A Whole Sensation of Myself—Part 1
What was it in the human condition that Gurdjieff saw that others didn’t see? And did the teaching he brought really change this aspect of humanity or rather open people to the possibility of change/evolution? We read in his First Series that a series of “messengers from above” were sent to earth to help humanity rid itself of the remnants of the organ Kundabuffer, that though it had been removed its effect on humans continued. These residual properties helped to create “the abnormal conditions of external being existence.” Properties, of egotism (self-love and vanity) suggestibility, seeing everything upside down and so forth. These were and are still manifest in humanity. These attributes of man contribute to the abnormal conditions of external being existence in a circular dance of psychological sleep in all its manifestations. The properties create the conditions and the conditions help maintain the properties. That he saw this and much more is clear in his writings and teaching.
A Mission?
A question arises: why work with westerners whose inclination, in his time and ours, is towards becoming and not being? Western people interested primarily in the manipulation of the physical and not exploration of the metaphysical; of the external world while neglecting their inner world. Certainly, the culture he was raised in was a crossroads, a mixture of West and East. And he often spoke of the remaining good aspects of eastern and middle Eastern cultures while he denigrated and eviscerated Western culture/civilization—from European Russia to America, he found little of worth, yet he lived the majority of his life in western countries, working almost exclusively with western students. From these facts there has been speculation as to what Gurdjieff’s “mission” was. Did he have a mission? I would posit that a mission is different from an aim. A mission to me is something that one is given to accomplish while an aim is more subjective coming essentially from the individual, though perhaps being in some way influenced by others. From those who have had contact with him he has been called everything from a charlatan to a Solar God (whatever that might be). My opinion and that is all it is, is that due to the circumstances of his childhood which were unusual, plus the confluence of impressions and experiences he was exposed to as he says, unique to him, he came to “something” that was inexplicable by ordinary western methodology/science and was not explicitly given in Western or Eastern texts and ordinary religious teachings.
What was that something? He writes it quite succinctly in Meetings with Remarkable Men (pp 204-205) “At the beginning I was completely stupefied, but soon the intensity of feeling which flooded through me, and the force of logical confrontation of my thought increased to such an extant that, at each moment, I thought and experienced more than an entire twelvemonth. Simultaneously, there arose in me for the first time the ’whole sensation of myself…’ ”( emphasis added) To me this says he was not a so called “Solar God” or some already very advanced being but rather simply a man. Because when he came to a “full sensation of himself” he came from a lower level of consciousness/awareness. Otherwise, there could be no distinction, the experience of “whole sensation” also called global sensation, as given, would simply be how he lived. The experience as written, if taken literally, took place on an artillery range under the very real possibility of instant death or grievous injury. But is it to be taken literally? End part 1
Open to Openness 