Unbuffering and Understanding
A problem with perception
This is a partially rewritten article from 2023, regarding the question of regaining our birthright of the shock of new impressions.
Self-initiation through science studies; buffers preventing self-remembering; impressions losing force; only “I” can fill the fourth centre; what is corresponding data?; the third factor in the formation of the three totalities of psychic functioning and the striving for selfhood at different levels.
Solita Solano writes on Tuesday, October 19, 1937, that,
. . . one year from the day [Gurdjieff] told me to go review all my science studies and report. I had written out a report on my year’s work, my conclusions and “discoveries,” I took it to the café and he gave permission to read it, and looked at my chart of head and body systems, to which I had applied his law of trimonia [law of three] for certain exercises. He said nothing when I finished reading, so I asked, “Perhaps I was impudent to compose such paper for you?”
GURDJIEFF: Not impudent. Even I thank you. You have unconsciously given me answer something I was searching for my book, about future of humanity. If you have found such thing, others of future humanity also can do. This is what you have enlighten for me.
KANARI: I can’t believe it, Mr. Gurdjieff.GURDJIEFF: You can believe. You have initiated yourself.1
From this extract, perhaps we can take courage and motivation in our own striving to fathom the gist of Gurdjieff’s ideas, alongside and with the help of “science studies.” Indeed, we have to initiate ourselves into understanding his ideas through our own efforts of pondering. And in this Fourth Way, as is said, the results are only proportional to understanding.2