I arrived on a Saturday night, when the exercises were performed in the same white costumes I had seen in Constantinople, and visitors from Paris were allowed to watch the performance. The exercises consisted of the same rhythmic movements and ritual dances that I had seen before. There were also various demonstrations of telepathic communication that much impressed me at the time: later I was shown the tricks by which the results were obtained. There were twenty-five or thirty Russians, and about as many English visitors. There were no French or Americans at that time, and between the Russians and English there was very little contact—chiefly owing to difficulties of language. I was fortunate in this respect. When 1 arrived, Madame de Hartmann received me in an elegant drawing-room on the ground floor of the Chateau, and told me that Georgy Ivanitch—the name by which Gurdjieff was known among the Russians—would see me the same afternoon. Speaking Turkish, we had no need of an interpreter. He asked for news of Prince Sabaheddin, and went on almost at once to speak of the very same subject—the distinction of Being and Knowing—that we had left at our first talk at Kuru Cheshme, nearly two years before. I made notes of all the talks I had with him, and can therefore reproduce them fairly accurately after all these years. He said: You have already too much knowledge. It will remain only theory unless you learn to understand not with mind but with heart and body. Now only your mind is awake: your heart and body are asleep. If you continue like this, soon your mind also will go to sleep, and you will never be able to think any new thoughts. You cannot awaken your own feelings, but you can awaken your body. If you can learn to master your body, you will begin to acquire Being. For this, you must look on your body as a servant. It must obey you. It is ignorant and lazy. You must teach it to work. If it refuses to work, you must have no mercy on it. Remember yourself as two— you and your body. When you are master of your body, your feelings will obey you. At present nothing obeys you—not your body, nor your feelings, nor your thoughts. You cannot start with thoughts, because you cannot yet separate yourself from your thoughts. This Institute exists to help people to work on themselves. You can work as much or as little as you wish. People come here for various reasons, and they get what they come for. If it is only curiosity, then we arrange things to astonish them. If they come to get knowledge, we have many scientific experiments that will instruct them. But if they come to get Being, then they must do the work themselves. No one else can do the work for them, but it is also true that they cannot create the conditions for themselves. Therefore, we create conditions. I said that I was tired of being as I was, and wanted to change. He replied: You must begin at the beginning. You start as kitchen boy; then you will work in the garden, and so on until you have learned how to master your body. He asked me how long I could stay, and I said that I did not know, as it depended on the Peace Treaty with Turkey. He did not seem very interested, and said: It does not matter. You start now, and we shall see. ~ JG Bennett “Witness”
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 22:57:15 +0000
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