First Hand Information
We live on Earth and except for a certain level of instinctual knowledge that we are either born with or acquire mostly in our early years of life, exist primarily with second hand information/knowledge, taken in by the head brain while the emotional center plays a diminished role in ordinary life, the moving center can be quite active. In other words someone else, in someway shows, gives, writes, teaches and so forth what we take in as knowledge/information. In ordinary life there are very few unique individuals that have come to a given knowledge directly, and so what we receive is not really second but third, fourth, hundredth, thousandth hand. This all coming via ordinary life’s standards that allow the distortion of information, people’s feeble memories, thus giving a narrow and warped view of reality as well as the creation of a collective “reality” within which ordinary life occurs. This “reality,” which reflects the people within it, is dualistic, confused and fragmented, while sometime horrid and other times intoxicating. Science, and the use of the scientific method, which puts in place certain controls and reviews has been modern man’s answer to this issue; an imperfect answer, though a step toward impartiality on the material level. Yet, we see that the inherent suggestibility, and one might add the corruptibility, of human beings, particularly those Gurdjieff names as “power possessing beings” has greatly diminished the usefulness and acceptance of science in ordinary life. And more meaningful to the subject of the evolution of consciousness, if we have read the First Series, Gurdjieff repeatedly writes that the general conditions of ordinary being existence contribute greatly to the distortion and diminishment of any teaching, religion or spiritual way, often merely leaving, as Mulla Nassr Eddin would say,” Only-information-about-its-specific-smell.”
Gurdjieff says, “No faith is required on the fourth way… faith of any kind is opposed to the fourth way” ( Search 49). So we take nothing on faith and that includes what our teachers tell us, as well as the ideas Gurdjieff brought. Given this should you teach what you haven’t verified through experience? Can you teach what you don’t experience, is it possible to really teach what is personally unverified? Can you answer questions based on a student’s experience when you have not experienced what the student is speaking about and have no deep understanding? We have been educated and conditioned to process information, particularly complex information, through the head brain, one center. So, with the help of the other centers, connected and working in relative balance and our level of being, we may be able to verify what we have read and or been told, and this would be or become first hand information. A teacher that hasn’t verified something should never speak as if they know, but rather Mr. Gurdjieff said or Mr. Uspensky said or wrote and so forth. Otherwise they only contribute to confusion and complexity where straight forwardness, honesty and simplicity is needed.
There certainly exists the possibility of going beyond verification. And so from a foundation what has been given and then verified there can be a discovering of a truly unknown country, that which one’s teachers words or deeds and the books have not given at all explicitly, but may or may not have merely pointed toward, this would be the definition of “coming to something” and of a teacher who is quite special. end
Open to Openness 