A STOPINDER ANTHOLOGY A stopinder is an element in a compound, an episode in a tale, a note in a song, and a step in a process. It is a meaningful line between deflection and deflection, a word between silence and stillness. Our lives are made up of stopinders. Each life comprises a stopinder in the human story, and that is but a moment in the mind of God. This stopinder was brought into existence by a need which came from beyond any of the participants, for a forum where the second-generation of what we might call the Gurdjieff tradition (Beelzebubs grandchildren) could show and share. This current from the beyond enriched them as they voluntarily offered and conformed their efforts in service of this onsweeping, magisterial demand for conscious contemporary manifestation, adapted to the needs of person, time and place. To be particular, David and Nonny first sensed this need for a manifestation from within the stream of tradition. The current had begun even before Gurdjieff (c. 1865-1949) himself, but he, of course, defined it. From our vantage point in 2014, it seems that at least part of what Gurdjieff did was to bring a spiritual or even mystical understanding which could resuscitate hope in people who were thirsty from the peculiar dryness of the Englightenment, and who could not return to pretend to themselves that they were satisfied with unthinking certainties. Gurdjieff showed a path to be simultaneously skeptic, rationalist, scientist, artist, craftsman, faithful, spiritual and mystic. One might say that he even demonstrated that a life which did not include all of these within itself, as stopinders which would be taken up into a larger whole, could be fully human. The impulse which moved David and Nonny was faint, but not weak. It could barely be heard because of its subtlety; it was a still, small voice. But the need was not all feeble, and once responded to, it indicated, by the very nature of the call, the level required. It was Global: it incorporated, in its upward sweep, local adaptations. It called to each to make something that was their own of what they had received, and to exchange, so that all might be stimulated by a mosaic of exemplars. An impulse arising in the USA might blend with what was thriving in Europe or Australia, and so on, in a cycle of cross-fertilization, all meeting the need to enculturating into life Gurdjieffs ideas and methods, so that they might ferment the global spirit like a yeast of consciousness.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:51:44 +0000
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