the outer limits

a work friend made some simple statement that she likes spiritual writings she can understand, they are practical and make sense.

immediately i recognized (rightly or wrongly) that she was measuring her potential evolution against what she already likes, against what she already is capable of understanding. and i was immediately grateful for the impossibility of gurdjieff's difficult and convoluted writing.

***

once i was given an exercise to make a certain effort for a period, and then to cease as entirely as possible with just enough “maintenance” to continue to observe. somehow with that direction, for once, rather than being so taken with an energetic buzz, that afforded an opportunity to experience something quieter and stiller – who knew!?!?

from that experience about ceasing to make an effort, i often suspect any “thrilling” sensation to be a “descent” or a “radiation” rather than an “emanation” and am sometimes reminded to try to “try less” and to “watch more” when i experience a buzz, rather than let it take over.

***

among other friends in the Work we briefly touched upon:

Soon after the beginning of my sixth sojourn I became categorically convinced, as a result of my experimental investigations, that most of the causes of the strangeness of their psyche lie, not in that usual consciousness in which they have automatized themselves to exist during what they call their 'waking state,' but in the consciousness which, thanks to their abnormal ordinary being-existence, was gradually driven back within their common presence and which, although it should have been their real consciousness, remains in them in its primitive state and is called by them the 'subconscious.'

and then we sat quietly for a short while. and under the suggestion from that passage, that my waking consciousness wouldn’t “take me there” i allowed some “sleep” to overtake my mind and even the characteristic experience of “energy” subsided and in its place everything became remarkably still and quiet. what was a “buzz” now had a “relatively” “more objective” still and silent quality.

perhaps this seeming breaching of the restrictive structure of my personality was only possible because the idea was somehow novel, not anticipated – that’s why the matrix portals only work for a limited time. ("In the Construct, Neo and Trinity get armaments. 'Neo,' protests Trinity, 'No one has ever done anything like this.' 'That's why it's going to work,' he replies." -http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/synopsis)

i shared my (big) experience. but it met some downplaying, like we’re gathering bits of information, etc., etc., and i realized that i had stumbled into an experience bigger than he credited. but inasmuch as i realized he wasn’t quite right, i realized "i" could not be right either – that my know-it-all'ness, at my level, is mathematically impossible. so in a roundabout fashion i realize my friend was right, we’re just gathering bits of information. i'm also reminded that whenever i share some “insight” with someone, it gets picked up by a something ordinary which “already knew.” that's always frustrating, but, i guess, lawful. here's what i read recently:

The subject of the conversation at my table and across the restaurant was the bad weather. The diners expressed a number of different views on the subject, which the waiters – invested with a presumed meterological wisdom, and locals, after all – took it upon themselves to arbitrate. In the end the faction that forecast good weather for the following day won.

--Robert Bolano, The Third Reich (a novel, but reading that is why i purchased it). (reminiscent of "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.")

every idea in the work, i do not understand them today, but i wish to understand them more and more through work on myself

--attributed to someone in a group, "wish" is my emphasis:

“‘Wish’ is the most powerful thing in the world. Higher than God.” – i don't know where that comes from and cannot vouch that this is a real quote (so if you copy the phrase please include a similar disclaimer).