tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1357343582035507270.post2689646899815491654..comments2023-10-29T03:49:50.885-07:00Comments on If You Can Read This, You're Lying: Infinite Christmas, or, Thirst for AnnihilationpHhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00298844811436630754noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1357343582035507270.post-68867912656736137032014-12-25T14:49:39.360-08:002014-12-25T14:49:39.360-08:00Note at Christmas 1948
Throughout known history v...Note at Christmas 1948<br /><br />Throughout known history various attempts have been made to awaken Man to the mystery of his existence. So strong, however, is the external man, the man formed by contact with external life via the senses—in short, the acquired Personality—that these attempts eventually become useless and must give way to other attempts always with the same aim.<br /><br />Man asleep takes for granted both his own existence and the existence of the Universe. This keeps him in bondage to the external world, to Nature and its laws. Such a man, if he thinks at all, believes that Nature created itself somehow or other, in remote ages—a strange idea if you come to reflect on it. Now as a result of this great power of hypnotism that external life exerts, Man's real essential part cannot develop. Essence, although not developed, and in so many ways childish, is the real man or woman and cannot grow as long as the part of Man turned outwards to life dominates them.<br /><br />As said, people take this mystery of their own existence and the Universe for granted. It is only when one begins to feel and ponder this mystery that it may become possible to awaken from sleep. This capacity is called Magnetic Centre. If a man feels mystery in all things, if he feels that nothing has been explained, if he can see that there are life-influences in the world, such as the Financial Times, and distinct from them other influences, such as the Gospels, then he begins to feed, nourish, cause to grow, his inner essential side—that is, his Essence. Small children, as Essence, wonder. They are soon given answers that stop them.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Remember this: your Personality is not you. What is really you lies behind it. For, behind all the manifestations of the Personality and especially the False Personality, which is what is least you, and is the cause of most useless suffering in the pain-factory of this world, there lies something that is really you. This is called Real I.<br /><br />Being born on this planet, we have to win this goal by self-observation, by not identifying. It is not given. By shedding, by taking off, by stripping off the outer coats of yourself that you have taken as yourself, and starting with the False Personality that seeks to keep up nothing but a fiction of yourself, a distortion, often very expensive literally to keep going, and always a great expense psychologically, then you begin to move towards Real I.<br /><br />Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 4mistah charley, ph.d.https://www.blogger.com/profile/06303695341246058680noreply@blogger.com