Zigzag Idiot

I think both. On a relative scale, it's less harmful than an alcohol or heroin addiction. It's been an issue with me before at a time when I was uncomfortable with silence. It was something I relied on to dissociate in a subtle way from the present moment. As the saying goes, "awareness is curative". Observing how I was using music to dissociate was eventually enough to resolve it in a round about way.

"Even me" - you immediately caught it and laughed. I immediately became you at that moment.

Maurice Nicoll's PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENTARIES ON THE TEACHING OF GURDJIEFF & OUSPENSKY is over 1700 pages but is a joy to read if you're into the Fourth way or esoteric Christianity. This is distilled down into about 120 pages in a PDF ebook called GEMS OF WISDOM. The link to the PDF is below the quotes. This first one look close. It doesn't say that you have no right to be negative. It says you have a right not to be negative. YOU HAVE A RIGHT NOT TO BE NEGATIVE’ “Now the Work says you have a right not to be negative...To be able to feel this draws down force to help you. You stand upright, as it were, in yourself, among all the mess of your negativeness, and you feel and know that it is not necessary to lie down in that mess. To say this phrase in the right way to yourself, to feel the meaning of the words: ‘I have a right not to be negative,’ is actually a form of self- remembering, of feeling a trace of real ‘I,’ that lifts you up above the level of your negative ‘I’s which are all the time telling you without a pause that you have every right to be negative.” V. 1, p. 161 GIVING UP SUFFERING “A man, a woman, cannot awaken if they retain this dreadful weight, their mechanical suffering, and nourish it, by a continual process of justifying it.” V. 4, p. 1240 GIVING UP SUFFERING II “A man, a woman, must give up their suffering and sacrifice that first of all, because this can lead to a change of Being. For this to happen one must be able to see through self-observation what one suffers from...There is the suffering of man towards woman, of woman towards man...Then take all the mechanical forms of suffer- ing that arise from feeling that you have never been understood by your parents, your husband, your wife, or your children...It is exactly this suffering derived from life and all its awkwardness that has to be sacrificed.” V. 3, pp. 850, 852 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 WATCHING EMOTIONS II “You may treat a person outside you well. Yes, but how do you treat the person internally? . . . After a time in the Work, if it begins to act on you, you feel far more uncomfortable through wrong feeling than through anything you may have done outwardly. The Work is not mainly about outer life, but about inner life, and here sincerity and valuation are necessary—not pious, not artificial, but genuine. . . . You have to reach a stage in which when you are alone everyone you know, whether you dislike them or otherwise, can pass through without being sniped or butchered.” V. 2, p. 694, V. 4, p. 1355 https://inner-world-books.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Gems_of_Wisdom.pdf

This is a fascinating book. I pasted a couple of excerpts down below. THE NEW MAN AN INTERPRETATION OF SOME PARABLES AND MIRACLES OF CHRIST by MAURICE NICOLL THE LANGUAGE OF PARABLES PART ONE ALL sacred writings contain an outer and an inner meaning. Behind the literal words lies another range of meaning, another form of knowledge. According to an old−age tradition, Man once was in touch with this inner knowledge and inner meaning. There are many stories in the Old Testament which convey another knowledge, a meaning quite different from the literal sense of the words. The story of the Ark, the story of Pharaoh's butler and baker, the story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Jacob and Esau and the mess of pottage, and many others, contain an inner psychological meaning far removed from their literal level of meaning. And in the Gospels the parable is used in a similar way. Many parables are used in the Gospels. As they stand, taken in the literal meaning of the words, they refer apparently to vineyards, to householders, to stewards, to spendthrift sons, to oil, to water and to wine, to seeds and sowers and soil, and many other things. This is their literal level of meaning. The language of parables is difficult to understand just as is, in general, the language of all sacred writings. Taken on the level of literal understanding, both the Old and New Testaments are full not only of contradictions but of cruel and repulsive meaning. The question arises: Why are these so−called sacred writings cast in misleading form? Why is not what is meant explained clearly? If the story of Jacob's supplanting of Esau, or, again, of the Tower of Babel, or of the Ark constructed in three storeys riding on the. flood, is not literally true but has a quite different inner meaning, why is it all not made evident? Why again should parables be used in the Gospels? Why not say directly what is meant? And if a person thinking in this way were to ask why the story of Creation in Genesis, which clearly cannot be taken literally, means something else, something quite different from what the literal words mean, he might very well conclude that the so−called sacred writings are nothing but a kind of fraud deliberately perpetrated on Mankind. If all these stories, allegories, myths, comparisons and parables in Sacred Scripture mean something else, why can it not be stated clearly what they mean from the starting−point so that everyone can understand? Why veil everything? Why all this mystery, this obscurity? The idea behind all sacred writing is to convey a higher meaning than the literal words contain, the truth of which must be seen by Man internally. This higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric, meaning, cast in the words and sense−images of ordinary usage, can only be grasped by the understanding, and it is exactly here that the first difficulty lies in conveying higher meaning to Man. A person's literal level of understanding is not necessarily equal to grasping psychological meaning. To understand literally is one thing: to understand psychologically is another. Let us take some examples. The commandment says: "Thou shalt not kill. " This is literal. But the psychological meaning is: "Thou shalt not murder in thy heart. " The first meaning is literal: the second meaning is psychological, and is actually given in Leviticus. Again the commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is literal, but the psychological meaning, which is more than this, refers to mixing different doctrines, different teachings. That is why it is often said that people went whoring after other gods, and so on. Again, the literal meaning of the commandment: "Thou shalt not steal" is obvious, but the psychological meaning is far deeper. To steal, psychologically, means to think that you do everything from yourself, by your own powers, not realizing that you do not know who you are or how you think or feel, or how you even move. It is, as it were, taking everything for granted and ascribing everything to yourself. It refers to an attitude. But if a man were told this directly, he would not understand. So the meaning is veiled, because if it were expressed in literal form no one would believe it, and everyone would think it mere nonsense. The idea would not be understood—and worse still, it would be taken as ridiculous. Higher knowledge, higher meaning, if it falls on the ordinary level of understanding, will either seem nonsense, or it will be wrongly understood. It will then become useless, and worse. Higher meaning can only be given to those who are close to grasping it rightly. This is one reason why all sacred writings—that is, writings that are designed to convey more than the literal sense of the words—must be concealed, as it were, by an outer wrapping. It is not a question of misleading people, but a question of preventing this higher meaning from falling in the wrong place, on lower meaning, and thereby having its finer significance destroyed. People sometimes imagine they can understand anything, once they are told it. But this is quite wrong. The development of the understanding, the seeing of differences, is a long process. Everyone knows that little children cannot be taught about life directly because their understanding is small. Again, it is realized that there are subjects in ordinary life that cannot be understood save by long preparation, such as certain branches of the sciences. It is not enough to be merely told what they are about. ,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,In the psychological teaching of the Gospels, a man is not taken as what he appears to be, but as what he most deeply is. This is one reason why Christ attacked the Pharisees. For they were appearances. They appeared to be good, just, religious, and so on. In attacking the Pharisees, he was attacking that side of a man that pretends, that keeps up appearances for the sake of outer merit, fear, praise, the man who in himself is perhaps even rotten. The Pharisee, psychologically understood, is the outer side of a man who pretends to be good, virtuous, and so on. It is that side of yourself. This is the Pharisee in every man and this is the psychological meaning of Pharisee. Everything said in the Gospels, whether represented in the form of parable, miracle or discourse, has a psychological meaning, apart from the literal sense of the words. Therefore the psychological meaning of the Pharisees refers, not to certain people who lived long ago, but to oneself now—to the Pharisee in oneself, to the insincere person in oneself, who, of course, cannot receive any real and genuine psychological teaching without turning it into an occasion for merit, praise and award. Later on we will study the meaning of the Pharisee in oneself more fully.

5-27-2019 10 Conduct Line 6 54. The Marrying Maiden/An Untenable Situation Council from the changing line 6 -- Getting rid of self images liberates our true nature and helps bring us back into harmony.

I'm tempted to try this practice. Maybe 4-12 hours a day.

@Schahin I hold what you say as a possibility and in some ways, a likelihood. We also produce thoughts and so they are all mixed together.

Understanding surpasses forgiveness When you understand. You don't take anything in a negative way. If you have total understanding you will never again have to forgive anyone or make apologies. If you're not stirred by some outside influence that produces anger or any of the other passions that make us forget ourselves, we don't get offended or become a reactive Idiot thus foregoing forgiveness and apologies. We awaken and then nap off and on for a good while. Not all of us. There are different ways. My first awakening was that things are different than I thought. The second awakening was that the World is asleep. The third awakening was that there are deeper layers.

Yesterday 5-25-2019 61 Inner Truth Line 1 1 The Cosmic Consciousneas 5-26-2019 9 The Taming Power Of the Small. Line 2 37. Meeting Obstructions The idea that sexuality is a part of one's lower instinct and that it must be sublimated in favor of one's higher nature actually creates a shadow with our sexuality. Or as the text says - it puts spells and poison arrows on the body. This idea is repeated in several interconnecting ways through this text. It aligns with esoteric Christianity in a way here but especially more with the idea of guilt being an absolutely malignant notion. The idea that we were born into original sin and that we are stained with guilt as many fundamentalists insist on is seen as an immediate stumbling block which creates a perpetual feedback loop. It makes sense to me more as I have sat with this over time. This suggests that repression/sublimation of sexual energy helps to make compulsive behaviors perpetual. Mostly because of the ideas of guilt and shame put around sexuality by the Churches. Or as Robert de Ropp described them -- the Judeo Christian guilt cults. In our culture today people who have never even been to Church are infected with this idea because of the predominate influence of fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity influence throughout the previous generations. This is in line with the idea that whatever we fight or resist only makes it stronger. There are no evil people. Just ignorant people who perpetuate ignorance and suffering. Ignorance spawns negativity. Spiritual sleep is the result of unrealized (mechanical) negative behavior and identifications opposed to Conscious behavior which is free from identifications.

@phoenix666 Falling down then getting back up while self criticizing describes a definite aspect of my personal history that has run continual. Leaving out the self criticism and just observing my continual failures feels like a step up. Even though I feel remorse of Conscience at times, I'm not as divided against myself compared to the past and sometimes I'm actually able to resist temptation in speaking when I shouldn't or doing something that's not good for me. Slowly growth happens.

I thought that's what you meant when I watched earlier. It was good to hear you speak. I think your spoken English is good also. You've got me interested in watching Annihilation,,,,

We Have Betrayed Ourselves When we are genuinely interested in the truth, the whole truth, we realize with a greater sorrow that this betrayal from the outside is less terrible than another betrayal: we come to understand that we have betrayed ourselves. We realize that when our environment betrayed us and abandoned us, with varying degrees of insensitivity, we felt alone and abandoned, with no one relating to us. To be real meant being isolated from the environment, living in another universe, a universe not seen by our parents, not acknowledged by them, even not known by them... so we learned to pretend, to be like them, to join them in their world, the world of lies, the world of the shell, the conventional world. We became what they wanted us to be, what they paid attention to in us, what they preferred in us, what made them relate to us. Through this process of accommodation, we abandoned and rejected what they could not see, the parts of us they did not relate to. Since our Essence was the element they recognized or understood least, our Essence was the central element we disowned. We ended up abandoning and hiding our most precious nature. We hid it finally even from ourselves; most of us eventually forgot it altogether. The Point of Existence, pg. 319 The watch of the heart Meditation has helped my capacity for forgiveness. Letting go of thoughts in meditation is good practice for letting go of grievences. The same inner movement in forgiveness. . I know how quickly I can get drawn in to being identified with a particular perspective on any day though. How quickly the passion of anger can appear. I really don't know much about Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It has a similarity to A Course In Miracles though in its focus on the possibility of realizing deep peace through forgiveness but just as important is the ongoing 'watch of the heart' as it's referred to by some. I'm not a bit interested in Church or Religion or any kind of group activity. Small quotes from an article by Cynthia Bourgeault. This first is her quoting modern Sufi Master Kabir Helminski -- "We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart." "The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love." “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In this one sentence, the whole of the teaching is conveyed. What remains is for us to come to a greater understanding of how this purification is actually accomplished: a critical issue on which Christian tradition is by no means unanimous." From -- https://parabola.org/2017/01/31/the-way-of-the-heart-cynthia-bourgeault/

This is a picture of my television screen from a few months ago. A DVD of Nassim's about what you mention in your post. It was a difficult thing to wrap my mind around idea of the mass of the universe fitting into the empty space of a proton. Its got a catchy title though.

No, I've never worked in marketing,,,

First sentiment - peace to everyone You guys are so misunderstanding this place.. How is this Title not a projection in itself? I just throw this out as a rhetorical question,,, Not meant as an attack @DrewNows I feel like when we have toxic people in our life we are often unknowingly a match to them. And the only way to change them is in changing ourself. By doing this they either leave our presence or change for us to be aware of the attention we feed, and the reactions/judgments we have that’s a good start to self reflecting instead of simply pushing people away possibly out of fear or anger This matches an aphorism in the Work - Our Being Attracts our life. last sentiment- peace to everyone

I just realized how a lot of the things I post on here are horribly depressing if not offensive from certain perspectives. Like the Ouspensky and Gurdjieff stuff. Or Martin Butlers dim view of the financial elite. And the time devoted to meditation, self observation, Inquiry, etc., seems really impractical. Also from certain perspectives. I can really understand why there would be no motivation for doing this if one were emotionally balanced and relatively happy. There are different kinds of stresses now in the world than there was 50 years ago for sure. Even 20 years ago. In the form of existential angst and meaninglessness,,,, maybe? I understand the value of work on self esteem. The real need for it in a practical sense. Some of the views in the work on integration and transcendence would almost seem to be mocking those who are doing work on self esteem and that is a shame because it's only a perception and a mistaken one. Ken Wilber makes the case that with our complex subtle energy centers which allow for a real possible higher development there exist the other side of this coin. The Human has possibilities for beautiful higher potentials but these complexities are also responsible for our really potential messed-up-ness. They keep spitting out these jewels and so here is another one for those who are interested and following this path. The audio on this one is worse. It has the quality of an automated robocall but whoever is editing and putting these together are really doing a fine job in how they arrange the material IME.

@Arcangelo Hahahahaha ? Beautiful!

@Truth Addict I agree with what you say in your opening post on this topic but I just don't take Leo in this way. In the above quote. On 5-22 @Shiva said - Ok here's one for you: Stop wondering if what Leo says is true or not. He's presenting a possibility for you. If it inspires you, good, pursue it. If it doesn't, don't waste your time criticizing and arguing. In the end, what Leo says is just poetry, until you find out it is not. Or who knows, maybe it is just poetry and nothing more. Also fine, at least enjoy the poems.

Great! ? Yep. Lunar Venusian. The Lunar type is said to be willful. ??‍♂️

I wish these short videos had been around when I first started trying to learn the system. I know for sure they are helpful in refreshing my past learning and reminding me of different aspects which are interconnected. To say the subject matter in this one is relevant to everyone here and also the tone of the forum at the moment would be one hell of an understatement. 7:57 minutes

Yesterday 5-23-2019 38. Separating/Opposition 5-24-2019 31. Influence. Lines 1 and 6 13. Associating with People A small piece of the council from Line 1-- "before acting, a person needs to empty his mind of all petty likes and dislikes that make him look down on Nature and on his body. The correct influence comes from inner stillness, which both attracts the Cosmic Helpers, and enables the correct spontaneous response to arise from one's inner truth." from line 6 -- "A person may believe that what he says lightly in idle conversation, or what others say about him in this manner, produces no harm. Nevertheless it is mostly through idle talk that projections, spells, and poison arrows are created. It is a person's Cosmic duty to take responsibility for everything he says and thinks, and to realize idle talk and thoughts often create great harm." Zigzag Idiot opinion/insight -- Many thoughts are not self produced, they just appear seemingly out of nowhere or out of the stimulus response mechanism of the body which is just a meat computer. Being responsible for such thoughts means just letting them go.

That's great! You seem to have a positive momentum going. I appreciate the honest objective tone of your Journal. ??

Relates very much to considerations about life purpose.

Modafinil and Clarity In trying the Supplement Modafinil recently, I've realized more the value of clarity in relation to self awareness and awareness in general. With greater clarity my inner world is calmer which makes me more mindful creating greater efficiency in carrying out tasks. The atmosphere of my luminous egg stays cleaner. In my practice with concentration and emotional balance I use Shamanisms idea of the luminous egg for visualizing and containing what Gurdjieff called our atmosphere. If I have a lot of distractions, thinking of things far away, in the past or in the future, my atmosphere is contaminated or has lost its hermetic seal. Gurdjieff gave a sitting Practice for cleaning one's atmosphere. This practice is easier to do with just a little increase in clarity. So, things can start to add up .