OF THE
TIMES
Something is not quite right...you feel it...you may have experienced this feeling, this nagging, for a long time. So you most probably just try to ignore it and hope that it goes away; but sooner or later the persistent nagging finally brings an idea to your mind - there's something very odd about the way the world is. Maybe you feel like you are at the cinema watching a film and yet you sense there must be something wrong about the film you are seeing. The images are all there, but there's a feeling that something is out of sequence, or the frames are running out of 'normal' time. However, after a while you get used to the style of the film, and your senses adjust to its rhythm and you lose the sense of strangeness and you get pulled into the show and you go along with the ride..."We are dreaming a symbolic world, only briefly waking to what is real." ~Arthur Deikman, M.D.
"He not busy being born, is busy dying." ~Bob Dylan
The esoteric teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, in many ways, fly in the face of traditional Western religious thought. Whereas it is accepted as a given within Judeo-Christian tradition that each human is born with a soul, Gurdjieff does not let us off so easy. Active in the early part of the 20th century, this Greek-Armenian mystic travelled the world, synthesising spiritual disciplines into a unique path called The Fourth Way. He taught that human existence is a kind of waking sleep, in which we live more or less automatically, unconscious and unaware of ourselves. He even went to the extreme of suggesting that humans are not born with souls at all, and that we can only create one while alive through intense personal suffering and what he called "work." If we are not successful in this venture, he taught that our identities would not survive the shock of death, that we would "die like dogs" and that the ever-hungry Moon would gobble up our energy as part of its own evolution of consciousness.
Comment: Perhaps the emotions of shame and guilt in general exist as a method of preventing behaviors that are not only detrimental to ourselves but to others. They are accessible to us in order to learn from mistakes and experience subsequent growth and healing. These feelings are also what separate normal, wounded people from psychopaths. The problem is when we identify with these feelings via trauma and they become limiting coping mechanisms that leave us stuck.