When we live in ‘the Box’ - the box of our thoughts, the box of what we have automatically assumed to be true - then we’ll never come across anything that is genuinely new. When we live in the box...
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There are only two possibilities that are open to us - either we can become ‘machines’, or we can become ‘philosophers’. It's as simple as that! It's as simple as that - there is no middle ground, we’re either one...
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The Equilibrium World is the world that comes into being when everything that happens has to happen in a way that agrees with the guidelines, agrees with the standards, agrees with the ideal values that have been specified by that...
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The thing about living in a one-sided way is that we can have no awareness of the absurdity of the so-called ‘life’ that we are leading as a result. We have zero awareness regarding the absurd nature of our existence...
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We are - in this high-tech, super-rational world of ours - as far away from understanding psychosis as we could ever be. We have lots to say about it for sure, we have all sorts of different types of medication...
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A circle is a ‘self-referential’ kind of thing, we might say - a circle is a self-referential kind of thing because every point on its circumference has the very same relationship to the centre, which is also the circle, just...
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We all have this sure and certain idea regarding ‘who we are’, and ‘what life is all about’, and this notion that we have - no matter how ridiculously unsupported it might be - is so sure and certain that...
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It's impossible to be in Rational / Purposeful Mode and yet at the same time be 'in reality'. That just can't be done. When we think about things then we're not in the real world, and when we deliberately act...
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It's not so much a matter of 'being versus non-being' (although it is that as well) but ‘being versus pseudo-being’, which is infinitely more nuanced, infinitely more subtle. Pseudo-being is all we know! 'Margarine is all we know', Russian mystic...
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Any artificial situation is always going to be balanced by the equal and opposite counterpart to this situation. This is how it always is with artificial things, and we shouldn't really be too surprised about this - what else would...
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The nature of all phenomena is inherently tranquil, so the Buddhist sutras tell us, and yet this is a tranquillity that we very rarely perceive in everyday life. Instead, the world as we know it is full of strife and...
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Wherever there is purposeful activity there is a self, there is an ego. Were it not for the purposeful activity, there could not be a self. Not in a million years could there be a self. This is backwards to...
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The rational identity assumes a framework (a context) and then it makes tautologically true statements within this framework. It conceives, and then enacts, tautological actions. Any action that the rational identity takes within this defined context is always going to...
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‘Freedom is taken, never given’, says Gurdjieff. If there is one who controls us, rules us, regulates us, then no matter how long we wait, no matter how well we behave, no matter how compliant we are, we are never...
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We can go along with what happens, but we can't predict what will happen. We can’t know what is going to happen before it happens. This creates a glitch because we - by default - refuse to have anything to...
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Technical knowledge is the ‘lower analogue’ of wisdom. In this high-tech world of ours (which we adulate so much) it's all about technical knowledge, of course and technical knowledge is – for us – simply a ‘means to an end’....
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Psychological growth can't be forced, the expansion of consciousness - as it used to be called - can't be done ‘to order’. That's just not the way things work - whatever else we might be able to force or control,...
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When we act out of the External Authority (rather than acting out of our own unprovable, unverifiable but also quite irreplaceable sense of interiority) not only does this make us instantly expendable, instantly replaceable, and instantly generic in nature, it...
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