saint buddha

     "It transpired that in his explanations of cosmic truths Saint Buddha had told them, among other things: 'Each of the three-centered beings existing on the various planets of our Great Universe, and of course on the Earth also, should in reality be only a particle of that Most Great Greatness which is the All-Embracing of all that exists; and the foundation of this Most Great Greatness is there Above, the better to embrace the essence of eveything existing."

Excerpt taken from Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, G. I. Gurdjieff, pub. Viking Arkana 1992,, p 225.

Food for levels

“There is still another system of classification,” he said, “which you also ought to understand. This is a classification in an altogether different ratio of octaves. The first classification by ‘food,’ ‘air,’ and medium definitely refers to ‘living beings’ as we know them, including plants, that is to say, to individuals. The other classification of which I shall now speak leads us far beyond the limits of what we call ‘living beings’ both upwards, higher than living beings, as well as downwards, lower than living beings, and it deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense. Above all this classification shows that there are no jumps whatever in nature. In nature everything is connected and everything is alive. The diagram of this classification is called the ‘Diagram of Everything Living.’

“According to this diagram every kind of creature, every degree of being, is defined by what serves as food for this kind of creature or being of a given level and for what they themselves serve as food, because in the cosmic order each class of creature feeds on a definite class of lower creature and is food for a definite class of higher creatures.” 


Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p 322.

A new feeling of "I"

"There remains in my memory one other conversation during this journey. Once when the train was standing a long time in some station and our fellow travelers were walking on the platform, I put one question to G. which I could not answer for myself. This was, in the division of oneself into “I” and “Ouspensky,” how can one strengthen the feeling of “I” and the strengthen the activity of “I”?

“You cannot do anything about it,” said G. “This should come as a result of all your efforts” (he emphasized the word “all”). “Take for example yourself. By now you should have felt your ‘I’ differently. Try to ask yourself whether you notice the difference or not.”

I tried to “feel myself” as G. had shown us, but I must say that I did not notice any difference from the way I felt before.

“That will come,” said G. “And when it does come you will know. No doubt whatever is possible. It is quite a different feeling.”

 In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, Paul H Crompton Limited, 2004, page 343

Passing to a Higher, and Lower, Cosmos

“Each cosmos is an animate and intelligent being. Each cosmos is born, lives, and dies. In one cosmos it is impossible to understand all the laws of the universe, but three cosmoses taken together include in themselves all the laws of the universe, or two cosmoses, the one above and the other below, determine the cosmos which stands between them. By passing in his consciousness to the level of a higher cosmos, a man by this very fact passes to a level of a lower cosmos.” 

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p 333.

Two kinds of mentation

"Since I have happened to touch upon a question that has recently become almost an "obsession" of mine, namely, the process of human mentation, I consider it possible, without waiting for the place in my writings I had designated for the elucidation of this question, to speak at least a little in this first chapter about some information that accidentally became known to me.  According to this information, it was customary in long-past centuries on earth for every man bold enough to aspire to the right to be considered by others and to consider himself a "conscious thinker" to be instructed, while still in the early years of his responsible existence, that man has two kinds of mentation: one kind, mentation by thought, expressed by words always possessing a relative meaning; and another kind, proper to all animals as well as to man, which I would call "mentation by form."

     "The second kind of mentation, that is, "mentation by form"--through which, by the way, the exact meaning of all writing should be perceived and then assimilated after conscious confrontation with information previously acquired--is determined in people by the conditions of geographical locality, climate, time, and in general the whole environment in which they have arisen and in which their existence flowed up to adulthood."



 Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff, Viking Arkana Edition, 1992, page 14

The nature of knowledge

“Such preponderance of knowledge over being is observed in present day culture. The idea of the value and importance of the level of being is completely forgotten. And it is forgotten that the level of knowledge is determined by the level of being. Actually at a given level of being the possibilities of knowledge are limited and finite. Within the limits of a given being the quality of knowledge cannot be changed, and the accumulation of information of one and the same nature, within already known limits, alone is possible.

A change in the nature of knowledge is possible only with a change in the nature of being."

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p 65-66.

Gurdjieff, on schools

“In answering this question G. told me several things which I did not understand till later.

“Even if you found schools you would find only ‘philosophical’ schools,” he said. “In India there are only ‘philosophical’ schools. It was divided up in that way long ago; in India there was ‘philosophy,’ in Egypt ‘theory,’ and in present-day Persia, Mesopotamia, and Turkestan--’practice.’

“And does it remain the same now?” I asked.

“In part even now,” he said. “But you do not clearly understand what I mean by ‘philosophy,’ ‘theory,’ and ‘practice.’ These words must be understood in a different way, not in the way they are usually understood.

“But speaking of schools, there are only special schools; there are no general schools. Every teacher, or guru, is a specialist in some one thing. One is an astronomer, another a sculptor, a third a musician. And all the pupils of each teacher must first of all study the subject in which he has specialized, then, afterwards, another subject, and so on. It would take a thousand years to study everything.”

“But how did you study?”

“I was not alone. There were all kinds of specialists among us. Everyone studied on the lines of his particular subject. Afterwards, when we forgathered, we put together everything we had found.”

“And where are your companions now?”

G. was silent for a time, and then said slowly, looking into the distance:

“Some have died, some are working, some have gone into seclusion.”

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004, p 15-16.