• June 1, 2023

    To be present is more than to be in the present.

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  • May 21, 2023

    Work on self without God is merely self development and a waste of precious time.

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  • March 15, 2023

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    The answer to prayer is the prayer.

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  • March 9, 2023

    Desiring is not the same as wanting. To be wanting, and to know it, is to be on the way to God.

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  • December 3, 2022

    Culture is trash, said a group member. True if you think of some of our current music and entertainment…lighting up genitalia, twerking and the like. But culture also encompasses our greatest achievements as humans, reflecting the highest use of sensitive energy to create the beautiful.

    Consider reading Doris Lessing’s Marriage of Zones Three Four and Five. Zone Four is a culture based on rules and thinking. It is known for its rigidity and lack of imagination. Its inhabitants do not look up to the mountains. They follow dictates. Their highest form of organization is the military.

    Zone Three is the creative use of sensation. Zone Three does not ultimately lead to the fully conscious experience of the mysterious Zone Two but its life is elevated by subtlety and communication.

    The difference between Zones Three and Four is visible in something as simple as serving a cup of tea. In Zone Four, the cup is plunked down while the mind goes on to the next thought, the next task. In Zone Three, The gesture is completed by taking into account the server, the served and the tea and the placement is an exchange between their gestures and postures.

    One artist can be interested in learning technique while another wants to explore the sense experience of the materials, the light in the studio, the placement of the easel.

    Fourth way work tends to be too much Zone Four. Most of the questions I get are literally senseless.

    Voluntary sensing is Gurdjieff’s World 24. Still impermanent, but it touches on World 12 where feeling enters from the miraculous realm of the infinite. Better to cultivate sensing than thinking. Use attention. Let mentation follow along the rails of sight and sound. This way lies consciousness and World 12.

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  • September 11, 2022

    Work on self is utterly dependent on observation of self, not just the big events of anger and fear but also the small flutterings of sensation that lie beneath my actions, words, thoughts and gestures. Ambitious people on the spiritual path overlook this fact. They are so busy trying to do the ‘work’ that they do not know they are not reliable enough to have a connection to it.

    I must become reliable. What does this mean? I must see exactly what is going on in me and be able to shift it, even the most minute reactions, in real time. Failing this, I must be able to account for all my uneasiness…the residual disturbances of sensation…after the fact of making them, and correct them. Cleaning up the mess in aisle 6 as it were.

    This knowing of self in not analytical. It is perceiving in real time. The why of it is an indulgence, a backward look. What is wanted is the ability to dance among my own phenomena, using them or dismissing them as they arise.

    Attention, attention attention. I have no other genuine tool for transforming me.

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