"...Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name; But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game..." Exert from The Rolling Stones' Song - 'Sympathy for the Devil' - where Mick Jagger is playing Satan, documenting events through history that could be seen as “works of the devil.”
"...For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms..."
Ephesians 6:12
After long work on oneself, when you begin to really see your own potential for evil, your own deep seated vices --- extending from witnessing sleep or mechanicalness (somnambulistic behaviour) to objective violent depravity and inherent narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies --- and become completely terrified, almost to the point of asking whether committing suicide would be worthwhile to rid the universe of such a destructive element as yourself, can a re-orientation open.
This realisation of the "Terror of the Situation" (as Gurdjieff refers) is the singular force of motivation to endure the necessary humiliation for transformation. Those who have not begun to experience this terror, that should haunt them daily, are deeply at risk of their spiritual pursuits turning into the very thing they wished to avoid.
The creation of a Soul, that facilitates our salvation to everlasting life that Christ speaks of, must be paid for with the equivalent cognisance and work in vanquishing the evil that can be perpetrated against it. Here, when I confront the invoking of my own evil, can I begin to understand evil in the world.
Man—how mighty it sounds! The very name ‘man’ means ‘the acme of Creation’; but… how does his title fit contemporary man?
At the same time, man should indeed be the acme of Creation, since he is formed with and has in himself all the possibilities for acquiring all the data exactly similar to the data in the ACTUALIZER of EVERYTHING EXISTING in the Whole of the Universe.”
To possess the right to the name of “man,” one must be one.
And to be such, one must first of all, with an indefatigable persistence and an unquenchable impulse of desire, issuing from all the separate independent parts constituting one’s entire common presence, that is to say, with a desire issuing simultaneously from thought, feeling, and organic instinct, work on an all-round knowledge of oneself—at the same time struggling unceasingly with one’s subjective weaknesses—and then afterwards, taking one’s stand upon the results thus obtained by one’s consciousness alone, concerning the defects in one’s established subjectivity as well as the elucidated means for the possibility of combatting them, strive for their eradication without mercy towards oneself.
G.I.Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" (Penguin Arkana, pp. 1208-1209).
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