The only really interesting questions are the unanswerable ones.
Jacob Needleman
Each form of our Work together (Group meetings, ideas study, sitting meditation, work on crafts and the Movements) can help distill the experience of living. As well as exposing our isolation, vanity and self-love, work in these conditions sometimes attracts a Life within life. Everything suddenly becomes more vivid. We live for a brief time enveloped by another quality of attention that is light and free, able to receive richer impressions of the rhythms of reaction and response at play in ourselves, in our relations with others and with the task at hand.
For a moment, there is a new, vibrant feeling of oneself in relation with two grand forces: one, an inner call to unity, a movement toward the Unknown; and the other, an outer gravitational pull toward the sleepy comfort of one's habits.
A motivating 'spirit of inquiry' can rise up out of these kinds of inner confrontations. Sometimes words fleetingly and purposefully attach themselves to the process. Who or what am I? What is the deeper purpose of life? What is service? What is really necessary? What is God? But it is the process of inquiry which is alive, not the words.
And often there are deep inquiries that have no words at all.
We have just begun to explore video as a means to examine these kinds of questions and the fundamental principles of the Work, all the while listening for the 'spirit of inquiry' they can awaken.
There is a very important distinction to be made between emotion and feeling. This video is a short introduction to that distinction, which of course needs to be verified in one's own experience. We have based our examination on Jean Vaysse's insights from his book Toward Awakening.
Throughout Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson, Gurdjieff makes many references to the intimate connection between humanity's general spiritual state and the health of what he calls Great Nature and the evolution of the Being of our planet. For the general equilibrium of its interrelated systems and for its own evolution, planet Earth has need of the emanations produced by collective human spiritual Work. To contribute, one has to discover and re-discover, again and again, one's own path toward the truly human state, an inner Life that can allow a higher Intelligence and finer sensitivity to guide one's actions, enabling one to begin To Be for the Good.