Below is a passage that I had to omit from my MA thesis. There simply was no room, and the passage proved redundant to the other text. But, the passage holds several kernals of truth & fully embodies the spirit of my work:
“You go into life according to the shape of your personality. You encounter life, people, and so on, through your personality, not directly. Is this clear? Now you do not see your personality. It is not conscious to you. So perhaps you blame life or people, or feel disappointed, and so on. The trouble is that you have acquired a certain mechanical device for making contact with life called personality that renders life to you according to its shape, as it were.
“And so here you are, always carrying about with you your personality, your apparatus for experiencing life, and always hoping perhaps, if you had a new environment, new people, a new house, new clothes, etc. that everything would be utterly different. How can that be? You are carrying about your apparatus for contacting life—that is, your personality. You may pack your bags and fill them with new clothes and go to the Anitpodes—but you carry your personality with you, with all its acquired habits of mind, habits of emotion, habits of behaviour, habits of talking, habits of finding fault, habits of movement, habits of health, and so on.
“Now this work is about how to get away from oneself, not from life. You do not get away from yourself by changing your outer scene. For this reason it is necessary to observe oneself and see what one’s personality is like and study it and see what one’s appartus is like. We all have all sorts of dreams about a new life—about ideal circumstances, marvelous people, etc. But such dreams are idle because even if we were placed in exceptional and beautiful conditions, such as are said to obtain in Paradise, we would react to them through our personalities and very soon be returned out as quite unsuitable, I fancy.
“The trouble really is that none of us knows how to live, because none of us sees that the trouble lies in the personality—that is, in the receptive-reactive machine we use to contact life. And we shall never learn how to live even a little aright if we do not work on personality in us, and see what it is in us in each case and what troubles arise from ourselves and not merely from others and from life.”
~(Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Vol. 1, p.278
Posted by bell at March 25, 2008 06:40 PM | TrackBack