Zigzag Idiot

Maurice Nicoll's Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. What some call the Work. He called it esoteric Christianity. GIVING UP SUFFERING III “To serve the Work means to obey what it teaches you to practice on yourself. You want to be gloomy and moody, to object, and so on, and you observe your state and begin to separate from it—then you are serving the Work. And in so doing you are giving up some of your mechanical suffering.” V. 3, p. 855 GIVING UP SUFFERING IV “By work on oneself . . . one rises in the ‘Ladder of Being’ represented by the Ray of Creation. But this rising is only possible by sacrifice. To behave as you always do, and expect to rise, is impossible. One must, to begin with, sacrifice one’s suffering. All self-pity, all self-cradling, vanity, secret absurd fears, all self-sentimentality, all inner accounting, all pitiful pictures, all sighs, inner groans, and complaints, must be burned up in the fire of increasing Consciousness.” V. 3, p. 1090 GIVING UP SUFFERING V “All our mechanical suffering is fraudulent only we will not admit it. Fraudulent suffering is the keynote to what we have to sacrifice. Real suffering is utterly different and always opens us up to a higher level: fraudulent suffering closes us.” V. 3, p. 853 WATCHING EMOTIONS “In yourself everyone else is helpless. You can, as it were, drag a person into the cave of yourself and do what you like with her or him. You may be polite naturally, but in the Work, which is all about purifying or organizing the inner life, it is not enough. It is how you behave internally, invisibly to one another that really counts...Your most negative and most dangerous ‘I’s may come forward when you are alone. . .when you feel that no one is looking. Yes, but you must look.” V. 1, pp. 216, 256

Very true. IME Addresses a real phenomenon. Worse for me was letting go of unnecessary suffering. The idea that we can't let go of our unnecessary suffering is primary in Gurdjieff's Teaching. It took me years to understand the scale of this.

The diversity of the felt sense of the presence moment. What it consists of is so varied that there's no place to start. And the strong memories of some of those moments are amazing in an odd way. When I was about 13 or 14 in a darkened movie theatre or out behind the skating rink in an unlit spot where us pubescent boys and girls would pair up for a few moments temporarily unsupervised to kiss and grope one another, the experience of feeling a tender, soft, plump breast. It felt so amazing! I've never been the same since. In a way. I crossed a threshold of sorts then but didn't have a clue really, about anything. So many varied experiences in life. Quite simple things that are imbued with richness. ? The first time I killed a small bird with my BB gun and then felt remorse holding its lifeless body in my hands. It was still warm. I felt dirty inside. I was about 8 years old.

Another Way of expressing the need for the archaic revival. Can we save the environment/planet from ourselves?

Terence is eloquently ranting about the archaic revival and I'm beating the drum.

@Aakash Yes, pretty much,,,, Terence keeps repeating that feeling is primary. "The felt sense of the present moment." The Oracle of the Cosmic Way unwinds it that way also. An excerpt from the last post in Tea-ching friend Journal that I abandoned. ,,,,,,,,, "the mental program that creates the ego has been installed in the psyche with the help of threats, punishments, flatteries, and rewards. Therefore, the ego takes on a "bully" character that keeps the true self intimidated and locked in self-doubt . The person needs to clearly realize that the ego is a parasite in his psyche that not only feeds on his life energy, but that, if not counteracted, will eventually destroy him. To rid himself of it requires that he recognize and deprogram all the false phrases and images on which is based. The purpose of the I Ching, as a gift of the Cosmos to humans, is to help the individual achieve this divestiture." From page 63 of The Oracle of the Cosmic Way. To condense and paraphrase more. We create spells in our lives with thoughts and words. I like Red Hawks phrase. " A relaxed body is an honest body." Or maybe he phrases it in reverse? An honest body is a relaxed body from his book Self Observation. I may look it up later. A relaxed body and a quiet, still mind. It happens for a bit every now and then.

Being embodied requires the capacity to let go of thinking. Being present in body awareness. What does your body tell you? Does that make any sense?

Excerpts from Chance and Choice about I CHING In the first step you awake to your DRAGON, you vocation, your question, your participation in the cosmic work of the spirit, or as the Native American's call it, your "medicine". For this you have to leave your family and personal history, changing your dependencies into material for self actualization. The CAT does not care for the past family, only the future one. In the second step you have to find friends in the TIGER study groups and separate your spiritual way from the quest for survival (SNAKE). You look for those people who make it possible for you to pursue your spiritual way without looking for profit. With the honest HORSE you transcend your group and make your achievements useful to others. You do so by establishing a style of livelihood, of wealth, which allows others to strive like a BUFFALO to participate in spiritual life. Now with the RAT you must stand up for your truth by organizing your whole life around your vocation. You blend your material and spiritual life by the GOAT Ò the lunar capacity to seize the moment, the opportunity. By receptivity to the times you make useful to others what is meaningful to you. Then you must get into revelation by understanding the comical aspects of all religious traditions, like the eclectic MONKEY in a supermarket of new age publications. The purpose of your search for revelation must be to heal others, to bring them to their wholeness. This requires unconditional service symbolized by the PIG. This understanding of the PIG explains the statement found in hexagram 61 - Inner Truth - "Pigs and fishes. Good fortune." The highest achievement is no longer self-centered. You are in civilization and in spirit, a part of the New Earth in the sign of the DOG Ò Aquarius. You are, like the DOG, completely faithful to your path and to sacred history. You transcend your ego by announcing your truth in society like the ROOSTER without regard to the practical consequences. From http://www.ichingwisdom.com/i-ching/cyclical-time-in-chinese-thinking/

Unlike western scientific laws which are based on causality, where everything has physical cause and effect, the I Ching is based on a non-linear law which Carl Jung called "synchronicity". The Law of Synchronicity is an a-causal connecting principle. Much has been written about this by Jung and his followers. Synchronicity recognizes the relationship between physical reality and the unconscious, and provides an explanation for how seemingly chance events in physical reality can reveal a hidden order in the psyche. The principles of the I Ching and the law of synchonicity are in accord with the natural Laws of Chaos and Self Organization. Life is based on Self Organization, the fractal reality of the fourth dimension. At the human stage of evolution we try to base our Self Organization on the infinity beyond the left-right symmetry of the animal kingdom. So it is appropriate to make our choices out of chance, out of chaos, so long as the chance is constrained by mathematical structure in consonance with the Universe. This is exactly what the I Ching does. It uses chance, constrained by the basic numeric structure of life, to bridge Wu Chi and Tao the infinite and the finite This is how the book is able to provide such remarkably-accurate answers to questions put to it. The system works and creates synchronicity because the mathematics are correct. Mere tossing of coins, for instance, heads I do this and tails I don't, cannot create synchronous effects because the mathematics are wrong. The I Ching "constrains chance" as Mandelbrot says, by ordering the random process with a mathematical structure which correctly mirrors the Universe. It works because of the mathematical structure of the hexagrams themselves. This structure is the "base two" number system to the sixth power, the six yin or yang lines in the hexagram. One of the first Europeans to see the hexagram structure when it was first brought out of China in the early 1700s was Gottfried Leibniz. He is the German philosopher and mathematician who first developed base two mathematics in the West. Today the base two number system has become the cornerstone of all modern technical culture. All computers operate on a machine level using a base two binary code of off or on, 0 or 1, or as the Chinese would say, Yin and Yang.

Article 1. The Sage as our Cosmic Teacher by Carol and Hanna © by Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog Carol’s experience of the Sage in the 1970’s was of an alive consciousness that wants to communicate with us. This took away for her the understanding that what we read in the written text of the book, is all we have for an oracle. It becomes apparent through its use that the I Ching is a Cosmic gift to humans. Its purpose is show people (1) the nature of the Cosmos as a system of Principles of Harmony, (2) our true human nature, and (3) the way we individually can return to harmony with these Cosmic Principles when we have lost our way. The Sage, as part of this interaction, is a presence within us that uses the oracle to draw up from the depths of our nature, our innate knowledge of Cosmic truth. (This truth is contained in the DNA of every body cell.) The I Ching Hexagram 61, titled “Inner Truth,” refers to this source that is stored in our bodies, not in words, but in the form of feelings of what is harmonious and what is not. Thus, the Sage uses the I Ching to speak through its text, but the text itself is not the oracle. The Sage makes it clear, through the method we call the retrospective-three-coin-method, or “rtcm” (which will be described in our next article), that it does not teach us the handed down platitudes that have often been taken as ‘ancient wisdom.’ It rather discourages this kind of memorized mental approach by reaching into our own deepest inner truth to bring forth the answers that are already there. We find, in so doing, that our inner truth has been suppressed in favor of these platitudes and commandments. That is why, on finding the answer we need, we recognize that we “knew that” all along, but did not dare to trust it. Thus, we find that the Sage is all the time connecting us with a part of ourselves that has been repressed through conditioning. This process of reaching into the depths is described in Hexagram 48, “The Well,” which calls our inner truth “a clear, cold spring from which one can drink.” Often, we cannot access our inner truth because “there is mud in the well” in the form of fixed, preconceived ideas, fears, old grievances, and memories of wrongs done to us. When we drink from this mud, we are kept stalling. With the help of the I Ching text, the Sage not only wants to make us aware of this fact, it also offers us help to cleanse our inner well. Then we find that our inner truth is a gold mine containing everything we need to know. The more we work with the Sage and give it the necessary space in our mind, the more we realize that it wants to speak to us as a friend, not as a godlike figure that expects obeisance and punishes us when we make mistakes. On the contrary, the Sage wants to free us from ideas that are either grandiose, making us see ourselves as the center of the universe, or that inspire us with fear and awe, and make us see ourselves as small and insignificant. The ancient Greeks had an idea of the Sage when they spoke of “a tutelary spirit that accompanies each person lifelong.” They named it “genii,” root of the word “genius.” Writers have long called it “the muse.” For many artists, athletes, and inventors, it is an “elusive thing” that takes over in us when we give up relying on the “brilliance and ability of the thinking mind,” or the pure brawn of our bodies, to provide the success we seek.

@Truth Addict Bless you friend. I feel blessed. Full speed ahead for the empowerment of our aims!

@Truth Addict There's a part of me that changes all the time and another part which seems to never change. I can't remember exactly what it was but in the recent past I spoke to you in a blunt or rude matter. Maybe at the time, I felt the need to play a role in order to convey a message that I thought was necessary. Whatever it was, in hindsight, it feels like it was a mistake. I apologize for that. Please forgive me. As has been said, "we're all in this together. ?

practicing Centering Prayer for twenty minutes twice a day has made a lot of difference for me. There's more flexibility in getting this done rather than 1 hour long sitting per day. It's an exercise in letting go of thoughts and discovering, slowly, the state of non conceptual awareness or what others call objectless awareness. When given time, it begins to create inner spaciousness.

Well thought out replies from all. I just woke up and need a few minutes to ponder if I have anything of possible value to contribute. ?‍♂️?

@Serotoninluv Thank you for sharing. This one had an effect on me a while back.

Quote from Ocke: Ocke: We limit our being by dualistic thinking and therefore we limit our thinking by dualistic thinking. We have lost our feeling for oneness so to speak and we have because of this also lost our sense for sacredness. To make ourselves whole again we have to make the potential actual. This true wish incarnates in us from the level of being of a man number four. It is at this station that the dead man in us shall leap from his grave. It is at this level that the Permanent Witness comes into being. From http://www.higherbeingbodies.com/ A quote from Paul Beckmann Taylor about Ocke's book Higher Being Bodies. This is finally. a book written by one who knows and cares for those who care but do not know yet how to work on themselves.

You are Intimate with Yourself When You’re Simply Being Where You Are When you really like to discover the truth, when you just like to see and feel what’s true, this indicates that you like being yourself. It is lovely to be where one is without rejection, without the need to be somewhere else to be okay. In this place, the heart opens up, and there is enough space to feel joy. There’s contentment and peacefulness, and a personalness to the contentment and peace that gives the feeling of intimacy. You are intimate with yourself when you’re simply being where you are. Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 196 To be where we are really is a form of surrender to whatever is happening. And that surrender is an awareness that embraces whatever our experience is. If I am feeling something and I see that I don’t like it, then I embrace that I am feeling something and I embrace the fact that I don’t like it. I don’t take the position that I shouldn’t have a negative response to what I am feeling. This implies a certain trust and confidence in our nature. Usually we don’t have that trust, so we want to take things into our own hands and twist them and turn them the way we want them to be. True Nature shows us that we have another option, which is to align with it in allowing our experience to be what it is. The Unfolding Now, pg. 26

I think Leo may enguage in 'pushing buttons', but for a specific reason and one that's also out of love. I still need to process this more before I say much else.

Watching Leo's new video about fear. He is nailing it! To feel everything is to feel one's 'every-which-way-ness'. This is inner truth/Conscience. There is a difference between acquired Conscience/personality and inner truth Self/Conscience. Culture is an enforcer of acquired Conscience. The capacity for going against group think is necessary to go beyond fear.

Russell Brand is a Mercury/Saturn a Divine Feminine warrior.

I haven't had an eye exam since 2015. My typo's are making me self conscious. This would be a self consciousness parallel in meaning to the Fourth Way phrase 'inner considering'. I love Autumn weather. I'm ready for it.