You are in prison. All you can wish for, if you are a sensible man, is to escape.
– G. I. Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous pg 30
Life’s Not Serious
The Whole Flows Like A Stream
All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (τὰ ὅλα ta hola, “the whole”) flows like a stream.
– Heraclitus, via Diogenes
Finite And Infinite Speech
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 what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.
– James Carse
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The Demand For Obedience
It is chiefly in magisterial speech that the power of winners resides. To be powerful is to have one’s words obeyed. It is only by magisterial speech that the emblematic property of winners can be safeguarded. Those entitled to their possessions have the privilege of calling the police, calling up an army, to force the recognition of their emblems.
The power of gods is known principally through their utterances. The sicut dixit dominus (thus says the lord) is always a signal for ritual silence. The speech of a god can be so perfectly expressive of that god’s power that the god and its speech become identical: “In the beginning was the word. The word was with God, and the word was God.”
One is speechless before a god, or silent before a winner, because it no longer matters to others what one has to say . To lose a contest is to become obedient; to become obedient is to lose one’s listeners. The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death . For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil.
– James Carse
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Rules For Rules
There are no rules that require us to obey rules. If there were, there would have to be a rule for those rules, and so on.
– James Carse
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The Implant
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
Our Situation of Abnormality
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.
– Will Mesa, Gospel according to Gurdjieff
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The Demonic Stars
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.
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Inside Out
The mind sees things inside-out. What it takes to be life is really death, and what it takes to be death is really life.
– Rumi
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Cosmic Flotsam 