Why Bother?[1]

Why bother to begin this work on yourself? Others have been motivated by these kinds of observations that you yourself might make on your own present life:

• You make the same mistakes again and again, with painful consequences, and cannot seem to interrupt the mistakes
• You believe you are entitled to certain treatment or success or health that does not in fact often come your way
• You are genuinely unhappy, or suffering even, about various elements in your world
• You experience quite a bit of fear about your life, the life of the world itself, and with what you see in the daily news
• You experience too much helplessness, life just happening to you, without any genuine sense that you can make a difference in yours or others
• You read cryptic references in religious or psychological literature that allude to a better life, but you cannot decipher them; or there is reference to dramatic success in human functioning in various methods, but you attempt them and find they do not work for you that way
• You meet certain people who seem more alert and aware than you, perhaps more empathic, understanding, wise even, and you wonder if ‘that is just them’ or if they perhaps are drawing from some well that you too could drink from
• You don’t have any real standards (other than financial and consumer-possession ones) from which to ascertain how far you have come as a human being
• You give a kind of lip-service to “worshipping God,” perhaps even believing you are “born again;” you participate with  your religion but do not really feel deeply yoked to it, and see little from your efforts
• You have an opinion about yourself, ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ but others do not share it; (this attitude of yours is likely one of the biggest obstacles to actual inner development)
• You have the sense that you are not what you think you are: you overestimate yourself, and lie to yourself about this, constantly
• You truly believe that ‘others’ make you the way you are (“you make me angry”), that others are primarily to blame for the paucity of results you’ve achieved from your effort in traffic or career or love
• You were told, or read, that if you learned to observe yourself, without prejudice, repeatedly and objectively, that this would give birth the truth inside yourself, a kind of truth which can grow
• You do not know how to actually see things in yourself that you did not see before, nor what to do with these things

 

What will further your efforts?

• Learning how to observe yourself, over and over, without judgement or condemnation, you will encounter a deepening desire to develop yourself….

 

[1] Inspired by “Talk by Gurdjieff, September 1941”, provided by Richard Lefevre, personal communication, January 13, 2007