Common Sense Advices

Someone uploaded a good recitation,
with music of the Armenian teacher, 
arranged by his pupil Thomas De Hartmann.

The following list of 82 advices first appeared in the autobiography La Danza de la Realidad and its English version The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cinema director and therapeutic artist. 

According to Alejandro these advices were given to him by a woman nicknamed Reyna D'Assia (Queen of Asia), who presents herself as daughter of G.I.Gurdjieff, the Armenian teacher of dances and inner-development. 

Given the novelesque and symbolic flavor of many of the events described, it is difficult to separate factual circumstances from symbolic reality in some passages, as in the movies of Jodorowsky and the work  Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff´s own autobiography.

However, the so called "commandments" that she attributes to her father do seem to mirror many of the attitudes of the Armenian teacher.

And it is worth meditating on each one of them, regardless of the veracity of the source and events in which they were supposedly presented. 

They are charged with an almost overwhelming force to live with a truly universal common sense:

Reyna D´Assia speaking:

“We have been badly educated. We live in a world of competition in which honesty is synonymous with naïveté. We must first develop good habits. Some of them may seem simple, but they are very difficult to realize. Believing them to be obvious, we fail to see that they are the key to immortal consciousness. Now I shall offer you a dictation of the commandments that my blessed father taught me:

Ground your attention on yourself. Be conscious at every moment of what you are thinking, sensing, feeling, desiring, and doing. 

Always finish what you have begun. 

Whatever you are doing, do it as well as possible. 

Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time. 

Develop your generosity — but secretly. 

Treat everyone as if he or she was a close relative. 

Organize what you have disorganized. 

Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift. 

Stop defining yourself. 

Do not lie or steal, for you lie to yourself and steal from yourself. 

Help your neighbor, but do not make him dependent. 

Do not encourage others to imitate you. 

Make work plans and accomplish them. 

Do not take up too much space. 

Make no useless movements or sounds. 

If you lack faith, pretend to have it. 

Do not allow yourself to be impressed by strong personalities. 

Do not regard anyone or anything as your possession. Share fairly. 

Do not seduce. 

Sleep and eat only as much as necessary. 

Do not speak of your personal problems. 

Do not express judgment or criticism when you are ignorant of most of the factors involved. 

Do not establish useless friendships. 

Do not follow fashions. 

Do not sell yourself.

Respect contracts you have signed. 

Be on time. 

Never envy the luck or success of anyone. 

Say no more than necessary. 

Do not think of the profits your work will engender. 

Never threaten anyone. 

Keep your promises. 

In any discussion, put yourself in the other person’s place.

Admit that someone else may be superior to you. 

Do not eliminate, but transmute. 

Conquer your fears, for each of them represents a camouflaged desire.

Help others to help themselves. 

Conquer your aversions and come closer to those who inspire rejection in you. 

Do not react to what others say about you, whether praise or blame. 

Transform your pride into dignity. 

Transform your anger into creativity. 

Transform your greed into respect for beauty. 

Transform your hate into charity. 

Neither praise nor insult yourself. 

Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you. 

Do not complain. 

Develop your imagination. 

Never give orders to gain the satisfaction of being obeyed. 

Pay for services performed for you. 

Do not proselytize your work or ideas. 

Do not try to make others feel for you emotions such as pity, admiration, sympathy, or complicity. 

Do not try to distinguish yourself by your appearance. 

Never contradict; instead, be silent. 

Do not contract debts; acquire and pay immediately. 

If you offend someone, ask his or her pardon; if you have offended a person publicly, apologize publicly. 

When you realize you have said something that is mistaken, do not persist in error through pride; instead, immediately retract it. 

Never defend your old ideas simply because you are the one who expressed them. 

Do not keep useless objects. 

Do not adorn yourself with exotic ideas. 

Do not have your photograph taken with famous people. 

Justify yourself to no one, and keep your own counsel. 

Never define yourself by what you possess. 

Never speak of yourself without considering that you might change.

Accept that nothing belongs to you. 

When someone asks your opinion about something or someone, speak only of his or her qualities. 

When you become ill, regard your illness as your teacher, not as something to be hated. 

Look directly, and do not hide yourself. 

Do not forget your dead, but accord them a limited place and do not allow them to invade your life. 

Wherever you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred. 

When you perform a service, make your effort inconspicuous. 

If you decide to work to help others, do it with pleasure.

 If you are hesitating between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing. 

Do not try to be everything to your spouse; accept that there are things that you cannot give him or her but which others can. 

When someone is speaking to an interested audience, do not contradict that person and steal his or her audience. 

Live on money you have earned. 

Never brag about amorous adventures. Never glorify your weaknesses. 

Never visit someone only to pass the time. 

Obtain things in order to share them. If you are meditating and a devil appears, make the devil meditate too.”

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[1] 

Sacrifice the interference

Roman mosaic: Orpheus with his tamed Beasts

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: 'Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.' When asked which dog wins, he reflected a moment and replied: 'The one I feed the most' –told by George Bernard Shaw

Many are the ways conscious love can be expressed. Yet the most sublime is indeed the sacrifice of that which hinders the communion between the Lover and Beloved Essence that breathes in every fiber of the Kosmos.

The Supreme is always Lover and Beloved, aspiring to merge with the third holy force in an endless embrace.

Any love outside that intimate Holy Trinity, is intrusive, parasitic, an object of Idolatry.

Countless are the distractions that drive the animal mind and bestial heart away from the real Heart. Mechanical and ruthless is the force that obsessively pulls back the psyche to worries and restless emotions. Why? What is this drive? What preys and feeds on emotions and endless thoughts?

Emotions –not higher feelings– can be like a drug rooted on false memory, the distorted perception of the past: irrational fear, self-pity, self-deprecation, boredom, loneliness, lust for pleasure and high experiences, jealousy, envy, greed, hate, are all full of pride, self-centredness, and make the mind chatty and noisy. The heart moves the mind, which in turn agitates the heart, forging a slavery chain that should be stopped so that one can be free.

By contrast, higher feelings –such as compassion, gratefulness, happiness, conscious love, longing, the inherent sorrow of life or even the burning remorse of conscience that shows some inner imperfection and its negative impact outside–, can only exist now, and may lead to the silence and serenity of a higher nature when due attention is paid. 

Only humans can have these higher feelings, provided one escapes the subconscious influence of the emotions, animal energy in motion.

By fortune emotions can be transformed into higher energy, higher feelings. How? By sacrificing them, depriving the emotional animal of its food and letting it die of starvation, freeing the necessary energy for higher nature, which is indigestible to psychic predators.

It is in the search for the Beloved Essence and conscious love that seekers should understand ancient teachings concerning “sacrifice” and “dominion over animals”, as those found in sacred traditions:

Take four birds and draw them towards thee, and cut them in pieces." The birds are explained to be the duck of gluttony, the cock of concupiscence, the peacock of ambition and ostentation, and the crow of bad desires, and this is made the text of several stories. Beginning with gluttony, the poet tells the following story to illustrate the occasion of the Prophet's uttering the saying, Infidels eat with seven bellies, but the faithful with one –Rumi [1]

And Elohym said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth –Genesis 1:26

...these have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds. Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased–Jeremiah 5:5-6

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity ―Dale Carnegie, in How to win friends and Influence People

It is necessary to understand that to be really human is to be humble, humus, soil for divine gardens. And this demands indeed the sacrifice of the proud animal that still lives in the physical body and the psychic body, both of which have different desires.

Such a work is what purifies and unites the psychic body of personality with the watching consciousness received from the Source. This is the union of soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma) that Saint Paul spoke of in several passages of his letters (ie.1 Thessa 5:23). Wisdom also mirrored on the Egyptian doctrine that emphasizes the merging of Ka or psychic double and Ba, spiritual nature, to give birth to the immortal Soul.

Without this sacrifice and union, there can only be physical death first and then the separation of psyche and spirit (Hebrews 4:12), known as “second death” in the Book of Revelation 2:11 and other passages.

One avoids being devoured by psychic vultures and turn the psyche into a true loving Soul (1 Cor 15:42-44), by charming beasts with the lyre of consciousness, as Orpheus, and bringing down the selfish Giant with slyness and the sling of attention, like David.

Once the individual soul embryo matures and grows through the merging of psyche and consciousness:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them –Isaiah 11:6

Now, this is not simple, because the seeker warrior not only has to deal with the animal nature.

It has been taught that humans are in no way the top of the food chain. The Bible, the Zohar and other sacred texts reveal that invisible inorganic forces prey and feed on all types of emotions. Most of those energies are engendered from the waste of psyche in its degenerate behaviors, specially the spill of the seed of life, main source of food for predators. 

And these forces press hard to tempt those who are weak enough to follow their game (i.e Isaiah 34:9-12, Ephesians 6:10-12), depriving humans from the fruits of the Tree of Life, as the dry Fig Tree in Matthew 21:18. Although even scavengers and mosquitoes have a place in the Kosmos.

This is why in myths and tales the spiritual warriors fight beasts, monsters, infidels and hungry demons, all of which attack from the land of the psyche, invisible to the senses and to the blind mind, devouring holy energy.

Like what “it” does not like –maxim of G.I.Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World.

Only hominid minds and bestial hearts believe in gods who demand blood for the expiation of sins or in killing an “external infidel” that does not share a set of blind beliefs. Perverted religion can only lead to psychopathy and death.

True masters knew this. And since very few could understand them, there came savage rituals and religion wars, while ravaging lions, crows and vultures devoured the little humanity some had left. 

It´s surprising to watch –in the XXIst century– how many still teach about converting infidels to their own faith, as if they were messengers of the only Truth.

Yet all that can only be a byproduct of “untamed hearts”, mostly new generations of spirits that might become pure souls one day. Only for the sake of learning humans are allowed to be as retarded as Epimetheus (delayed mind).

It has also been transmitted that inner sacrifice releases energies which harmonize Nature. In the past many semi-humans did not understand this, and they preferred to chop animals or even other people, in order to pacify Nature; but to no avail, for catastrophes caused their destruction, as it will happen to present day civilization if the level of savagery does not decrease in a critical mass of hearts.

Now, all this is not to scare or disappoint anyone. It is simply a set of observations to ponder on sincerely, in case one wants to be truly human knowing the tragic situation better.

Then, a decision has to be taken:

No man can serve two masters...Ye cannot serve God and Mammon –Matthew 6:24

The true Heart of the soul needs also food, but being part of an Angel responsible for carrying love to the Source, its only food is Love for the One, from which everything is given.

The Beloved One is indeed the best example of self-sacrifice, for One becomes Nothing so that everything can Be in unicity with everything else.

Thus, we can´t do this work alone. We need each other to see ourselves mirrored on the other, letting others point our flaws as part of the game. Then will we be able to recognize the Beloved breathing in everyone else, even in those who are asleep. 

May one hand wash the other and both the face.

After these reflections, come to mind questions to be always remembered:

Whom or what are we feeding to? What do we want to sacrifice, the possibility of a loving Soul or the beasts of pride and vanity?

© Copyright 2015

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[1]  The Spiritual Couplets, Book V [1]

http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/masnavi/msn05.htm