Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see whatisdone with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see whatisalready known to the speaker,butto share a vision the speaker could not have had withouttheresponse ofthelistener.
Itischieflyinmagisterial speech that the power of winners resides.Tobe powerfulisto have one’s words obeyed.Itis only by magisterial speech that the emblematic property of winners can be safeguarded. Those entitled to their possessions have the privilege ofcallingthe police,callingupan army, to force the recognition of their emblems.
Thepower of godsisknown principally through their utterances.Thesicut dixit dominus(thussaysthe lord)isalways a signal for ritual silence.Thespeech of a god can beso perfectly expressive of that god’s power that the god and its speech become identical:“Inthe beginningwasthe word. Thewordwaswith God, and the wordwasGod.”
Oneisspeechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has tosay. Tolose a contestisto become obedient; to become obedient isto lose one’s listeners.Thesilence of obedienceisan unheard silence.Itisthe silence of death . For this reason the demand for obedienceisinherently evil.
In my opinion, what will be troublesome for you in all this is chiefly that in childhood there was implanted in you—and has now become perfectly harmonized with your general psyche—an excellently working automatism for perceiving all kinds of new impressions, thanks to which “blessing” you have now, during your responsible life, no need to make any individual effort whatsoever.
– G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson
The question then is: How do we become normal again? We must begin by seeing our abnormality. Seeing here means suffering. We have to suffer our situation in life, namely, our situation of abnormality. This is the absolute first step, without which nothing else could be accomplished. We have to suffer our situation not only once but a hundred times. This is so because the abnormal conditions of life prevailing all around us always exert tremendous pressure on us. We cannot escape that easily, we must understand that. When we think we have escaped, we are brought back again. It has been said that Kundabuffer is very tenacious. That is why we have to suffer our situation of abnormality again and again.
Gnosis means knowledge, and the Gnostics acquired this in a number of ways. The first and most fundamental form of knowledge is good news, and concerns the divine nature of one’s own essence: the soul appears as a divine spark of light. The second is bad news and concerns the “terror of the situation”: the spark of light is subject to the influence of external dark forces, in the exile of matter. Imprisoned within the coarse dungeon of the body, it is betrayed by the external senses; the demonic stars sully and bewitch the divine essence of one’s nature in order to prevent a return to the divine home.
– Alexander Roob, (1997), The Hermetic Museum, Taschen.