What World Am I In Right Now?

In our meeting last evening we started working with an important exercise from Gurdjieff - Active Elements Breathing. This is a work to represent that we absorb the finer, "active" elements in the air as we breathe. When we bring attention and intention to the act of "eating" the air consciously it becomes possible to deepen presence in our inner life with the continuous nourishment of breath. 

We also shared a long and deep exploration of Gurdjieff's Hermetic cosmology. This is an image of a living universe composed of nested "worlds". Each world is a whole in itself and transforms energies for the preceding and succeeding worlds within a living universe. This connects to our psychological work in the sense that a human being is (potentially) a complete world, in the words of Gurdjieff, "a similitude of the whole". 

In this cosmology we have, as human beings, all the worlds in ourselves. Each is more or less liberated from constraint, enjoys greater or lesser degrees of freedom and associated levels of consciousness. Our center of gravity moves on this spectrum -- we can live in negativity, delusion and separation, or an open-hearted consciousness of abundance and unity-- heaven and hell in religious terms--with many gradations and in between. All the worlds are present here and now, and one way of describing the aim of our inner work is to learn to navigate between these worlds, to come to occupy a larger, finer world with greater degrees of freedom. 

So our theme for the next few weeks is two-fold. First is to observe our state and level of consciousness with the inquiry "What world am I in?"

Second is to continue the work begun at last week's meeting - to say only what is necessary. Implicit in this is the discernment of what is necessary, without omission or commission. 

We continue to pause together, coming to a collected state, and making contact with the presence of the group, on each third hour.