Who Are These Ideas For?
Common sense would dictate that the answer to this question is that
these ideas are addressed to those of us who are interested in them.
But this reply assumes something that we should also be aware of:
there are "mechanics" behind our capacity for being interested in something.
Naturally, in the realm of ideas, if something speaks to us - something
where we feel a connection - this creates an impetus of a certain quality -
a kind of energy is generated.
Our attention becomes engaged.
Gurdjieff's ideas suggest that
we do not possess the conscious intelligence
we usually imagine ourselves to have.
The false assumptions we have about ourselves and our powers are a result
of social and educational conditioning (and perhaps even cosmic influences).
This reality has resulted in an inner fragmention and disconnect
from who and what we really are and thus, our purpose in life.
Gurdjieff's ideas are addressed to people who continue to search for
meaning - as well as question whether or not
there is more to life than what their daily life consists.
These ideas are addressed to those of us who have met with disappointment
in ourselves, because try as we might, it seems impossible
to make any productive, long term changes in our life.
These ideas are addressed to those of us who recognize that
we live in "two worlds" and that these two worlds
often times seem to be in conflict with one another.
One world demands from us obligations
(career, relationships, money, etc.)
and the other world: a yearning for a
deeper understanding and connection - a yearning of a spiritual dimension.
It is this hunger that calls us to something higher;
an intuitive sense of an exisiting deeper relationship that is possible,
but which is also beyond our ordinary daily experience.
This hunger within our inner world is significant
for it is from this place where important questions emerge:
Who am I? What is the meaning of my life? Why are things the way they are?
As children, very naturally we ask "where did I come from?"
Now as adults, for one reason or another, we only seem to ask,
"where am I going?" Clearly something has happened in us -
something lost. Perhaps - somewhere in the past - the responses
we have received when questions like these were asked
felt wholly unsatisfying and entirely inadequate.
Nevertheless, we "learned" to stop asking.
Whether by the movement of life upon us or acting from the perspective
that these questions are moot, ridiculous, impractical or
imposssible to answer, we move further away from them.
What was once an "open" place in us, has now slowly
become much liked a blocked artery - and this is IF we are lucky!
For there are others, some you may know, with whom questions
such as these are rarely explored, if at all. Nevertheless,
for those of us who keep returning to these questions,
there is recognition of a kind of precarious struggle between
an inner and outer life. Perhaps we carry a deep feeling or sense that
there is indeed, a proper response to this condition:
that there must be a way to live where this apparent conflict
will not distract or blind us from seeing and experiencing the Real World.
~
What Are the Ideas and What is the Work?
How Do I Further Explore these Ideas?
©2008 GIGInfo.