It would be hard to deny our present world situation does not clearly describe the first aspect of apocalypse.

People who are willing to say and do anything, no matter how many lies they tell or how many people they hurt, have an obvious advantage over people whose behavior is restricted by conscience, common sense, and decency.

The jewel of an awakened man is a fully formed personality that can be described as a system of knowledge that does not stop impressions from entering into deeper aspects of his being.

Mescaline doesn’t open up higher centers directly, but it forces them to the forefront of our consciousness to deal with and make sense of a world without associations.

Any man can speak truly; but to speak with order, wisely, and competently, of that few men are capable. ~ Montaigne

It has been suggested to me by a number of readers that I write something on the COVID 19 pandemic which has affected all of us…

It always amazes me that more people are not interested in the idea of conscious evolution.  The idea that a man (or woman) can, by making specific inner efforts…

Another characteristic of the hasnamuss is that he appeals to the lowest in his followers, and in doing so destroys whatever higher possibilities they have.

Aristotle classifies friendship into three types: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and perfect friendships…

Dreaming is just a particular way that consciousness organizes experience; it can be used by higher centers to communicate spiritual truths, or it can be used to express our buffered fears and confusion…

Besides Gurdjieff, no one in the early days of the movement did more to support, clarify and promote the work than Ouspensky…

Psychologically an ordinary man is not prepared for such an intense flow of energy, and the resulting manifestations (symptoms) are what we call the manic phase of bi-polar disorder.

When people react negatively to inner work, it is often because ideas of conscious evolution threaten to expose the lies they tell themselves.

As a rule, we either don’t think about how identity will organize itself without a body, or we assume we will be given a soul after death in the same way we were given a body at birth. But to believe that a soul can be given is a misunderstanding of what a soul is…

The work we are involved in is long and it is normal to occasionally fall into a state of apathy about our progress,..

Thinking may make us human, but it doesn’t make us conscious.

When Shakespeare created Iago, he imagined a character that had never been seen in literature: a brilliant and sophisticated devil…

A couple of weeks ago I met with a friend who is a psychologist, and she described an encounter with another psychologist on November ninth, the day after the American elections…

In the summer before my last year in high school my older sister’s best friend, Jeni, was killed in an automobile accident.;..

When an impression is strong enough it can create a shock that allows it to enter essence and higher centers automatically…

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had an affinity for science. Gurdjieff was interested…

When we take this principle of balancing the four lower centers to the scale of nations, business mirrors the instinctive center; government, the moving center; religion and myth, the emotional center; and the press and the arts, the intellectual center…

A couple of years ago two of my friends died within a short period of each other…

Not long ago I had a toothache, and between the time when the tooth began to ache and the time when my dentist could see me, I had a few difficult days…

The only way we can have a guarantee of good fortune is to find a way of thinking and living that transforms events that we now think of as bad fortune into events that we can consider good fortune…

Before I can begin to talk about prayer and how it relates to inner work, I am going to have to speak about a few misconceptions…

For a time in my youth I thought I might become an artist and was part of an art guild that was run by a man who had been recruited by the army as a sniper during the Korean War…

When I was just beginning to explore the difficulties and possibilities of self-remembering—I believe I was twenty at the time—I discovered a fundamental truth about the practice of self-remembering that has stayed with ever since…

Once in my role as a counselor at the psychiatric clinic where I worked as a young man, I spent an afternoon talking to a new mother…

In chapter thirteen of In Search of the Miraculous Ouspensky asks Gurdjieff how he can recreate the emotional state that propelled into the series of extraordinary experiences he had undergone in Finland…

There is a Mulla Nasrudin story that goes something like this: A woman came to Mulla and asked him to forbid her son to eat sugar…

The very idea of finding one’s self is problematic because we are the never the same. If you think you have found yourself—a solid, unchanging self—wouldn’t that imply that you’ve stopped growing?

At the age of five I was sent to Catholic school and almost immediately got into trouble with the priests and nuns who ran the parish…

I find it hard to talk to a man who knows little of history and little of what the rest of the world thinks. This kind of man is too often trapped by his own opinions.

Time travel a very attractive idea: to see the future, or to go back in the past and change events. It seems to have captivated our collective consciousness.

Once a king called together all his wise men and asked them, ‘Is there one thought or precept that will work in every situation…

In order to understand the dynamics of human relationships it is necessary to understand to some extent the many factors that make up individuality. Human individuality can be mapped, but there is not just one map; there are many…

In his book The Theory of Eternal Life, Rodney Collin recounts a story about how native East Indians poured beer and whisky over the grave of a recently dead European planter…

Before I was five, that is, before I went to school and began to develop personality, I knew quite definitely that I had lived before…

While the nuclear bomb was being developed in the United States during the Second World War, there were a few scientists who theorized that once you started the nuclear chain reaction that caused the bomb to explode, that there would be no way to stop it…

When I worked at a psychiatric clinic in my youth, I convinced the supervising nurse at the hospital to hire a friend of mine…

In general people can agree that men differ in the amount of knowledge they possess–a man may be more knowledgeable or less knowledgeable than another man–but it is a little more tricky to see that two men may possess a different being, especially in relation to spiritual matters.

We can even say that all effort to be presents begin at the level of essence.

In spiritual circles today there is a certain amount of contention about the role that thoughts play in the process of mastering higher consciousness…

When people first come in contact with Gurdjieff’s system, the idea that man is many ‘I’s’is often objected to. People don’t like being told that they are not one person; it sounds crazy. But really it’s reversed. The truly crazy people, the scary people, are the ones who are always the same.

When I was a young man, I worked at a psychiatric clinic, and one morning I was asked to go to our front offices to admit a new patient…

When I say ‘this is theoretical’ or ‘this is philosophy’ in answer to a question, it means that the language is wrong You cannot ask something in a philosophical way and expect a practical answer. ~ P. D. Ouspensky

Part of what we are doing in choosing one effort over another is attempting to bring emotion into the effort we are making.

If esoteric practice is about creating higher consciousness and not about being good so that you will be rewarded in an afterlife, doesn’t that give students of esotericism the licence to be selfish and to take advantage of others?

Initially one of the problems in working against identification is that we think of it as a positive quality.

When we talk about freedom, we’re speaking about the work an individual does to become free of unnecessary laws…

When I worked at a psychiatric clinic as a young man, I was asked this question by a friend: If you could explain one esoteric idea to your colleagues at the clinic, which idea would it be?

This ability to keep your attention on the world and, at the same time, on your reactions is a key element in being present.

Fear thrives best in a state of attachment to a small picture of self.

The point I want to make here is that inner considering is based on a delusion, the delusion that other people spend any amount of their time thinking about us.

People generally believe that they can be present in the enjoyable moments of their lives, and that other moments—moments that are either painful or are preparation for pleasurable moments—can simply be ignored or frittered away with imaging or thinking about more important moments.

Attention holds a specific energy in a fixed field around something that we want to observe or examine. Consciousness requires an ability to focus a similar energy around the body in a less directed way.

I ask myself: ‘Am I dispassionate enough to transform this?’

The teacher’s responsibility, and essentially his only responsibility, is to bring out, or feed, the student’s higher possibilities.

The body is the only focus we have for consciousness. It can be seen as a kind of rallying point for being present, something for consciousness to form around.

Anybody who tries to be present for any length of time will eventually come to this thought: ‘If I could only increase my desire to be present, I could be present more often.’ But the question of how to increase the desire to be present is complicated. This is so because we are not unified. Our inner psychology contains different ‘I’s’ or parts….

There is a principle at work here and it is this: when we suffer we strengthen whatever we are feeling in our inner world.

When personality dominates it means that events are deflected, that they are not allowed to enter us in a way that affects us deeply.

One of the most important things to understand about sex is that it should have no negative side. Either there are pleasurable and joyful sensations, or there are no sensations at all.

In my experience in teaching esotericism, I have observed that the idea that we are influenced by the movement of the moon, the planets, and the stars is one of the esoteric ideas that is most often objected to.

I think the idea that is hardest to understand here is that dispassion or detachment is a necessary component of happiness.