Gurdjieff's Comments on Struggle

Hig: I don't see exactly what path to follow and what aim to have in view.

Gurdjieff: A path isn't necessary. It is only necessary that you obtain results in yourself. Collect, accumulate the results of struggle. You will need them for continuing. You must accumulate; you have batteries in you in which you must accumulate this substance, like electricity. This can only be accumulated by struggle. Therefore create a struggle between your head and your animal. I already explained this the last time. Excuse me. It was Saturday that I told it. My memory is getting old. I never used to make mistakes and now I begin to. I advise you - now that I know you a thousand times better - not to stop. Continue your struggle, but without waiting for results. Accumulate the results of the process of struggle. When we struggle interiorly with thought, feeling and body, that gives a substance in the place where it belongs. We have no interest today in knowing where that place is. Accumulate. It is this that is lacking in you. You are young. You haven't experience. You are empty. Continue the struggle accidentally begun. So that if you say that you are satisfied, that proves you are on the right road. But you must not stop. You had as a plan to go to the Etoile. You are in the rue d'Armaille. The Etoile is still far: Boulevard Carnot, there are 20 lampposts, 20 stations. Now then, turn to the right. That is the right road. That is to say, continue your struggle. You are searching for the means? What you are doing has no importance. What is necessary is that you must have in you the process of struggle. What means shall you employ? That isn't important. Struggle. You know better than I what struggle. For example, whatever your body likes, whatever you have the habit of giving it, don't give it any more. The important thing is to have a continual process of struggle, because you need the substance that struggle will give you.

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Mr. Gurdjieff : For the physical development , there exist no seasons. Not political seasons. It is always necessary. You must educate your body with your head, consciously. It is very simple. Never allow it to do what it wants. You make it do everything contrary to that which it loves. It likes sugar; you do not give it any. One must inure it to struggle, you are always right when you resist your body. It is simple. Everything contrary; it is so that God created your body and your intellect. It is a very simple thing. For this it is not necessary to read. The program is very simple. Under all conditions, in all political situations, man must educate his body to be submissive to him. Your personality can educate your body. He in which the body is strong and has the initiative over him, this one is null. He who has his body enslaved is intelligent. You understand what is meant by intelligent? Intelligent means he who directs his body. If the body directs, you are a nullity, a peasant - if you direct your body you are intelligent. Thus, choose what you want. Intelligent or peasant? If you want to be a peasant, let your body direct you. If you want to be intelligent, let your consciousness direct your body. The more you want to direct your body, the more it opposes you. And in resisting you, the more strength it gives you.

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Mr. Gurdjieff : For your better understanding of the further explanations given by me then, I consider it indispensable to repeat some of them now.

Among other things, I said then that the most important work for a man who has already cognized with his Reason his real significance— that is to say, who has cognized his error in the sense of the exaggerated importance given to his individuality, which represents, according to his own impartial appreciation in a quiet state, almost a complete "nullity"—is to acquire the ableness to direct for a definite time all his possibilities and all his strength only for the purpose of constating as many as possible of the physical as well as the psychic abnormal facts proceeding in his various functionings, that is, to exercise what is called "self-observation."

It is obligatorily necessary to do so chiefly in order that such undesirable facts, cognized only by his mind, which are still empty of significance for his common presence, gradually assimilating into his nature, should begin to crystallize a steady conviction about everything learned, and through this, as it must lawfully proceed, should come forth in his common presence for the possibility of further work upon himself, an energy of great intensiveness, with the help of which alone is a further work upon himself possible and which is manifested, by the way, in a persistent striving to achieve the "power" during the daytime in his so to say "waking state," for a definite time, to "remember himself."

This is necessary in its turn so that such a man, who has cognized only in his mind the nullity of his individuality and who has decided to struggle consciously with the abnormalities constated by him, which have crystallized in his individuality thanks to the unfitting surrounding conditions of his preparatory age, and which manifest themselves in all sorts of weaknesses that in totality give birth to his will-lessness, character-lessness, inertness and so on, could learn as much as possible not to identify with the surrounding conditions and, continuing to observe his inner and outer manifestations with a simultaneous domination in himself of various feelings of partiality which are becoming inherent in him, and thus constating still more deeply various factors, abnormal even according to his own consciousness, and existing in great number in his psyche as well as in his physical body: all this with the aim of convincing himself with his whole being of his negative properties that are even in his own judgment unworthy of a man, and not only with his, in the present case, meaning-nothing "mind"; so that thus he may again become a person wishing to work upon himself with his whole being, and not only, as I have just said, with his meaningless consciousness.

On account of the great importance of this question, I repeat and underline that all this is indispensable in order that in a man working upon himself should arise and accumulate, as could only lawfully proceed, the needed energy for the possibility of continuing to work with the intensity of striving and power of action upon himself which alone permits the transmutation of oneself from this "nullity" into that "something," which he ought to have been according to even his own "good sense"; this latter, although rarely, does manifest itself in each contemporary man at those moments when the surrounding conditions do not prevent the manifestation of this good sense, that is, to be such as a man ought to be, the, as is said, "acme of Creation," and not what he has become in reality, especially in recent times, namely, as in moments of self-sincerity he knows himself to be—an automatically perceiving and in everything manifesting himself domestic animal.