Words of Love

Words of Love

From our friend Charles R.

What the great Egyptian dynasties were to the cultural genesis of most of what we experience today, and what the Golden Age of Athens was to western thought, the proliferation of the great cathedrals to the dark ages and the flowering of the Italian Renaissance to western art, so were the Sufi’s, an almost incongruous eruption of conscious love expressed - blurted even - unabashedly, joyfully and ecstatically against the backdrop of a quieter and somewhat sterner, although no less beautiful, expression of the esoteric that the Islamic tradition carries.

We write and speak about being present. A quote from a poem by Rumi points the way from eight hundred years ago: "I am a child of the present.” Peter Ouspensky who explained and codified the Fourth Way as it is presented today, somewhere in one of his texts said that the false personality is comprised of a limited set of habits that repeat, and that the advantage to this is because of this characteristic, we are able to observe it’s manifestations. If its repertoire were unlimited then we’d have no hope of ever seeing it or struggling with it. Abu Said said the same centuries before Ouspensky: "It is typical of the lower self to set foot repeatedly on the same spot.”

Rumi asks us "Can you remember the present?”, and as if to answer him, Gujduvani says “Remember yourself always and everywhere.”. Gujduvani’s quotation is often ascribed to George Gurdjieff. Indeed, it may be said that George Gurdjieff was the last conscious Sufi. The sayings and quotes attributed to George Gurdjieff share many of the same characteristics of the Sufis.

An enigmatic quote from Gurdjieff is "The acquisition or transmission of true knowledge demands great labor and great effort both of him who receives and of him who gives.”. Enigmatic, because five hundred years before in a different country with completely different cultural values, William Shakespeare utters a similar sentiment in his play Merchant of Venice, and as The Bard himself might say, gives us pause for thought: “The quality of mercy is….twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes”. Even so, again from Gurdjieff, he states that "We would find a great many ideas in the works of ancient art passed down to us, if only we knew how to read them.”

Practicing self-remembering, the non-expression of negative emotions and transformation of suffering, we must bear in mind that without a school, without the outside help of a Teacher, other students, three lines of work, and all that a school offers, the connection to higher centers is so negligible, that at best, it’s simply a happy and inconsistent accident. Ubayd Al-Ahrar counsels the Fourth Way student: "You must struggle to keep firm and constant in the remembrance, because whatever you acquire easily, without difficulty, will not stay with you.”

And if you are wondering whether or not a school is right for you, here are a few words from Rumi:

Come out of the circle of time (imagination)

And into the circle of love.(Wordless presence)

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Image: George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Private collection