Icono (Icon) by Remedios Varo, a painted box designed for the South American group of Gurdjieff's followers.
It’s been a while since the last edition of Magister Dixit; I have to admit that, since my third PhD year started, I have panicked a bit and accelerated the pace of my experimental work, which has left me with little time to read non-work related things; in addition, usually by the time I finally break free from my project/lab related stuff, my brain is so drained that I just don’t fancy reading anything more intellectually challenging than "I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s Diet and Got A Rash On My Face" or "Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal". However, in my limited reading times I still keep finding little gems of wisdom that I feel compelled to share. The following is one of them. One of the most fascinating books that I have been reading this year is P. Ouspensky’s Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which compiles in great detail the core knowledge of the Philosophy of the Fourth Way, a self-perfecting practice and system of beliefs developed and taught by Armenian-Russian mystic Gurdjieff – if you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know this is not the first time I have mentioned him here. It had been my intention to feature and profile the book in this blog at some point, since it has been a highly influential book for me, and the principles exposed in it have transformed my outlook. However, it is such a content-heavy book that profiling it seems rather complicated – there’s just so much packed into it, that it would be very difficult to choose an area of focus. I have been slowly making my way through it during my lunch breaks since the year started, and I’m still less than halfway through. It is not an easy book to read, and not one to be read in long ‘book-binge’ stretches I believe. I would say that some off-book time is needed in between to really reflect on what was read; to analyze it and let the notions sink in, understanding and assimilating the contents. I mean, when you encounter stuff like this in a book:
You know that you can’t just cram it in an afternoon after lunch and get something meaningful out of it.... Still, several of the principles exposed in Fragments Of An Unknown Teaching are simple enough, or at least the idea behind them is. They are just presented and explained in a way that makes them become more complete, grounded and meaningful. For example, in Chapter IX, I found something that really resonated with me. In it, Gurdjieff is talking about how to develop a harmonious and correct function of the body’s components – one which allows the efficient processing of both physical and intellectual feed, rendering a man capable of rising from their unenlightened, mechanical state to a higher, truly evolved human with superior characteristics. 
Reflejo Lunar (Lunar Reflection) by Remedios Varo.
Two crucial principles to achieve such evolution are the process of self-remembering, which can be identified to an extent as some sort of mindfulness practice, and the suppression of unpleasant emotions. A full transformation requires a great deal of energy, and in order to generate and make use of that energy, we need to know how to prevent wasting it with useless and destructive behavior:"Energy is spent chiefly on unnecessary and unpleasant emotions, on the expectation of unpleasant things, possible and impossible, on bad moods, on unnecessary haste, nervousness, irritability, imagination, daydreaming, and so on. Energy is wasted on the wrong work of centers; on unnecessary tension of the muscles out of all proportion to the work produced; on perpetual chatter which absorbs an enormous amount of energy; on the 'interest' continually taken in things happening around us or to other people that are in fact of no interest whatever; on the constant waste of the force of 'attention'; and so on, and so on.”Nevertheless, even if one manages to succeed on saving up this energy required for transformation (made of certain subtle ‘substances’), the work is still not done and the path to progress is still at risk; one needs to be careful not to blow it all away on impulse and uncontrolled emotion:
"In order to regulate and balance the work of the three centers whose functions constitute our life, it is necessary to learn to economize the energy produced by our organism, not to waste this energy on unnecessary functions.”
"In beginning to struggle with all these habitual sides of his life a man saves an enormous amount of energy, and with the help of this energy he can easily begin the work of self-study and self-perfection."
"It must be noted that the organism usually produces in the course of one day all the substances necessary for the following day. And it very often happens that all these substances are spent or consumed upon some unnecessary and, as a rule, unpleasant emotion. Bad moods, worry, the expectation of something unpleasant, doubt, fear, a feeling of injury, irritation, each of these emotions in reaching a certain degree of intensity may, in half an hour, or even half a minute, consume all the substances prepared for the next day; while a single flash of anger, or some other violent emotion, can at once explode all the substances prepared and leave a man quite empty inwardly for a long time or even forever.”In other words, if you want to transform yourself, you have to start by observing your reactions, taking responsibility for them, and then take control over them. This notion goes on to back up the adage that says you cannot control the events that happen to you or around you, but you can control the way you react to them; and that makes the whole difference.
El Ermitaño (The Hermit) by Remedio Varo.
As a little prompt for self-study, examine yourself and your patterns: what triggers your sense of irritation, anger or indignation? Do you often find yourself stressing about things that are yet to come and thus, completely unsure of? Do you think it helps you in any way to dwell on the past? Next time you are entering a bad mood, truly and honestly, ask yourself: Is it really useful to get angry or upset about this? Will that make this very moment better in any way? What are you going to get out of it if you continue nurturing that negative emotion? And, what would happen if you just let it go and chose to focus on something else instead? Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift on thinking. I find that trying to stay anchored in the present moment, rather than letting the mind wander back and forth in time and fantasize continuously, is the best way to avoid this unpleasant emotions. I wrote a little about this in a previous post about Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now. Next time you feel the sting of negativity coming, stop yourself on your tracks, breathe, count to ten, and realize that most of the times there is no problem; a situation of conflict becomes a problem only if you chose to make it so. In order for things to change, you have to do something differently; this is your opportunity to do so. Thanks for reading! This post was a long one, for sure, but I hope it was somehow useful... Cheers,
