Birdlip, January 8, 1944
NOTE ON THE STUDY OF LOSS OF FORCE

The conception of force is an essential idea in the Work. In order to awaken a man must have force : without force he cannot a% aken. The conception of force can be best understood if it is studied from two angles. The Work says that a man loses force in a great many specific ways which it mentions, that he gains force by work on them, and that he creates force by the act of Self-Remembering.

Let us study loss of force. We are told that we can only begin to awaken after much effort and long struggle, and that this is due to the fact that life wants us to stay asleep for its own reasons. This means that life prevents us from conserving force, or, put the other way, life takes our force. Since we are nothing but a mass of habits, life forms very early in us various habits of losing force, sometimes very complex ones. So we lose force mechanically, just as we do everything else mechanically. It is very difficult to see how we lose force. We have to view ourselves in the light of new knowledge—to, exchange our old ideas for new—in order to realize what is continually happening. A person may lose force in a flash, just because of touching a negative emotion. In the Work, which is long, we begin to realize that we are faced by this mass of habits, that is not us. This is a painful experience and it is unnecessary to enter into it unless one is convinced that there is something to reach.

Now, to awaken, anything anti-mechanical may help. Self-observation is anti-mechanical and must come before everything else. But it is in non-identifring that the main key lies to preventing loss of force. Every-act of non-identifying saves force. We are speaking of force necessary for awakening. If we identify with everything, inner and outer, we cannot have force for doing or understanding the Work. The Work will remain far away as a vague cloud. After a time one begins to notice that one is asleep. That is, one begins to notice that one has lost force. At the same time one notices that the Work and its ideas seem very far away. When one begins to have a barometer of this kind, it is possible to study in more detail what it is that causes loss of force. Although the causes of loss of force can be arranged in general categories, that apply to everyone, such as negative states, each person has particular causes that must be observed personally in the greatest detail and reflected upon with the greatest care in the light of the new understanding that the Work gives. Otherwise there is no sincerity with oneself, upon which alone can anything be built within oneself. Nor can there be any centre of gravity established by the influence of the Work, and so nothing will reach us that belongs to Real 'I'.

All this belongs to the necessity of valuation that is frequently spoken of. Without valuation of the Work there can be no sincerity with it, nor can there be a definite inner perception of loss of force. That is, a person will not notice distinctly that he is asleep, although he may notice that the Work seems far away. It is very interesting to begin to notice the sources of loss of force and the conditions connected with them. There are certain trains of thought, for instance, that cause loss of force, and it may take some years before you see why. And it often happens that things you thought quite harmless and even admir¬able cause loss of force.

Now to recall briefly that other angle—what creates force. It is the act of Self-Remembering that creates force. The opening of the mind to the act and the meaning and significance of Self-Remembering and the accompanying separation from all one's usual ideas of oneself; from one's usual small feelings and internal considerings—this actually creates force. So one gains force by every act of non-identifying because one prevents its loss, and one creates force by Self-Remembering.

Now you will see that it is necessary to isolate oneself from the action of life. But to understand what this means in a general sense, and what it means for each of you in a particular sense, is not something given us ready-made. It is only gradually that one begins to see. How impatient some people are about the Work. I sometimes marvel at people expecting to reach in a short time states that demand a life-time of work before they can be attained. There is always something outside and something inside that a person should try to isolate himself from. What does it mean to isolate oneself? You can say "insulate" if you like. If life takes all force and keeps us asleep it is necessary to isolate oneself from at least some of its various powers over us. Some people are always upset about something or other—about something that they think very wrong. Let us say they are politically upset, or morally upset, or religiously upset, or hygienically upset, or, simply, just always upset by everything. They lose force. That is, in these ways life robs them of all force for awakening. They think, however, that they are doing right. This is not a good thing to think mechanically. When you feel you are right you may be sure you are asleep. But of course life robs us of force in many other ways. We are not important in the Ray of Creation. We are living on a mere point in the Milky Way which is billion-sunned and there are billions of Milky Ways. Yes, we are very small. But there is a chance. To have this double-feeling is a form of Self-Remembering.

Now as regards Self-Remembering, which is the means of actually creating force—you remember the First Conscious Shock and the energies resulting ?—there are many ways of Self-Remembering. But they all depend on the feeling that there is something else, that this life on this extremely bad planet is not explicable in terms of itself. There is something else. We then meditate on the Octave from the Sun, until it becomes a living thing in our mind, and speaks to us. Then perhaps we begin to see what "isolation" means. However, we have moments in which we feel that the future will surely be better. But there are two futures, one in time and one in scale, one horizontal —the other vertical and always there, just above our present state. There are many forms of Self-Remembering. You have to get out of your own way, to get out of your own light. Since we are different at different moments, Self-Remembering is different at different times. The "Sly Man" knows this. He does not always practise the same method. To do so is to make it mechanical. What is mechanical is useless for the Work. He moves, as it were, forward and then backward and then forward, and so on. In any case he experiments. He notices what was and is no longer useful and invents some other way—and so on. Some time we will speak of "Sly Man". But everyone should above all things think of and study and try to self-remember each day. Try to get out of your own way. Try to let something get, in that cannot because you are in the way. Can you stop the noise of yourself for even a moment? Can you get out of the ordinary feeling of yourself? Can you become no one for a moment to yourself? Or, by contrast, can you feel the intense reality of yourself? Can you feel I in all you have to do, for a time? All these are different ways of remembering oneself. There are many other ways, but try to discover one for yourself, to begin with, and get to know the taste of it. Then you will know more distinctly when you are asleep. We are trying to awaken to another level of life. We believe this is the real meaning of our existence. But to awaken we must have force. Whatever we do consciously remains: whatever we do mechanically is lost to us. So we have to learn how to live in life and not be eaten by life. Identify with life and give all your force to life and you cannot awaken, just as you cannot if you identify with your¬self. How rich that young man felt himself, how identified he was with all his virtues and talents and excellences. He was told to go and sell all he had before he could awaken. He was very sorrowful. Think what it would mean to cease to ascribe to yourself everything you do and think you are—that is, to sell all your possessions. Who can imagine what this really means? Have you caught even a single glimpse yet of its meaning in regard to yourself? If so, you will begin to realize where your force goes every moment, how it is used and why people are asleep without knowing it.

Birdlip, January 15, 1944
A FURTHER NOTE ON THE STUDY OF LOSS OF FORCE

Let us continue to-night with a further commentary on losing force. Last time we spoke about the necessity of observing how we lose force and noticing what is the cause of it. Amongst other things it was said that internal considering is part of the great subject of identifying and identifying is the greatest evil for mankind. Many people think that worrying about other people will help them. They even imagine that it is right to be in a worried, anxious state about anybody else, but what we have to understand is that it does not help anyone. If you are very worried and anxious about someone who is ill, it does not help either you or the other person. Being identified never helps. It is just in this way that we take force from other people by identifying with them and we keep them, as it were, in prison, and ourselves also. You have probably noticed how easy it is for two people to put themselves in prison and create their own useless suffering.

Now you can lose force by thinking of someone with whom you are identified. We do not treat one another well inside ourselves. We have to release one another. If we could get a right attitude to one another, we should be free from one another. I mean, we should not be in a kind of bondage. To find a right attitude really means to find a point of equilibrium where one is not in either of the opposites. But identifying with the other person is the reverse of this. As you know, being identi¬fied is almost the only emotion that we experience. Even if we for a moment experience a trace of real emotion it almost at once becomes mixed up with some fonn of identifying. For example, we ascribe, say, a momentary feeling of love to ourselves and instantly the whole situation within is changed. Of course, if we believe that there is nothing higher than ourselves it is really impossible not to identify always in one way or another. And this always means loss of force. We do not become more conscious of one another through identifying but less conscious. To become more conscious we require more force. The object of this Work is to increase consciousness. If we were more conscious this war would stop at once. If we became more conscious of other people our whole relationship towards them would change. External Considering is a development of consciousness. Consciousness can grow only in certain directions. Self-knowledge is one direction : external considering is another direction. If you could put yourself in the place of all the people whom you were about to kill with a bomb you would be unable to do anything. It would come to you as a terrific shock to realize what you were about to do. This would be an increase of consciousness. Force would increase in you but you might go to sleep a moment later by identifying with feelings of revenge or personal insult, etc. and then you would lose force and at once the area of your consciousness would diminish and instead of seeing many things together you would once more see only one thing. You would look once more through one narrow window. We can notice the states in which we feel much more awake towards people, much less identified, and in which we begin actually to take in new impressions of others. This means that we are more conscious, that we have more force of consciousness. Then suddenly we become identified as when someone says something that we do not expect, and so on, and we tumble down as it were to our ordinary state which has such a stale smell about it.

One cause of losing force is through not being in the right centre for what you are doing. This is comparatively easy to study in yourself provided you know something of the work of different centres in your¬self. For instance, if you are day-dreaming and trying to do some job that you dislike very much you will be losing force all the time. Why? You should discuss this amongst yourselves. If on the contrary you are in the right centre and really engaged in something to which you are giving your attention—in which perhaps even all centres are assisting—then you will not lose force but tend to gain force or to conserve it, because you are acting more consciously. You know what it is to do your daily work mechanically and the difference if you do it more consciously. In the one case, you get no impressions: in the other case, you get some impressions.

You will realize how important it is to seal yourself against states where force can leak out, and how much the Work deals with these and how practically it speaks on these points. Perhaps some of us have not realized it yet. Perhaps we have not made the connection between the teachings of the Work and our own inner experience. In any case you will see that unless a man becomes hermetically sealed he will be like a person putting to sea in a boat that is constantly springing leaks, who will have to keep on putting back to shore. Our situation is really exactly similar. We have got to isolate ourselves from the effects that have been automatically produced in us and this requires a great deal of patient self-study, self-sincerity and understanding of what the Work is about.

Certain ideas of the Work are very important in this respect and I will again call your attention to one or two of them. You have to understand the deeper meaning of the saying that Man is mechanical and the saying that Everything happens in the only way it can happen in life. You have to realize that Man cannot do. You must begin to realize the meaning of these sayings and their truth because otherwise the whole mental outlook will be wrong and of course you will lose force quite uselessly. It will be like having the wrong attitude to a machine that you are trying to run in the best possible way. Y.0 do not understand the machine. You keep pulling the wrong levers. You do not see what it really is. It is something like that that I mean when I say that we must understand the meaning of these sayings. For example, if you take everyone as fully conscious you will continually lose force.

We are not conscious. We do not speak and do things consciously. There are not certain people running the affairs of life, some people called "they". Everything is happening in the only way it can happen. Let me quote you something in G.'s words. 0. has asked G. what he ought to do:

"What to do?" asked G., as though surprised. "It is impossible to do anything. A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before."

"How can one get rid of false ideas?" I asked. " We depend on the forms of our perception. False ideas are produced by the forms of our perception."

G. shook his head. "Again you speak of something different," he said. "You speak of errors arising from perceptions but I am not speaking of these. Within the limits of given perceptions man can be more or less deluded. As I have said before, man's chief delusion is his conviction that he can do. All people think that they can do, all people want to do and the first question all people ask is what are they to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him—all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature of the atmosphere; as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.
Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels—all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, cannot invent anything. It all happens.

To establish this fact for oneself, to understand it, to be con¬vinced of its truth, means getting rid of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. There is nothing of this kind. Everything happens —popular movements, wars, revolutions, changes of government —all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as everything happens in the life of individual man. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not hate, love, desire—all this happens.

But no one will ever believe you if you tell him he can do nothing. This is the most offensive and the most unpleasant thing you can tell people. And it is particularly unpleasant and offensive because it is the truth. And nobody wants to know the truth."

怎么把乌斯宾斯基《探索奇迹——无名教学片段G——O》英文版发到这里来了？

其实，中文版、英文版也没什么意思啦，反正都是至少二手以上的。

突然想到，也许一个体系的核心——出发点，一定要明确……核心、出发点明确了，基本上至少就能传承60%了吧。

G体系：记得自己、意识……成为真正的“有意识”的人！

呵呵，如果您可以推荐《人的类型》，为什么又对《探索奇迹》的二手性那么挑剔呢，毕竟本书还是G本人认可了才出版的，而《人的类型》……

任何出发点或核心理念，是给理智中心的“意义饲料”，为了启动工作，它本身并不够。至于“一个有意识的人”——“记得自己”——都是什么？知道这些词及其约略代表的含义或方向性，就可以是了吗？假设你坐听周围声音，同时感觉呼吸每一次进出，同时心里按某种序位数数……这是记得自己吗？这里面哪个是有意识的“人”呢？

[ 本帖最后由 Hassein 于 2007-11-18 23:04 编辑 ]

想当然，楼上两位，我的标题写得清楚，在www.gurdjieff.org上有对于Maurice Nicoll的介绍。

本贴供翻译，学习，交流。我先来翻一段。

Birdlip, January 8, 1944
能量流失之研究

在“工作”中，能量是核心观念之一。为醒悟，一个人必须具备能量：没有能量他无法醒悟。从两个角度研究，能量的意思可以获得最好的了解。“工作”告诉我们，一个人的能量会在它提到的很多特殊渠道中流失，通过工作自己人可以获得能量，通过记得自己的行为人创造能量。

让我们研究一下能量的流失。我们被告知，我们只有通过很多努力和长期争斗才开始变得醒悟，这是因为生活出于其自身的原因想要让我们处于睡眠之中。这意味着，生活防止我们保存能量，换句话说，生活拿走我们的能量。既然我们除了是一堆习惯之外什么也不是，生活在很早的时候就在我们身上形成了各种流失能量的习惯，有时候是一些很复杂的习惯。所以我们机械地流失能量，就像我们机械地做任何事情一样。为了认识到什么是一直在我们身上发生的，我们必须在新知识的光照下认识自己，也就是说，把我们的旧观念换成新的。一个人可能在瞬间丧失能量，只是因为接触负面情绪。在这个久远的“工作”中，我们逐渐认识到，我们面对的这一堆习惯并不是我们。这是一个痛苦的经验，没有必要进入它，除非一个人信服有必要去达成什么。

谢谢。

我英语不很好，哈哈：）

谢谢这里的一些朋友的提携、赐教。

我的“线”主要是从“友朋会”来的，目前在这上面，我接受帮助的前辈，曾经或还是友朋会的人。

才会说到《人的类型》——路线是这样的，手头的资料也不多。

请多关照。多谢。

“任何出发点或核心理念，是给理智中心的“意义饲料”，为了启动工作，它本身并不够。”——要启动工作，在日常生活中，还需要些什么？身体、情感……？

“假设你坐听周围声音，同时感觉呼吸每一次进出，同时心里按某种序位数数……这是记得自己吗？”——我也质疑这样是否和“有意识”有关……机能不是意识。

记得自己——分开注意力，和它贴近吗？或者说“是”？

Ps：乌斯宾斯基后来是离开了葛吉夫的团体工作，这样，好象他的那条线，G的线都不怎么承认吗？我看的比较多的都是或者有关o的著作。要感谢的人，也很多，有些也已不在人世了……

今天再翻一段：）

为了清醒，任何反机械性的都可能帮上忙。自我观察是反机械性的，必须把它放在其他事情前面。但是不认同是防止能量流失的关键。每一个不认同的行为都挽回能量。我们正在讲的是清醒必须的能量。如果我们跟任何事情认同，内在的，外在的，我们就不可能有能量来理解和做“工作”。工作就会一直像模糊的云层一样遥远。一段时间之后，一个人开始注意到自己是睡着的。也就是说，他开始注意到自己失去了能量。此时，他发现工作及其观念看上去极为遥远。当一个人开始具备这样一种气压计，才可能更详细地学习什么是能量流失的原因。虽然能量流失的原因可以归为几个适用于每个人的大类，比如负面状态等，但是每一个个人都有自己特殊的原因，这原因在”工作“给予的新理解的光照之下，必须给予最详尽的观察，最细致的反省。否则一个人就对自己没有诚实可言，只有诚实才是在自己内在有所建设的基础。没有诚实，也就无法通过工作的影响建立起任何工作所称的“重心”，也就没有什么属于真实的“我”的东西会建立起来。

所有这些就是关于经常讲到的对“工作”的看重之必要性。没有对工作的看重，就没有诚实可言，也就没有对能量流失的清楚的内在察觉。也就是，一个人不会确实地注意到他处于睡眠之中，虽然他可能注意到工作似乎离他很远。开始注意到能量流失的源头及其相关状况是极为有趣的一件事。比如说，有某些一连串的思想列车，会导致能量流失，这也许会让你花费几年时间才能看清。而且这经常发生在那些你认为无伤大雅甚或有所倾慕的事情上。

现在让我们简短地回到另一个角度：什么创造能量。记得自己这个行为创造能量。头脑对记得自己的行为，意义，重要性的开放，伴随着一个人与通常的自我观念的分开，与那些通常的细小情绪和内在顾虑的分开，这事实上创造了能量。所以一个人通过每个不认同的行为获得了能量，因为他防止了它的流失，并且一个人通过记得自己创造能量。