May The Force Be With You

Attention is a force—and an energy and a mystery. As a force, attention, when directed inward, awakens in us a “sensation”—a sensitive energy.
This simple act of “sensing” is unique to the legacy of human development work transmitted by GI Gurdjieff.
In a careful study of PD Ouspensky’s Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, chapter nine, we find that being present to the “organic sensation of life” in our body allows for an accumulation of an energy without which self-observation and self-remembering are but a dream.

Women On Work

A “second generation” of “grand-daughters” ranging in age from fifty-five to no-longer-alive.
The relatively-unknown and some of the coming-to-be-known women who have been and are presently part of the transmission of Gurdjieff’s Teachings from then to now.

“I saw ‘myself’ as the only thing I could work on,
not the doing away with war over which we have no control in our present state.”
— Marjorie Von Harten, in her book Walking in the World.

“The primary effort in work on the body is to anchor the attention… here in the flesh.”
— Patty de Llosa, in her book The Practice of Presence.

“Dorothy Phillpotts’ book brings the objective and the subjective together.”
— Peter Brook, from his Foreword to Phillpotts’ book Discovering Gurdjieff.

“Those who search and find an answer… have an obligation to share this experience with others.”
— Melissa Marston Macleod, in her book My Life: a Spiritual Quest.

The Terror-of-the-Situation

In his epic historical novel All and Everything, Gurdjieff as Beelzebub laments to his grandson Hussein of a newly-formed-abnormal “hope in something” which paralyzes human possibility and results in the disease “tomorrow,” the “putting off until later everything that needs to be done at the moment.” — cf. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Chapter XXVI: “The Terror-of-the-Situation”

Today, on the eve of what many hope will be a new beginning for America and the world, when a young political upstart named Barack Hussein Obama will enter America’s most public of public offices, while humanity is once again in terror of a situation of its own making, many of us are sincerely asking if there really is a yes-we-can-hope that is more than political slogan?