G.I.Gurdjieff

Every person can do whatever others can do. If one can, everyone can. Genius, talent, is all nonsense. The secret is simple—to do things as a three-brained being. Whoever can think and do things in a right way can at once do a thing as well as another person who has been doing it wrongly all his life. What has to be learned by this other one in ten years, the newcomer learns in two or three days, and he then does it better than the one who spent his life doing it.

It is easy to decide to change, sitting quietly in our room. But as soon as we meet someone, the horse kicks.

And it always drives along the same kind of street, the broad boulevards. Some parts got rusty from long disuse. If, at times, the carriage needs to take a different street, it almost always suffers a breakdown and a more or less serious overhaul afterward.

The essence of right work is that the moving, feeling and thinking centers work together to produce an action. There is a thousand times more value even in polishing the floor as it should be done than in writing twenty-five books.

The horse inside must change. First of all, we must realize that we are not what we think we are. We are the horse. If we wish to work, we have to begin by teaching the horse a language in which we can talk to it, tell it what we know and show it the necessity of, say, changing its disposition. If we succeed in this, then, with our help, the horse too will begin to learn. But change is possible only inside.

The power of changing oneself lies not in the mind, but in the body and the feeling. Unfortunately, however, our body and our feeling are so constituted that they couldn’t care less about anything so long as they are happy. They live only for the present moment, and their memory is short. The mind alone lives for tomorrow. Each part has its own virtue or merit. That of the mind is to look ahead. But it is only the other two that can “do.”

Desire must be in the horse, and ability, the capacity, in the carriage.

If our body and feeling receive for their existence the necessary energy and various elements in the proportion of, say, twenty parts, our mind receives only one part. Our attention is the product of these elements, of this material. Our separate parts each have their own attention; its duration and power are proportionate to the material received. The part that receives more material has more attention.

Christ and the others spoke of the death that can take place in life, the death of the tyrant from whom our slavery comes, the death that is a necessary condition of the first and principal liberation of man.

If we were deprived of our illusions and all that prevents us from seeing reality—if we were deprived of our interests, our cares, our expectations and hopes—all our strivings would collapse. Everything would become empty and there would remain an empty being, an empty body, only physiologically alive. This would be the death of “I,” the death of everything it consisted of, the destruction of everything false collected through ignorance or inexperience. All this would remain in us merely as material, but subject to selection. Then we would be able to choose for ourselves and not have imposed on us what others like. We would have conscious choice.

Yet the same order of relationship is possible among the functions in a person with only a physical body. The physical functions may control feeling, thought and consciousness; feeling may control the physical functions; thought may control the physical functions and feeling; or consciousness may control the physical functions, feeling and thought.