Public talk, Bryn Mawr, PA 1994
You are not what you were born to be. Almost everybody has that deep-down suspicion, occasionally or suddenly, that something is not quite right. For example, one finds oneself fully in possession of the faculties able to do what one couldn’t have done yesterday. Then, it disappears. Why can I be like that in one moment and seem to have lost it in the next? Because each one of us was indeed born with a capacity to be far more than we find ourselves to be. Because each one of us is born, not with just one nature like a spider…, but two natures: the one deriving its substance from the earth itself, from the planet Earth: our physical nature, our animal nature, if you like; our body, which contains the brain, contains the capacity to feel and the capacity to do, to build, to make, to write, to compose music; to create, in other words. But, something else as well. Me, my own true self in the sense that: my name is Tom Forman, alright who is Tom Forman? Who is “me?” Is “me” and Tom Forman the same? In my experience, in my opinion - no! There is something in each one of us far more intelligent, far more capable of perceiving reality as it is and knowing things as they are rather than as I see them in my subjective mind: something absolutely real, absolutely there, but we’ve lost touch with it.
As a child, you maybe had moments when you really knew that you were you and gradually we lost touch with that. We began to imitate, be on the football team or baseball team or Lacrosse team or something, and took on personas other than one’s own, which are not you. But that intelligence belonging to that part, the unknown part in each one of us, is far greater and far stronger than the intelligence of our ordinary minds.
Have any of you ever tried to think seriously without being distracted about any one thing for any length of time, when you really want to follow something? You know how hard that is. For another part of us, it is not so hard at all.
It’s about how to be, how to become by a certain kind of work. We’ve lost something. We need to get it back. It was lost through no fault of our own, really. Conditions of education, the conditions we were brought up in, make us what we are, which is not at all what we really are.
Gurdjieff once said, “Whatever any man in the history of mankind ever did or created, any other man who wishes is also able to do.” So, if your ideal is Michelangelo or Mozart …, whatever he can do, you can - maybe better. But not as we are.
Public talk, Bryn Mawr, PA 1994
We read about the ‘astral body” and think we have one, but we don’t yet. It is something that comes about, is created in us, from this struggle in us which goes on in us all the time between “I want” and “I don’t want,” “I like and I don’t like,” “ I will and I won’t,” “I intend and I refuse.” It’s a natural law, the Law of Three or Threefoldness: positive, negative, neutralizing. Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, Holy Reconciling. These forces are all in me. I’m only aware of two of them. I’m aware sometimes of “I want,” and “ I will,” but the moment I see “ I will,” if I am observant and honest with myself, I am at once confronted with an equal “I won’t.” It is a law. It can not be otherwise. You see it in life sometimes. The moment somebody, let’s say in Congress, comes up with some brilliant idea, the stronger and better that idea is, the more somebody else is going to oppose it right away. You see it every day. It is a law, inevitable.
I’m very seldom aware of both, especially in myself. I am aware of “I will,” then I get knocked over the head by “I won’t,” which appears the next day, the next hour, or the next minute. But when I am aware of both in balance in me, if I stay in between, something of another level comes in and reconciles these two forces. Two plus one makes three. This is the meaning of the Trinity. At that moment, there can be a genuine action, a creative action, an action coming from my own doing. In all that, the important thing is not the head brain, not the brain they call “the heart” (there is a brain in the heart). There is a brain that controls my movements, basically the spinal column, especially the lower part that controls the inner life of my body. This is the important one to begin with because we have no contact with it at all. We know a little bit about thoughts, yes, and a little bit about emotions: I get angry or pleased, all different emotions, but about the body brain we know nothing and we could.
The action (not an action in the sense of something I do, an action in the sense of manifestation), the manifestation of my body in me is something that, for want of a better word, one could call “sensation.” There again, we all have different notions of what that means.Continue to Exercise in Attention and Sensation
We've made an effort to keep the cadence of Tom Forman's speech while editing lightly for clarity.
To appreciate the compassion and presence he brought, we recommend listening to the Bryn Mawr Talks. These notes are a work in progress. To get updates to this and other sections of the site, please send a message through the Contact page.
Public talk, Bryn Mawr, PA 1994
This teaching is part of a very ancient teaching which Gurdjieff called “The Fourth Way” for a very good reason. There are three ways, very well known in different parts of the world: the way of the yogi, the way of the one who is primarily intellectual, the way of the monk, who primarily feels something about religious teachings, and the way of the fakir, who is very physical and in his body. But each of these ways — suitable for types of man — has to go through being the yogi, the monk, or the fakir before he begins to work on the other parts of himself. The Fourth Way is for people who work more or less balanced between thought, feeling, and action; more or less equally distributed abilities. The fakir knows how to drive a nail but does not know how to build a house, for example. A monk knows how to weed a garden but doesn’t know how to think.
This is what is called “The Fourth Way.” I don’t know if you’ve been into comparative religions or not, but if you begin to study the religions of the world, the great religious teachings, the more you get to the heart of the matter, the more you begin to see that it’s all the same. The language is quite different, and the form of address. Moses was talking to people who had just escaped from slavery, who didn’t know how to get anywhere their own at all. Mohammed was speaking to Bedouin tribesmen camel drivers, who didn’t know anything about fish and fishing. Christ spoke to fishermen who knew a little about seeds and fish. So, the language was quite different. Buddha, for example, was raised among and spoke to princes and aristocrats. With others, too, the language is different, but the teaching, the same. All of them say the same thing. Wake! Sleep not!
April 11, 1974, New School for Social Research
Man, that is, an individual man such as you and I know him, is a part of a very great creation, a living part of a very great living creation, in which he has both a function and a purpose. He is born with, unlike other beings among the beings comprising the mass of organic life on earth; unlike them, he is born with the capacity to evolve, to complete himself. All other forms of organic life being, as it were, completed by nature as they are and incapable of further evolution. But man’s possibility to evolve depends entirely upon him. There is no law that says he must or he should. It depends entirely upon whether or not he wishes to do so. And of course, whether or not he wishes to do so depends to a certain extent on whether he is aware of this possibility innate in him.
April 11, 1974, New School for Social Research
Gurdjieff speaks of essence and personality: essence being everything with which a man is born, the man as he actually is by nature; and personality, containing everything which from the moment of his birth, in one way or another, he acquires. He is taught many things; he picks up many things really in the most haphazard way. There is no one there, really there, to see that what he picks up is going to be useful to him someday. It is absolutely by chance if he gets something useful. It is absolutely by chance if he gets something harmful. And yet, in general, since you don’t really look very carefully at these things to begin with, this is all one has and one’s stuck with it.
Now, the capacity to reason is based upon this kind of knowledge, the knowledge of personality. But knowledge by itself does not mean one can say: “I understand that, I know that was true, was so.” Because, that kind of understanding depends upon, well, the quality of one’s essence, or the quality of being. So, knowledge by itself won’t help. As a matter of fact, being, even a very highly developed being, by itself won’t help very much. Gurdjieff talks about a “stupid saint,” for example, who has real being but no knowledge at all. He is able to do whatever he wants but doesn’t know what or how or when to do it. And the converse, for example, with the one who has very much knowledge, real knowledge, even about himself, but no being and consequently no way of putting it into practice.
July 9, 1974, New School for Social Research.
In general, psychology regards man as having a mind and a body and feelings. Gurdjieff stresses this very much. He calls man a “three-brained being,” as distinct from the majority of the animal kingdom, which he calls “two-brained” beings.” It’s quite obvious why. And the rest of organic life has one brain. Now, in man, the third brain is that brain which we call “the brain,” the intellectual capacity, the intellectual function, the capacity to think, to think creatively, to foresee, to plan. The first brain is that of the body, the physical body, the center of gravity of which is in the spinal column both in Gurdjieff’s teaching and in organic medicine.
The second brain controls feeling. Not in us: we have no control over our feeling. The center of gravity of the function of feeling, the capacity to perceive through feeling, the capacity to know things emotionally is located in the solar plexus. Now the physical faculties, the physical functions of man are, once again, divided into three aspects, really; one of which he calls moving mind or moving function; one of which he calls instinctive mind, instinctive function; and one of which, of course, is sex. And in general, they’re taken as three aspects of one and the same physical aspect of man.
Now, the moving function is that brain which controls all external movements that had to be learned, that had to be picked up somewhere along the line, either by imitation, hard work, or by being taught. How to walk, for example, how to write, how to speak; and there are many other examples which you may wish to ask about. The instinctive mind controls all the inner movements of the organism with which a man is born in full working condition, such as the breathing, the heart circulation, digestion: all the inner work of the organism. It is quite a distinct aspect from that work of the moving center, and sex, which is, as it were, the neutralizing force in relation to the active and passive forces of moving and instinctive centers. Continue reading
1987, Cleveland
It has nothing whatever to do with masochism. I promise you that. It’s not a question of wearing a hairshirt or that sort of thing. The question is: what does it mean to be intentional? There’s very little in my everyday life that I actually do intentionally. It happens. I go from one thing to another. I have no say in the matter. Oh, I give orders to my secretary, to my mechanic, whomever. And, I give orders to myself. Sometimes. Who listens to me? The secretary doesn’t want to be fired, the mechanic might think I know what I’m talking about. Do I listen to my own orders? I know damned well that I shouldn’t eat so much late at night. I tell myself “Tomorrow, I won’t do that.” What happens? Perhaps one night I don’t. The next night I do. It doesn’t change anything, my decisions about my behavior. New Year’s resolutions. You remember about them? Gurdjieff had a wonderful saying about that. He didn’t speak English very well. He had heard the expression “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” What he made of it was: “Good intentions go to Hell.”
First of all, I have to be conscious, at least a little. Most of life is composed of degrees of suffering, from minor, trivial, to quite dramatically noticeable. What do I do with them? Even sitting here, there is a little suffering. Continue Reading
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