Gurdjieff's teachings dealt with an enormous amount of subjects. His main explanations revolved around the following: Consciousness, Subconsciousness, Higher Consciousness, Conscience, Remorse of Conscience, The Physical Body's Functions, Higher Bodies, Centers, Self-Awareness, Knowledge vs. Understanding, Essence vs Personality, Universal Laws, Enneagram, Ray of Creation, Human History, Language, Hypnotism, Sacred Dance, Sacred Music, Humans' Natural Weaknesses...some are expanded below:
Self-Observation
Striving to observe in one's self the certain behaviors and habits which are usually only observed in others, and to observe them in one's self as dispassionately as one may observe them in others; to observe one's self as an interesting stranger.
Division of Attention - (Preliminary exercise to Self-Remembering)
Gurdjieff encouraged his students to cultivate the ability to divide their attention, that is, the ability to remain fully focussed on an external object or internal thought while being aware of oneself. One might, for instance, let part of one's attention dwell in one's little finger, while the other half is aware of our own presence. In the division of attention, in the initial stages one may need to go back and forth between one thing and another. However, experiencing them both fully and simultaneously is the aim.
Self-Remembering
Beyond the division of attention lies "remembering oneself" - a state, which is permanent in a "conscious" person, while fleeting and temporary in the average people. In this state a person sees what is seen without ever losing sight of himself seeing. Ordinarily, when concentrating on something, people lose their sense of "I," although they may, as it were, passively react to the stimulus they are concentrating on. In self-remembering the "I" is not lost.
The Need for Efforts
Gurdjieff emphasized that awakening results from consistent, prolonged efforts. These efforts are the ones that are made after a person is already exhausted and feels that he can't go anymore, but nevertheless he pushes himself.
The Many 'I's
Many I's is a term which indicates the different feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ in a person: I think, I want, I know best, I prefer, I am happy, I am hungry, I am tired, etc. These feelings and thoughts of ‘I’ usually have nothing in common with one another, and are present for short periods of time. They tie in directly with Gurdjieff's claim that man has no unity in himself. This lack of unity results in wanting one thing now, and another, perhaps contradictory, thing later.
Relaxation
Gurdjieff claimed that people's bodies are over-tensed during their actions, and thus they unnecessarily waste a lot of energy. Gurdjieff focused on ways of relaxing the physical body and minimizing the tenseness of the human muscles.
Centers
- Main article Centers (Fourth Way)
Gurdjieff classified plants as having one center, animals two and humans three. Centers refer to apparatuses within a being that dictate specific organic functions. There are three main centers in a man: intellectual, emotional and physical, and two higher centers: higher emotional and higher intellectual.
Body, Essence and Personality
Gurdjieff divided people into three independent parts, that is, into Body, Essence and Personality. Body is the physical functions of a body. Essence - is a "natural part of a person" or "what he is born with". Personality - is everything artificial that he has "learned" and "seen". It was taught that Essence is the part of a being which is able to evolve.
Cosmic Laws
The two main cosmic laws on which Gurdjieff focused on are the Law of Three and the Law of Seven.
The Law of Three is also called "Triamazikamno" and is described by Gurdjieff as "the second fundamental cosmic law".
The law states that every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes.
The Three Centers in a human, which Gurdjieff said were the Intellectual Centre, the Emotional Centre and the Moving Centre, are an expression of the law of three.
Gurdjieff taught his students to think of the law of three forces as essential to transforming the energy of the human being. The process of transformation requires the three actions of affirmation, denial and reconciliation.
The Law of Seven is also called "Heptaparaparshinokh" and is described by Gurdjieff as "the first fundamental cosmic law".
The law of seven is used to explain processes. The basic use of the law of seven is to explain why nothing in nature and in life constantly occurs in a straight line, that is to say that there are always ups and downs in life which occur lawfully. Examples of this can be noticed in athletic performances, where a high ranked athlete always has periodic downfalls, as well as in nearly all graphs that plot topics that occur over time, such as the economic graphs, population graphs, death-rate graphs and so on. All show parabolic periods that keep rising and falling. Gurdjieff claimed that since these periods occur lawfully based on the law of seven that it is possible to keep a process in a straight line if the necessary shocks were introduced at the right time.
How the law of seven functions is illustrated on the Enneagram. A piano keyboard is also a good place to begin one's study of the law of seven, as the seven notes of the major scale correspond exactly to it.
Law of Accident
Gurdjieff and his followers have written that one of the major aims of the Fourth Way system is to escape from the influence of the Law of Accident.
Moon symbolism
Gurdjieff was documented as teaching that people assimilate and transubstantiate certain matter which upon their death is released from their body and transferred to the Moon.[22] The simplest way of explaining this theory is by comparing it to other Biogeochemical cycle such as the Carbon Cycle or the Nitrogen Cycle. In the nitrogen cycle, bacteria assimilate and transfer nitrogen from the soil into the atmosphere. Parallel to this, in Gurdjieff's moon theory, humans assimilate a certain type of matter in order that it is transferred from the Earth to the Moon. [23]
The use of symbols
In his explanations Gurdjieff often used different symbols such as the Enneagram and the Ray of Creation. Gurdjieff said that "the enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted ... A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before."[24] The ray of creation is a diagram which represents the Earth's place in the Universe. The diagram has eight levels, each corresponding to Gurdjieff's laws of octaves.
Through the elaboration of the law of octaves and the meaning of the enneagram, Gurdjieff offered his students alternative means of conceptualizing the world and their place in it.
Working conditions and sacred dances
To provide conditions in which attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements" which they performed together as a group, and he left a body of music inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, which was written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann.
Gurdjieff laid emphasis on the idea that the seeker must conduct his or her own search. The teacher cannot do the student's work for the student, but is more of a guide on the path to self-discovery. As a teacher, Gurdjieff specialized in creating conditions for students - conditions in which growth was possible, in which efficient progress could be made by the willing. To find oneself in a set of conditions that a gifted teacher has arranged has another benefit. As Gurdjieff put it, "You must realize that each man has a definite repertoire of roles which he plays in ordinary circumstances ... but put him into even only slightly different circumstances and he is unable to find a suitable role and for a short time he becomes himself."
No comments:
Post a Comment