Bennett readings – LR Compilation and notes

Deeper man

This world has something of the nature of the other two and we can say “being reconciles
will and function.” Being is that which allows us to be a complete whole.

Being can be said to be the state of concentration or the state of availability, of energy.
But energies are of different qualities and there are different levels of being corresponding
to the quality of the energies that are concentrated.

Now that the idea of energy has become respectable, it is all too easy to forget that
energy is unseen and that all we deal in are pictures which are useful to our calculations.
Energies, even of the simplest kind, do not belong to the world of function alone.

The concentration of higher energies requires the formation of a suitable vessel. This
means that our being must be strong enough to contain them without danger. What we
call the “transformation of being” is raising the level at which energy can be concentrated;
so that experiences that at present are impossible become possible and powers which
cannot now be exercised become available to the will.

Being is potency; the power to organize. For us men, being is what enables us to keep
ourselves together in the midst of all the activities of thought, feeling, and body. The
“more” the being, the more we are able to harmonize and hold together the various
functions.

When there is one vessel in us for the concentration of energy, there can be one will and
we can be whole. The unification of our being is a practical undertaking, consisting of
struggle with ourselves and sacrifice.

The will side is strengthened in us whenever we work from our own initiative,
uninfluenced by the likes and dislikes, pleasures or pains, associations, and so on of our
machines; and regardless of the reactions we have toward other people. Until we have
learned to work in this manner, whatever exercises we know and whatever results we
seem to be achieving, we have not actually crossed the threshold of work on the will.

It is only in the last two hundred years or less that science has used the word “energy.”
The word was introduced in the first half of the nineteenth century, not because anyone
observed energy but because it was convenient to have a word to describe the way in
which things behaved when they changed their composition;

We can therefore correctly translate alam-i arvah as the “world of energies.” What this
term signifies was discovered a long time ago: that there is something invisible behind all
that we are able to see which yet acts in the visible world. There is a constant intercourse
between the worlds of bodies and energies.

Our role in the world is connected with the conscious transformation of energies.

When we eat, we breathe, we see, we touch, and so on, we are taking in energies, and
unless we are trying to work on ourselves, these energies transform automatically in us
with automatic consequences. When it is like that, we are helpless. As Gurdjieff put it, we
are just waiting about “for roast pigeon to fly into our mouths.”
These sorts of ideas can easily be verified even by such a simple thing as reading. If we
read passively, from time to time we may be sensitive to the meaning of the words but
the net result is only a stimulation of chance associations. What is written may even be
completely misread. But when we try to bring ourselves into contact with the process of
reading, so that we are able to distinguish between our associations and what is being said
in the book, an energy is accredited to our account. Through this, we may be able to
understand something in a completely different way.

If “conscious energy” is in operation, then although our ordinary feelings, sensations, and
thoughts may continue unabated, we are no longer inside them in the same way but we
are removed from them as if they were objective or “outside.” Similarly, when we snap
out of a reverie: suddenly we notice that this daydream has been going on, whereas a
moment before we were that dreaming. It is this relativity that gives us the chance to see
the content of ourselves objectively.

Energies are not like bodies and they are not separated and distinguished as bodies are. It
is better to think of the scale as a series of gradations so that each energy merges into the
next. Every level of energy is organized by the level above and disorganized by the level
below. This is how we can recognize their difference.

All our instinctive automatic processes, such as association, the beating of the heart,
breathing, and digestion, can to some degree be controlled. This is where we can begin to
talk of “work on oneself,” even though it is a relatively external thing. For example, we
have postures of sitting, standing, and walking and mannerisms of movement that are
often wasteful of energy and impair the working of our organism. If we put our attention
on the state of our muscles, it is usually the case that we find them unnecessarily tense.
They are blindly responding to stimuli from our emotions and associations or reacting to
the environment. It is possible to relax them through the organizing influence of higher
energies. But there are postures and tensions of our thinking and feeling also. When we
begin to study these, we can realize that all together they produce the appearance of a
man that can deceive not only others but ourselves as well. The automatic energy is the
first that belongs to the scale of subjective energies, and there is a kind of experience
associated with it. The automatic “man-machine” is really a ghost. It is a suit of clothes
with nobody inside. The man inside has to be awakened from his dreams.
To avoid this confusion, we have to know what it is to hold together opposites. When we
like something, it is useful to see how we can dislike it and vice versa. If we find ourselves
saying “no” to an idea, it is useful to see ourselves in agreement with it also. It is only
when we are able to come under the combined action of “yes” and “no” that we really
have the possibility of choice.

Everyone assumes that they have feelings, but in reality, most people have little sensitivity
in their feeling life. It is all closed in to a narrow circle of reactions. If we begin seriously to
study our emotional life, especially if we can do this with others who have the same aim,
we will soon see how much imagination we have about it and how emotionally insensitive
we are to people.

It is very difficult to work directly on the feelings. The body is much easier. By simply
bringing our attention into the body, it becomes sensitive. This we properly call “sensing”
and the energy involved “sensation.” Work with the head brain is also much easier than
with the feeling brain. It is possible to some degree to keep our attention on an idea or a
pattern. By combining sensitive thought with sensitive bodily presence, something can be
evoked in the feelings. The most practical way of overcoming automatisms in any brain is
by combining the action of the other two.

At the beginning of the work there has to come a reeducation of the three brains so that
each of them in its own particular domain comes to operate in a normal fashion. Such as
we are, we do not have a normal intellectual, emotional, or physical life. Instead of the
normal urges we are filled with abnormal needs and desires, urges which are unrelated to
our true well-being. We have imaginary pictures of what is needed for our bodies, we
cultivate negative emotions, and we allow our heads to be stuffed with nonsense. Little by
little we have to develop an understanding of what thinking, feeling, and action are and
what they are for.

We can begin to work with the exercise of our own initiative in our functions so that
instead of moving, thinking, or feeling in reaction to a stimulus, we move, think, or feel
from we ourselves. Our power to do this is limited, but we need to learn to use the power
that we have.

There is the “will-to-see” of the thinking Center […] There is the “will-to-be” of the feeling
Center […] There is the “will-to-live” of the moving center […] By these urges we can be
spiritualized. It is through them that the worlds of function, being, and will can become a
whole reality: the world of function through the moving center; the world of being
through the feeling center, and the world of will through the thinking center—and the
three of them as one.

First, we have to become aware of the senseless habits that we have. Second, we have to
explore the potentials of our bodies and become familiar with how they work. No work of
transformation is possible without knowledge of our own body. Third, we have to
accustom the body to entirely new usages, and for this purpose, the ability to concentrate
the sensitive energy in the form of sensation is indispensable. As we said before, if the
operation of one brain is to be changed, it is necessary to bring to bear the other two. In
the system of movements created by Gurdjieff, all three brains are educated to work
together.

The true power of the feelings is to be able to perceive directly how things are. This is not
done through knowing, sight, or hearing but through participation, by entering into things.
The feeling nature of the normal man can penetrate into the depth of the world, beyond
the world of bodies, which we can reach with our senses, and beyond what can be
grasped by conceptual thinking. The real nature of feeling is not in time and space but in
“eternity.” Eternity is the zone of experience in which things do not go on as processes but
are what they are.

Neither can the almost universal habit among people of talking, which is thought to be
“communicating,” help us to be together. This kind of “communication” keeps us
separate. It is trying to do with function what belongs to being. When we can be with
other people and not be altogether wrapped up in our own associations, it is a very big
thing. It enables us to be with other people in silence and feel ourselves at one with them.
If we are able to share in this way, a connection is made which does not depend 6n
knowing but is a direct awareness. Only when this sort of experience begins to play a
significant part in our lives can we begin to be what we are.

But it is the next step that is crucial. Whenever we find ourselves in our thought aware of
the idea of work, we should make a corresponding effort to practice what might otherwise
remain only a possibility in our thinking. If, for example, we have the thought of being
aware of ourselves, we should bring this into our bodies and become aware of our
physical presence. Then from the two sides of thought and sensation we can try to
become aware of our feeling state as well. In this way, our thoughts can become a
reminder to work; and when this has become second nature to us, something can begin to
change in our thinking so that it is not always so weak and passive as it ordinarily is.

The force that is in the reactional self is very seductive. This self will feel that the reactions
it has are its very hold on reality. What has to be understood is that the reactions that
take place in us do have a very important role in our lives, but they are only “raw
material” for our own being and not ends in themselves. What has to be learned is how to
“bear the clash of opposites” in ourselves, for it is then that the reactional nature
becomes as it should be. The avoidance of this clash or tension is characteristic of the man
who is dominated by his reactional self.

To begin to master the working of the sensitive energy in us we must study how it works
in our lives. This is made difficult by the fact that we tend to identify with any state that
happens to be present in us, and what we have to learn is how to direct our attention
outside of “ourselves”—that is, our states— to what is around us. If, for example, we find
ourselves rejecting some idea, we have to get ourselves to see that “Here is this rejection
in me; there is that idea which is being rejected.” We can train ourselves in this way, but it
is at the beginning not so easy as it sounds.

The reactional self “steals” the energy: we like or dislike what we see of ourselves and we
get into some state that is as blind as what we had before the moment of seeing. To see
ourselves without reaction is one of the first tastes of freedom.

To come to see, it is not enough to “try to become more aware.” This in itself does not
lead to very much. We have to struggle actively against likes and dislikes in us: do what we
dislike doing and not do what we like doing; set ourselves to appreciate a point of view
contradictory to what we believe to be our own; be active when we feel inertial and
inactive when we feel energetic. Injunctions such as these are liable to be terribly
misunderstood. They are taken to be an advocation of a masochistic life. But the fruit of
their practice is rarely suffering, it is an enhanced sense of life. We become a little more
free from the mutual exclusion of opposites and, instead of being at one pole or other,
either being attracted or repelled, we experience the force between them in ourselves.
This is the force of life that lifts us out of the mechanical life, and it is for this that the
reactional self exists.

We must explain something further about the training of the reactional self. This can only
be done properly from within. It is of no value—in fact, it is detrimental—for people to be
forced into contradictory situations against their wish. Conditions can be created in which
it is relatively easy for people to recognize opportunities for struggle, and they can be
encouraged and guided to do so, but force only serves to stimulate the lower part of the
selfhood. When the struggle begins to be established in this right way— that is, not for the
approval or disapproval of others or for external reward but from within—then this is the
way to an opening up of the next higher self, the divided self. Educating people in this
path is a very high responsibility.

If we begin to work on ourselves in earnest, as time goes on we are bound

to find that there is “something” in us that wants no part of it. This “some
thing”
wants to have its own way and does not want to recognize any master
either within or without. Or else it is apathetic and only wants to be left alone.
This self-assertion, however, is not the whole story. It is from the very same
place in us that there comes the wish to be free of slavery and to fit into the
whole, to serve and to understand what needs to be done. All of this belongs
to the divided self and is the reason for its name.

We can only get at it indirectly, by finding out, for example, what we “cannot do” in
situations, such as take the initiative or keep to a plan and so on, which gives us a clue as
to our type. The observation of our typical behaviors can lead us to understand that there
is “something” in us which is imposing a pattern of what is possible and impossible for us
to do, that is not due to external conditioning or the state of our mechanism […] Type is
rather like a style of life that has almost infinite possibilities of variation. But we must
remember that we are rather like actors who have a very limited repertoire of roles.

Unless we are free from the domination of the two lower selves, work belonging to this
third level is ill-advised. The lower selves confuse the issue to such an extent that any
effort to deal with the divided self is bound to be worse than useless, even harmful. We
need to clear away the rubbish of the lower selves before we can begin to be aware of the
hidden pattern of our nature. When this emerges, it can be very hard to bear. We begin to
see how it is that we destroy our possibilities, reject, refuse to make sacrifices, all in the
belief that we are holding on to our true reality.

There are in reality no special people; and in work on ourselves we are all equally beggars,
equally beginners, must all start from where we are here and now. The choice confronting
us is simple enough: to live like animals and die like dogs or to work on ourselves in order
to become men. Then we can begin to live from a practical understanding of what we are
and what we can become. But for this to come to pass, we have to commit ourselves, here
and now, to work: this is the strait gate and the narrow way—there is no other.

To work with other people is not easy,

and the more real the work
the more difficult it is.

One thing we have to be very clear about: nearly all of our life is lived automatically, as a
machine. The man-machine can produce the most complex behavior without there being
any experience at all—at least, any inner experience. When we are in this automatic state,
we are shadows, ghosts, with no inner substance. Then it is quite legitimate to say that the
inner world is a sort of flotsam on the surface of external bodily events. In our practical
inner exercises, we are learning how to work with the material of the inner world. This
material consists of four media, just as the bodily world consists of four media. They are
four energies. There is thought, feeling, and sensation. The fourth, which is on a different
level, is consciousness. In both the bodily and the inner world, the fourth medium is a link
with the next highest world. Light or radiant energy links the bodily with the inner world.
Consciousness links the inner world with the truly spiritual world, the third world. What
we mean by “spiritual” is that which is beyond form.

For ourselves, we have to learn how to take the second world into account and how to live
with it. It is a world as varied but much deeper than this physical world. The real
difference is that it is under different laws. It has its own various “places” in the bodily
sense. When Gurdjieff speaks about all this, he does so in terms of the body kesdjan.
Kesdjan means “vessel of the spirit” in Persian and describes the kind of being or
organization that is able to “move” in the alam-i arvah. In other words, the kesdjan body is
more than a dream; it is a substantial reality that can be acquired or developed in us.
Contrary to many current beliefs, this inner body is not born with us, neither does it form
automatically. It cannot be produced in the world where our personality is dominant.

The possibility is given to us of forming a vessel which will cross the alam-i arvah and
reach the spiritual world. Then it can be discarded. This vessel is the body kesdjan.
Gurdjieff describes the state of the substance of the inner world in ordinary man as like a
cloud. It is amorphous, without any coherence of its own. It temporarily takes up the
“shape” of whatever physical part is attracting our interest. At one time it is a mouth, at
another an eye, at another an anus, and so on. If life is lived like that, then only the very
barest kind of organization is produced because without the body it is always in a state of
dream. Many of the exercises that we do are aimed at producing some coherence in this
substance. We learn how to use our attention to separate and blend the various energies
of which it is made. This is what is meant by alchemy. Besides this active work, it is also
necessary to practice meditation or something of the kind, in which we do not try to do
anything. If we can become quiet enough, the energies settle into their appropriate places
in us and can coalesce to form the second body. We can call whatever state this substance
is in the “soul,” but we have to remember that this is a relative term: some souls are much
more substantial than others.

Concerning Subud

The true man in us is not of this earth and, although he lies sleeping in the depths of our
essence, he has not lost the thread that connects him with his Source. From this
connection, there arise in us impulses that are truly sacred inasmuch as they are the
means whereby we are drawn back towards our place of origin.

Four of the Sacred Impulses are: surrender, patience, trust and sincerity. They do not
originate in the mind and the will of man, but they are operative in us only by our own
consent, and by understanding them better we can come to appreciate the true role of
human freedom in the completion of our nature.

By Surrender is meant not a state of passivity or irresponsibility, but the recognition that
we men are not the masters of causes—that is, we cannot 'do'. To see for ourselves that
our 'doing' cannot go beyond the mechanical processes of this world and to realize that
we must put aside the idea that we can set ourselves free by our own efforts—these are
the conditions of surrender. In its full significance, surrender is to place oneself wholly in
the hands of God—but we cannot have any idea of what this means until after we have
become conscious of the link between our own spirit and the Holy Spirit. In practice,
therefore, surrender means to put aside our own desire to 'do' something and to allow
the action of the latihan to proceed in us.

Patience is the acceptance of the times and seasons that are not of man but of God. So
long as we look for or expect results, we hinder the inner working. Impatience
is always a manifestation of self-will. Even if our aim is our own perfecting or the true
welfare of others, we trip over ourselves if we 'try to go faster than God'. I have referred
to the two streams of life and mechanicalness; true patience enables us to be carried
safely and surely in the stream of life. All impatience throws us back into the stream of
mechanicalness that leads to destruction. Patience is a sacred impulse. As St. Paul
declared, it is one of the manifestations of charity. But true patience can come only from
within. Patience imposed from without is weakness.

Sacred Influences