Beruflich Dokumente
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Stephen Aronson
Introduction: Gurdjieffs ContributionDivided Attention
The four century old conflict between religion and science has fragmented our ability to integrate
the reality of consciousness with the discernible laws governing the measurable Universe. There is
a Ghost in the Machine that, until acknowledged, will continue to be the missing link in our understanding of the true nature of both the Universe and ourselves as a sentient part of the Creation.1
G.I. Gurdjieff advises that one of our tasks is to connect the science of the West with the wisdom
of the East. This means for us practically that we have to connect the ideas and general structure of
the Work by making parallels with similar scientific ideas that exist at present. 2
Gurdjieff told Ouspensky,
.... the study of oneself must go side by side with the study of the fundamental
laws of the universe.
In right knowledge the study of man must proceed on parallel with the study of
the world, and the study of the world must run parallel with the study of man. Laws
are everywhere the same, in the world as well as in man.
The parallel study of the world and of man shows the student the fundamental unity of everything and helps him to find analogies in phenomena of different
orders.3
By bringing the recognition of relativity to the search for Self, both the world of spirit and the world
reachable to science, can be blended through the scientific method of observation, experimentation
and confirmation.
Gurdjieff, like other messengers throughout time, advised that the foundation of this understanding
required one to Know Thyself and that through meditation lay the pathway to the mystery of this
Self, as well as a deeper understanding of the Universe of which it is a part.
Meditation as a means of transformation can be found in all traditions, but in the experience of the
author, the integration and wholeness of Gurdjieffs approach seems uniquely suited for the modern
Western culture with its emphasis on rationality. Acknowledging the difficulty for mans search imposed by the complexity of the modern world, Gurdjieff said his teaching brought the possibility of
more rapid psycho-transformation than traditional Ways and could be practiced in each and every
moment within the flow of daily life, The foundation of this approach lies in Gurdjieffs modern version of divided attention.
This exploration represents the subjective experiences of the author in his search for Self through
the guidance of Gurdjieffs work, particularly the practice of divided attention.
There is a deep level of mystery that is discernible even in ordinary life. We can occasionally realize what we are thinking, occasionally recognize we are lying to ourselves, see our daydreams,
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Qualities of Attention
According to Gurdjieff, attention comes in three basic varieties or qualities. The most prevalent is
a mechanical attention with no real will of its own. It is free floating, undirected and distributed
like heat. It will be automatically pulled towards the nearest, strongest attractor at the moment,
then fall, over and over, again toward the next thing that captures the attention. It is mechanical
because there is no plan or intent behind it. Buddhism calls this monkey mind. Everyone knows,
and has wrestled with this level of distractibility. We say, The lights are on but nobody is home.
Often we cannot recall afterwards what it was we were listening to, looking at, thinking during this
period of random association, nor what happened to trigger it. This is the normal state of attention
the vast majority of time.
Occasionally, an attractor of sufficient interest engages us emotionally and we are caught, riveted, held by our interest for long periods of time, sometimes even against our will. This is a focused
attention out of the ordinary. We can experience this with a book, a movie, a morbid situation, a car
crash, sexual images, something fascinating to such a degree we become oblivious to our surrounds,
even to the point of not hearing our name called. This type of attention can be called emotional. It
has an aim, but the aim comes from the fascination with the attractor. It is not predetermined ahead
of time, or held in place, by ones own will.
The third, and most rare, type of attention is that which is directed by ones own decision prior to
the contact with the object of attention. A continual effort must be made to maintain the focus of
attention against the pull of the mechanical and emotional levels. Attention must be sustained by
the force of ones own choice and effort. It is usually brief in duration, and must be continually renewed. 4 What seems to lie behind the effort to focus directed attention is the mysterious something
that can occasionally see into the mind and feelings from beyond the usual conditioned habits.
Training Attention
In traditional meditation, it is this something that is engaged to initiate and direct its focus on a
mantra, using the mantra as home base, its point of stability. By choosing this focal point, the directed attention is engaged. The frequent mechanical drift away from the mantra is sooner noticed
and a directed return of attention to the focal point easier to reinitiate. The mantra is typically a
sound, image or sensation, such as the breath or prayer of a neutral to positive emotional quality.
2
Psycho-neurological research has confirmed that the underlying mechanism for learning rests on
the plasticity of the brain. When presented with new information or experiences, the brain literally
begins to rewire neuronal connections to accommodate the new task. If that rewiring does not take
place, there is no learning. Our brains are continually altering their physical structure in response
to experience. The brains of meditators reflect changes from the activity and are different from the
brains of non-meditators. We not only change our minds, but we literally change our brains to do
so. Because of this fact, the great meditative traditions have found a way to transform their practitioners into types of people different from the ordinary. 5
Through meditation the attention can become steadier, more capable of sustained focus, less susceptible to being continually drawn in to conditioned pathways organized around worry, resentment, living in the past or future. One is better able to focus on what is actually happening in the
moment with less mental/emotional overlay from memories of the past or speculation about the
future, which distort the accuracy of interpreting the actual moment at hand.
Divided Attention
To bring a practice that offered the possibility of more rapid psycho-transformation and could be
practiced in the flow of daily life, Gurdjieff suggested using directed attention, as is done in other
practices, but rather than a single focal point, dividing attention onto two or more points simultaneously as is also done in some Buddhist practices. Using the interior of the body as a starting point,
attention can be grounded in one or more locations by engaging sensation as the link. Holding open
a space between the director/observer of attention and one or more sensitized points inside the body,
allows an experience of the observer as distinct from the body. Attention can then be directed onto
thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, simultaneously while holding open this space. The experiential
distance between observer and observed allows the possibility of noticing qualities of subjectivity
within the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, interpretations that make up the stream of activity typically
understood as oneself. As the limitation and subjectivity of the content of these psychic processes are recognized, deeper levels of sincerity and objectivity can arise. Knowing thyself means first
learning what is not thyself, but rather a mechanical pattern of psychological/emotional/muscular
reactions and responses to the conditioning mechanism of life. A separation of the wheat from the
chaff requires an instrument of separation.
Gurdjieff also suggests using the potential of divided attention to look inside and outside at the
same time, what his pupil Peter Ouspensky called a double-headed arrow.6 How else could one discover a more accurate understanding of why ones life is the way it seems to be than by learning
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A New Attitude
The search for Self necessitates a way of watching the interplay between apparent events in the
world outside and the interior reactions and interpretations of the assumed meaning of those
events. Ideally, this two field watching should occur simultaneously, although it can also be recombined intentionally again for later viewing. The experience will inevitably produce surprising
results. Many of these results will not conform to the current image of myself. I must be prepared
to discover I am not the person presumed in the image.
The necessity to do so, Gurdjieff calls the individual collision defined as the shock experienced
between what is anticipated and what actually happens and says this should lead to the Divine
property ... impartiality. and a correct evaluation of the essential significant of their own presence,
..... [and] ... corresponding place for themselves in these common-cosmic actualizations. 8
To search for Self requires acceptance that one does not know the Self and that the current image
of self is erroneous. This practice requires effort, persistence, and tolerance for surprising or uncomfortable discoveries. This requires a change in attitude, a quality of impartiality to the subjective reactions encountered in the psychic world. If these building blocks of attributed meaning are
incomplete or distorted, the meanings ascribed to be the basis of ones life will be capricious and
accidental.
As Above So Below
The current search in Cosmology for a Unified Theory of Everything, can study the physical body of
the Universe, the functioning and mutual influence of material objects and posit the energy patterns
and underlying laws hidden from view, which organize what can be seen, weighed and measured. If
Man is a something composed of at least three levels, so must the Universe be a something composed of multiple levels.
What has organized and holds the contents of the Universe in their patterns is only partly understood.11 Currently there is a search for presumed dark matter and dark energy that is hypothesized
to make up the bulk of its invisible mass and energy. This may or may not exist, but what is currently
lacking in consideration of a Unified Theory of Everything is the question of subjective experience,
consciousness in its different levels. As our material form occupies a certain level of the electromagnetic spectrum, our emotional and conceptual instruments must be presenting phenomena at higher
vibrational levels above the material. Then there is the central observational location, activated by
divided attention, into which flow data from three different levels of the Universe. From this level,
attention can be directed to illuminate and decode information embedded at lower frequencies.
This appears to be a fourth level that can view and understand the levels below it.
Since we know enough about ourselves to recognize layered conscious dimensions of our experience,
there must also be vast dimensions of invisible conscious layers of encoded information within the
Universe. Either that or our consciousness comes from beyond the known Creation. The question,
Who Am I now seems related to the question, What is the Universe? 12
What Am I?
What then am I? I seem to be both within and without the sphere of awareness, sometimes directing
attention, most times just looking. If Attention is light, then the light is connected to me. I am connected to the light. All I know at this point is that I am both director and receiver of the dark light of
Attention. I cant see myself. I can see that I am not any of the phenomena perceived in the beam of
attention. I am not the body, or the feelings, or the thoughts, all of which I had believed represented
who I was. I seem to have no materiality, only consciousness. What level of the Universe have I awoken into? There seems to be nothing here, yet everything that exists for me is here. In the light of this
darkness, all I know is that, I AM .
In its essence, intentionally directed divided attention facilitates simultaneous perception into multiple levels, suggesting that the inner psychological world of man may become a bridge between the
outer world of the senses and the underlying dynamics of a living, intelligent Universe. Gurdjieff says
that we have within ourselves the potential to experientially participate in this interchange, if we
can awaken from the sleep of illusion and inattention to which we have been conditioned, because
the difference between each of them and our common great Megalocosmos is only in scale. 14
Gurdjieff says in the last chapter of his published works, And thus, every man, if he is just an ordinary
man, that is, one who has never consciously worked on himself, has two worlds and if he worked
on himself, and has become a so to say candidate for another life, he has even three worlds. 15
The desire to know who I am seems now to be a manifestation of the first two worlds, the interest
of personality in its relation to the world outside its body. In the third world, interest in an individual
i-ness seems to disappear. Whatever this sense of enlarged awareness may represent, it does not
seem to have a name or any interest in assigning one. Divided attention is Gurdjieffs offering to us
of a path to our potential for another life.
Stephen Aronson (saronson@maine.rr.com)
Footnotes
1. Koestler, Arthur; The Ghost in the Machine, The MacMillan Company, New York, 1967
2. M. Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, v.3 p 665
3. Ouspensky, Peter; In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching; Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1949, pp 89, 122
4. P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Mans Possible Evolution;Knopf, 1974 pp108-111
5. Scientific American, Neuroscientists and the Dali Lama Swap Insights: An Encounter with His
Holiness the Dali Lama and the Scientific study of Meditation;http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?d=neuroscientists-dalai-lama-swap-insights- meditation, July 30, 2013
and Mind & Life Institue: http://www.mindandlife.org/
6. Ouspensky, Peter; In Search of the Miraculous, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949, p 119
7. Gurdieff, G. I.; Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of
Man, Penguin Compass, Arkana, 1999
the active mentation in a being and the useful results of such active mentation are in reality actualized exclusively only within the equal-degree functionings
of all his three localizations of the results spiritualized in his presence, call thinkingcenter, feeling-center and moving-motor-center. p 1042
and
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DO
World
One
Absolute
World
Three
Holy Sun
Absolute
World Six
LA
Okidanokh
All Suns
Djarklom
Sun
World 12
First generation
of Suns early
galactic forms
MI
All Planets
World 24
Earth
World 48
la +
sol
fa +
mi +
re
do +
si
sol
fa +
Moon
World 96
H48
Big Bang,
Great Photon,
Highest of
Gamma waves
Appearance of mass,
confinement of
high energies
Nuclear fusion,
creation of the
Periodic Table
of the Elements,
atoms, ions and
simple molecules
H96
mi +
re
do +
~ Life Appears ~
H192
H384
la +
sol
fa +
mi +
re
do
as a case of
persistent
molecular forms
(water, atmosphere
and rocks) plus
resonant energies
H768
H6
H12
Electromagnetic
Force
Photonic
Action
ElectroH24 magnetic
Fields
H48
Ionic
Waves
Will
Attention
Images
Mechanical 2
Thinking
*DO
Impressions
Octave
*DO
Air
Octave
*DO
Food
Octave
H1536
RE
H12
H24
la +
si
Initial Moment
H6
Higher
Degrees
of Reason
Multiverse?/
Alternative
Universes
S P E C T R U M
C r e a t i o n
Heptaparaparshinokh
FA
Prior Universe
S P I R I T U A L
o f
Sacred
SOL
si
Three Foods
of Man
P S Y C H I C
Entry into
do +
Forms of
Energies
E L E C T R O M A G N E T I C
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R a y
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m
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m
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Modern
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H3072
Crystal
molecular forms,
no intrinsic
energies of
transformation
(aside from
radioactivity)
Thanks to Keith Buzzell, Fifth Press, Reflections on Gurdjieffs Whim, A New Conception of God, Further Reflections on Gurdjieffs Whim
Thanks to Keith Buzzell and the Fifth Press for use of an illustration in Reflections on Gurdjieffs
Whim, A New Conception of God, Further Reflections on Gurdjieffs Whim. The yellow highlighted area
is my addition.
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