SO I MUST GIVE, ALWAYS. THEY EXPECT
We were in the cafe promptly at seven, as instructed. Gurdjieff was alone at his table and appeared glad to see three of us. His friend had not come, he said without regret. We sat with him until his waiter brought his bill. To a generous tip he added, from his pocket, a handful of small wrapped candies which the gray-headed waiter gathered up with a pleased expression.
“Like a small boy,” Gurdjieff said as the waiter went off. “Always I take bonbons in my pocket, chiefly for children. They call me Monsieur Bonbon. Even here in ca£e by such name I am known. So I must give, always. They expect … “A sound of deep inner mirth escaped him as he repeated the name by which the innocents identified him. “Monsieur Bonbon!” … but we knew the real name of the man we followed out of the cafe to a taxi stand. His name was Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato. His name, in latter-day descent from those great teachers, was Gurdjieff.
~ Kathryn Hulme “Undiscovered Country”
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FOR ANOTHER SORT OF FATIGUE THERE IS ANOTHER LAW: THE MORE YOU GIVE, THE MORE YOU WILL RECEIVE
Questioner: I wish to ask about work and fatigue. It seems to me that there is a difference between efforts of work and automatic efforts. Exterior work takes our energy; the other work, on the contrary, should accumulate energy. But it is the opposite. One is very tired, one loses energy.
Gurdjieff: And in the meantime, you keep it. Consciously, you eat the electricity that you have in your body and you transform it. This constitutes your force. Not the same kind of fatigue. The fatigue from real work has a future; you are tired, that will give you a substantial result, recharge your accumulator. And if you continue, you accumulate a substantial substance which fills your accumulator (battery). The more you tire yourself, the more your organism elaborates this substance.
Questioner: Is it that fatigue is favorable or not to efforts of concentration?
Gurdjieff: If it is ordinary fatigue, it is not worthwhile to make the effort. It depends on the other accumulator. You will not be able to do even ordinary things. You will lose your vital forces. But for another sort of fatigue there is another law: the more you give, the more you will receive.
~ George Gurdjieff “Paris/Wartime Meetings”
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PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH THEY ARE CARRIED AWAY BY FEAR.
“Sometimes a man is lost in revolving thoughts which return again and again to the same thing, the same unpleasantness, which he anticipates and which not only will not but cannot happen in reality.
“These forebodings of future unpleasantnesses, illnesses, losses, awkward situations often get hold of a man to such an extent that they become waking dreams. People cease to see and hear what actually happens, and if someone succeeds in proving to them that their forebodings and fears were unfounded in some particular instance, they even feel a certain disappointment, as though they were thus deprived of a pleasant expectation.
“Very often a man leading a cultured life in cultured surroundings does not realize how big a role fears play in his life. He is afraid of everything: afraid of his servants, afraid of the children of his neighbor, the porter in the entrance hall, the man selling newspapers around the corner, the cab-driver, the shop assistant, a friend he sees in the street and tries to pass unobtrusively so as not to be noticed. And in their turn the children, the servants, the hall porter, and so on, are afraid of him.
“And this is so in ordinary, nominal times but, at such times as we are going through now [World War I], this all-pervading fear becomes clearly visible.
“It is no exaggeration to say that a great part of the events of the last year are based on fear and are the results of fear. Unconscious fear is a very characteristic feature of sleep. Man is possessed by all that surrounds him because he can never look sufficiently objectively on his relationship to his surroundings.
“He can never stand aside and look at himself together with whatever attracts or repels him at the moment. And because of this inability he is identified with everything. This too is a feature of sleep.
“You begin a conversation with someone with the definite aim of getting some information from him. To attain this aim you must never cease to watch yourself, to remember what you want, to stand aside and look at yourself and the man you are talking to. But you cannot do it Nine times out of ten you will become identified with the conversation and instead of getting the information you want, you will yourself tell him things you had no intention of telling.
“People have no idea how much they are carried away by fear. This fear is not easily defined. More often than not it is fear of awkward situations, fear of what another man may think. At times this fear becomes almost a mania.”
~ George Gurdjieff “Views from the Real World”
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IT IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW WORLD
On Saturday the 22nd, he walked out of his flat for the last time. I found him alone at the cafe. He had not been there for two or three weeks, and men and women from the Quartier des Ternes crowded in to salute him. None seemed to notice how ill he was. He spoke of the future, saying: “The next five years will decide. It is the beginning of a new world. Either the old world will make me ‘Tchik’ (i.e., squash me like a louse), or I will make the old world ‘Tchik.’ Then the new world can begin.”
~ JG Bennett “Witness”
The Toronto Hypnotherapist 