Crashingly Beautiful

“I need to see that my thought is almost never directed on knowing myself as I am in this moment…and again in this moment. It is difficult for the thought to remain on what is, because it is based on memory and is constantly visualizing the possibility of becoming. How to …resist the desire to become in favor of simply what is? It is difficult for my thought to…stay in front of the unknown. This means abandoning belief in everything it knows, even the trace of the preceding moment. To stay in front of the unknown my mind must be profoundly silent. This is a silence that is not obtained by suppressing or by sacrifice. I do not make the silence. It appears, when the mind sees that by itself alone, it cannot be in contact with something it cannot measure, something higher. Then the mind no longer seeks, it does not try to become. I see that there is never any stillness and that all this thinking of the known prevents me from having an experience of reality.”

—from Jeanne de Salzmann’s “The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff.” You can read a wonderfully provocative and insightful review of this long awaited book by Tracy Cochran in the current issue of PARABOLA.

from parabola-magazine