Being Present | Be Present First

Being Present, Conscious Evolution, Death and Grieving, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky

When Life Is Uncertain

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

Being Present, Gurdjieff, Self-Remembering, Transformation

On the Fragility of the Body

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

Being Present, Self-Remembering, Transformation

The Parable of the Ten Virgins

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…

Being Present, Gurdjieff, Transformation

Snipers I Have Known

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…

Being Present, Conscious Evolution, Self-Remembering

That We Can Practice for the Moment of Our Death

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…

Being Present, Conscious Evolution, Self-Remembering, Transformation

On Sacrifice

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…

Being Present, Conscious Evolution, Self-Remembering

Teaching Conscious Evolution

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…

Being Present

Words, Words, Words

According to the Kabbalists the twenty-two letters of the ancient Hebrew alphabet are the building blocks of the universe. God manipulated these letters (into words) to create everything in the physical universe. As a result the Jewish mystic believes that he can imitate God by, first, having the proper intention and, then, by pronouncing specific words from ancient Hebrew. It…