We live in an interval, A great collective interval. All the forms are cracking. Everything is loose, blurred, uncertain.

"There are periods in the life of humanity," says Gurdjieff, "which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when men irretrievably lose their reason ... Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge."

...) Balancing the world of our "outer life," that of our ordinary life in the world, with our "inner life" requires a lucidity and deft sensitivity that only presence can give. So little does the web of our outer life of family-relationships-job conform to our inner that often we live with a sense of compromise, resignation; and if we have touched that "something else" that Gurdjieff speaks of, perhaps even a sense of self-betrayal.

...) With experience, our attention may shift from the behavioral aspects of what we observe to the energy itself, its various qualities, tones, patterns of movement. The behavioral is still useful; it can alert us to the moment. But instead of stopping at this level of observation, we can go deeper into energy-experiencing. In doing so, we might begin to emphasize "seeing-feeling" less and "listening-feeling" more. As wonderful as "seeing" is, it can have a certain mental quality. Certainly it is not as subtle a sense as listening. Centered in listening, we are less bound to the object world. In listening, the division between what we have taken as our "outer" and "inner" worlds has no definitive demarcation. We hone our listening by simply listening without reference to object. In the fullness of the experiencing, we may come to quite subtle currents of vibration, audible included. Experiencing the whole of our vibration moves us to higher emotional qualities of feeling. The more inclusive, the wider and deeper will be our experiencing. Our conventional and restricted sense of "outer" and "inner" will be seen as being body-specific; that is, a reality of experiencing keyed to a definite vibratory body-world. [ more ]

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