Peace

 

That’s what we all want: peace. does it only come with death and does it even come then?  Reminded this week, suffering is the reality of life. Sorrow and joy, He says every day  That does not include contentment does it?

Quote from Robin Bloor,  6-1-26, The Lost Herald:

The Self You Didn’t Choose

Gurdjieff hands you an uncomfortable idea and refuses to soften it. You are not one person. You are two, and you have spent your whole life mistaking one for the other.

He calls them essence and personality. They arrive together, grow together, and answer to the same name, so you assume they are the same thing. They are not. In the Paris talks of 1922 he goes further and counts three machines born with every man — body, essence, and personality — and he insists they have nothing in common with one another. They form independently. They develop independently. A man can carry a bold body, a cowardly essence, and a brave personality all at once, and never notice the contradiction because he never looks.

Start with essence, because essence starts first. Essence is everything you were born with. Heredity, type, temperament, character, nature, raw faculties — the equipment that came in the box. Gurdjieff calls it purely emotional and puts its centre of gravity in the feeling centre. When he is being blunt, in America in 1924, he says it plainly: essence is “I.” It is everything that is genuinely yours. His own example is almost comic in its simplicity — I have a swarthy skin, and I remain as I was born. That belongs to his type. No lecture, no library, no change of address will alter it.

Now personality, and here the knife goes in. Personality is acquired. It is, in his word, accidental. It is built entirely from what you hear and what you read — education, opinions, points of view, the information and convictions that change daily and cancel each other out. Today you believe one thing and want it badly. Tomorrow, under a different influence, you believe and want something else. None of it is yours. It is, he says, a dress you wear, an artificial mask, the result of upbringing and surroundings. And because it is borrowed, it can be stripped off fast. Hypnosis can rewrite your convictions in half an hour. That speed should frighten you. You cannot hypnotise away a man’s essence in half an hour, or in a hundred years. You can rearrange his personality before lunch.

This is the test that cuts cleanly through the two. What you cannot change is essence. What you can change is personality. Change in personality is easy. Change in essence is perhaps impossible. And here Gurdjieff sets a trap for the self-improver. Essence grows until about the age of five, maybe a little longer, and then it largely stops. After that the levers are set. So the man who reads his way to a new philosophy at forty has changed nothing real. He has reshuffled his personality and left his essence exactly where it was at five years old — small, untouched, and waiting.

The two behave nothing alike, and once you see the difference you cannot unsee it. Personality is talkative, clever, easily convinced, and built around a single centre — the formatory apparatus, the mechanical part of the mind. Essence is many-centred but mute. It has no critical faculty. It is trustful, timid, apprehensive. You cannot argue with it. Your mind knows it ought to love everyone; your essence simply cannot, and no logic will move it. Your mind knows the ghost is a hallucination; your essence is afraid of it anyway. Will belongs to personality. Essence has no will at all — only desires. So the part of you that is genuinely you is the part that cannot speak the language in which you give yourself orders.

Gurdjieff dramatises this with his horse-and-cart. The body is the horse, the mind the driver, the personality the reins, and somewhere a master who should be giving directions and almost never is. Once, he says, all the parts shared one language and worked together. Then the language was forgotten. Each part went off to live on its own. Now the driver shouts and the horse flicks flies with its tail and understands nothing. You command yourself constantly. The horse — your essence — does not even hear you. Elsewhere he is grimmer still: we have two strangers in our house and can do nothing with them. The strangers are your own feeling and your own body, and you have never learned their names.

Why does any of this matter? Because Gurdjieff’s whole project hangs on it. When he talks about development, he means the development of essence — never personality. And development, he says, is not acquisition. It is reconstruction. The question is to reconstruct what has been lost, not to acquire anything new. You are not adding a skill. You are digging back down to something that was buried, because each year a man puts on a new mask, a new dress, until a thick crust covers the essence entirely. The work is removal, not accumulation.

There is a mechanism, and it has an odd, almost paradoxical shape. As personality is observed, it becomes passive, and then essence grows and becomes active. You do not attack the mask. You watch it. Watched honestly, it loses its grip, falls quiet, and the buried thing underneath finally gets room to move. Which is why sincerity sits at the centre of the method — sincerity with oneself, which Gurdjieff freely admits is the hardest thing of all. A man will be honest with a friend before he will be honest with himself, because looking down through the crust he is afraid of what he might find: his own nothingness. Most of us drive those thoughts away to dodge the remorse. The crust thickens. The stranger stays a stranger.

So the distinction is not a tidy piece of psychology to file away. It is a verdict. Almost everything you call your character — your opinions, your certainties, your sense of being a particular sort of person — is rented furniture, swapped out without your consent every time the surroundings change. The real article underneath stopped growing while you were still in short trousers, and it does not understand a word you say to it. Gurdjieff’s claim is that only a conscious man can even tell the two apart. The rest of us go through life loudly defending the mask and never once meeting the face.