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Ready to Begin
While doing some preliminary research on Gurdjieff, I came across this quote:
“The moment when a man who is looking for the way meets a man who knows the way is called the first threshold or the first step. From this first threshold the stairway begins. Between ‘life’ and the ‘way’ lies the ’stairway.’ Only by passing along the ’stairway’ can a man enter the ‘way.’ In addition, the man ascends this stairway with the help of the man who is his guide; he cannot go up the stairway by himself. The way begins only where the stairway ends, that is, after the last threshold on the stairway, on a level much higher than the ordinary level of life.”*
* Gurdjieff as quoted by Ouspensky In Search of the Miraculous, p201
Anyway, I can sort of relate to what he’s saying here. Let me try to explain. Somewhere in the past month or so, I’ve started feeling different about my research and my spiritual exploration. Different in a good way, I mean. I feel I’ve worked through a whole humongous catalogue of different hang-ups and bad ideas that I had. After several years of really serious study, I’m now at a point where I paradoxically feel like I’m finally ready to begin. I’m finally ready to start learning for real. That’s not to invalidate what’s come before, of course. But looking back, I realize how much of what I was really learning during the preceding period was simply how to untie my own knots. And now that they are (mostly) undone and combed out, I find myself ready to weave them into new patterns.
Another Gurdjieff quote:
“In order to do, it is necessary to know; but in order to know, it is necessary to find out how to know.”
I think what I’ve been learning is how to know.
Has anybody else come to a realization like this in their experience? The realization that you were working on a very different set of problems than you thought. I’m intuiting that it’s a hugely widespread situation when it comes to the occult and spirituality, but I’ve not really heard anybody else discuss it. Of course, the preparation this gives you seems to be immeasurable for where you’ll eventually go, but who knows. Anyway, this relates to what Gurdjieff is talking about in terms of the “stairway” versus the actual “way” itself. Maybe I was mistaking the stairway for the way. Or, possibly more accurately, I was mistaking the way to the stairway for the way itself. In any case, all I’m really saying is that I know how much I don’t know, and I’m ready to really begin in earnest. Whatever the hell that means.
- BIG ELK - “I Wanna Be Ready” [Lyrics]
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- Next: Gurdjieff on the Teacher
August 26th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
i’ve totally gone through exactly what you mean. for me, a lot of it came along when i was making the transition from blogging about politics and whatnot to blogging primarily about gnosticism and fortean/occult issues. for a while, i was really wrapped up in the whole politix scene, but i came to realize after a bout of ‘existential ennui’ (and with the guidance of a few excellent teachers) that everything i’d been doing up to that point had been ‘preparing the way,’ as it were, for what i genuinely needed to be doing. i needed to understand the uselessness of the political illusion, and come to terms with what i *really* wanted to do with gnosticism.
there’s a whole lot of this idea in sufism. like, people think they’re well along down the sufi path and then realize that they’ve just been getting ready the whole time. a good reference might be ‘learning how to learn’ by idries shah.
August 26th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
What Jp said but ‘Knowing How to Know’, Shah’s last book is also a good one imo.
The prologue of this book spends a lot of time talking about ‘inclusion and exclusion’ and the idea that we sometimes think we can only progress by adding or ‘including’ things whereas in reality we can also progress by ‘excluding’ certain things.
Wisdom, in this model, is knowing what to include and what to exclude. Maybe this is what you have been finding out by trial and error and have finally cleared the underbrush.
August 26th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
I’ve been reading your blog for awhile now as part of my research into contemporary attitudes towrd spiritual life, and this is the most intelligent post I have read yet. You are starting to get the outline of the transcendental path.
Ordinary knowing will fill your head with garbage; knowing how to know, or epistemology, is the key to real knowledge. The process of knowledge is also given nicely in the Gurdjieff qoute. You must find someone who knows, and they can help you because they know the process of knowing transcendental things.
As a young spiritual student I read very widely; Gurdjieff was my first contact with a real esoteric school, something I call the Esoteric Teaching, and when I encountered him I realized that I hadn’t really understood a bit of all I had read. I didn’t know how to know; I thought reading some books was knowledge. This encounter helped focus my search for a real spiritual teacher. Hopefully it will push you in that direction as well.
August 26th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
“To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much” -Gurdjieff
http://www.endlesssearch.co.uk/index_philosophy.htm
August 26th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
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Make Ready the Way
All this talk of being ready to finally begin has called to mind a Bible passage. It appears in the Gospels […]
August 27th, 2005 at 6:29 am
Gurdjieff Links
Looks like Tim Boucher is getting into Gurdjieff and there are what potentially promise to be some great discussions developing over there on Gurdjieff’s ideas.
I tend to waffle on about Gurdjieff quite a bit but it occurred to me that his thou…