoteric
mean? In the New Testament the outer man and the inner man are
spoken of. The outer man is called the exoteric man, the inner man the
esoteric man. What does this mean? The outer man, the Personality,
may be well-trained and will never stea
l, let us say. But if all fear were
removed, he would steal. But if the inner or esoteric man were developed,
he would not steal, understanding
why not. He becomes internally
responsible, That is the difference. If the inner man were developed,
no police would be necessary. Now, in us, life develops the outer man,
but not the inner man. Esoteric
teaching is therefore about the
development of this inner, as ye
t undeveloped, Essence—the esoteric
man. Then, whatever happens in outer life, a man behaves rightly—
from himself, internally. In the Greek,
εξω means outer:
and
εσω means inner.
Esotericism therefore is a teaching applying to the inner man—
to what you are in yourself, apart from external restraints and fears.
So
the Work starts with self-observation—that is, observing your inner
states and what you are like. It does not start with external observation
as does Science.
A man, a woman, in this Work,
must learn by self-observation that
what they seem to be, what they pr
etend to be outwardly, is not what
they are internally. Realizing this, th
ey begin to suffer from the sense
of contradiction. This
is useful suffering. The outer and inner must
conform eventually and become one—a unity. Man asleep takes himself for granted as a unity. When he begins to observe himself, he
realizes he is two in the broadest sense—that is, what he pretends to
be and what he is. Then he must
eventually become a unity. Then
outer and inner are the same. This is
the first step. To be kind to a
person outwardly and hate and murder him inwardly is the ordinary
state of Man asleep. In this psychological state
nothing
can change in
the man. He is a failure in the experiment of self-development.
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Responses:
[24803] [24813] |
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24803 |
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Date: August 28, 2017 at 21:46:51
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: positive ideas... |
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Great Amwell House, January
25, 1947
MAGNETIC CENTRE AND POSITIVE IDEAS
It has been often said in the teaching of this Work that one of the
signs of Being in a person is the possession of Magnetic Centre, which
signifies the power of seeing things on
different levels. A sense of scale
in regard to the meaning of Magnetic
Centre has nothing to do with a
mechanical sense of scale. For example, an emotional type—e.g. an
artist—has a sense of scale about art and usually a very jealous one.
Or an intellectual man, a No. 3 man, has a sense of scale about intellectual things,
and again is very jealous. But this is not the scale that
Magnetic Centre gives, which is a scale outside life. For example, let
us take a No. 1 man, who judges everything from the viewpoint of
physical prowess. He meets a No. 2 ma
n who is, say, an artist. He feels
nothing from this artist because he
has no sense of scale. He cannot
understand that this artist, who perhaps contributes to the culture of
life, is superior to him, because he
judges him from his physical power,
and so on. That is, he sees nothing higher than himself except in visible
people who are taller or shorter or more powerful than himself. So he
derives his feeling of scale from the physical senses. Magnetic Centre,
however, means the power of seeing beyond our mechanical fixations.
It means the power of seeing that there is something far higher than
oneself—whether one is No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 man.
Speaking in general, a man who possesses Magnetic Centre is at a
higher level than one who does no
t—because he can see higher and
lower. There are, however, different qualities of Magnetic Centre.
Sometimes people have what Mr.
Ouspensky called false Magnetic
Centre—and sometimes they have multiple Magnetic Centre—that is,
they have many small, weak Magnetic Centres. As a result, they run
after every variety of magical and pseudo-occult practice, every kind of
mystical cult, or even join end-of-the
-world societies, or spend their time
in measuring dark passages in the Pyramids and explaining everything
by them. Such people have no right sense of scale. Right Magnetic
Centre does not lead in this direction. But both in a man with wrong
or false Magnetic Centre and a man
with right Magnetic Centre, there
is the belief that there is
something else,
another idea of life, and that life
cannot be explained in terms of itself.
This is a positive idea. Now Man,
being created a self-developing organism, as the Work says, cannot fulfill
himself unless he finds out how to develop. He may feel he cannot
explain the Universe or that he cannot explain himself, or both. In
any case, the sense of mystery enters.
This feeling, this continual awareness of the inexplicability of everything is one of the signs of right
Magnetic Centre. Curiosity, ambition to be great, the excitingness of
so-called occult knowledge and the be
lief that one can get something for
nothing have to do with small 'I's
and with the self-emotions. But the
sense of mystery goes beyond all self-love. It decreases Personality. It
makes a man feel his nothingness.
So it connects him with positive
ideas, for anything that renders Personality more passive and Essence
more active has connection with positive ideas. For this reason God, as
Absolute, is a positive idea. The Ra
y of Creation is a positive idea.
The Conscious Circle of Humanity is a positive idea. The idea that we
are all asleep and must awaken is a positive idea.
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Responses:
[24813] |
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24813 |
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Date: August 31, 2017 at 09:47:59
From: RIG, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: positive ideas... |
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Ya know, all three of these posts could be boiled down
into a brief sentence... that's why the Gurdjieffian
inspired (or even his own words) diatribes you post
here are so Spiritually empty... they're all majority
filler and so very little substance...
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