Wrapping Up and Muffling, or Opening and Resounding
For full citations of abbreviated references, please see Introduction and Bibliography.
As always, posts assume familiarity with fundamental fourth way texts and concepts.
An ongoing tricky subject for me is, on the one hand, the need for verbal language to define ideas and things as exactly as possible; yet, on the other hand, there is the ever present danger of what should be a living vehicle becoming a hollow shell, with no life in it. The vehicle, the written and sounding word, lives only because of what it contains. And what it contains, or may contain, is more subtle - largely invisible, not heard, not known - than the outer part which carries it. If the shell is taken for what is important, and its essential purpose and possibilities forgotten, then what it carries will soon die, if indeed it was not born dead.
C.S. Nott relates an episode where,
. . . three of us were sitting with Orage at one of the little tables outside the dining room at the Prieuré. Orage was holding forth about something or other and Gurdjieff, who was sitting at another table with Stjoerneval, was evidently listening to the tones of voice, and observing our gestures and postures and facial expressions. For he got up, came over to us and said, 'Orage, I not like that scarf you wear. You know why?' Orage shook his head. 'It remind me of Ouspensky. He wore such thing sometimes. Never did I like such scarf of his.' Then he went indoors.
We asked each other what he meant. Orage said, 'I suspect he meant that I was being too formatory. I sometimes am. Ouspensky is too.'1
The use of the word "formatory" and related terms, such as "formatory apparatus," are present in the English renditions of Gurdjieff's early teaching,2 and in the expositions of his direct pupils.3