Two Pillars of Conscious Work: Conscious Labor and Voluntary Suffering
“The two pillars of the Gurdjieffian program for conscious transformation and conscious participation are Conscious Labor and Intentional or Voluntary Suffering.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 03:30 Thursday afternoon teaching.
“Intentional Suffering belongs to the spectrum of practices worldwide that cluster around letting be, letting go, deferring, releasing, bearing. Bearing in the double meaning of holding something up and giving birth. Intentional Suffering is not stupid suffering, which is the kind of suffering inflicted by the frustration of our emotional programs for happiness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 07:15
The Nature of Conscious Suffering
“Intentional Suffering begins from a part of you that is non-identified and uncoopted. You don’t have a dog in the fight. Out of the interior freedom you choose to bear a part of the pain body of sentiency. Always on behalf of something larger than yourself, always as a part of the collective. Gurdjieff would say to lighten the sorrow of our Common Father. It is to realize that there is a dread cost for anything arising.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 09:15
“When Real Conscience awakens in a man he knows what real suffering is. This only begins to happen to a man when he can bear it.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p449
“To suffer from the truth of the Work by seeing its goodness is one form of suffering called conscious suffering.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1468
The Alchemical Process
“If we choose to take the conditions of our life and make of the a laboratory for the generation of the energies that emerge from this kind of work, the fruits of the spirit that emerge from this alchemical work, we offer something back into the planet. We put goodness into the world.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 18:15
“The bearing of the suffering is the transforming. You don’t have to do anything else. Just reaffirm your willingness to bear. The rest is taken care of.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 19:40
“Intentional suffering can grow out of circumstances not of your choosing. You can take the tragic reversals of your life and choose to use them as intentional suffering, by your attitude towards it, your response to it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 12:30
The Protection of Choice
“The things that you’re able to take on, with clarity and freedom, are not likely to destroy you.” “When you decide to take something on out of your deepest will and deepest freedom, the circumstances lose much, if not all, of their power.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 15:40
“Realize that the freedom when you say ‘I will do this’ comes with some protection.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, Thursday afternoon, 17:15
Giving Up Mechanical Suffering
“A man, a woman, the Work teaches, must sacrifice their suffering. Mechanical suffering leads nowhere. A man, a woman, cannot awaken if they retain this dreadful weight, their mechanical suffering, and nourish it, by a continual process of justifying it.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1240
“You must replace the luxury of mechanical suffering by suffering because you still love mechanical suffering.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1241
“Remember one of the Work sayings—that you are asked above all to do one thing, to give up your particular form of suffering. This sounds easy. Try it. The reason why it is so difficult is because to do so is to destroy whole systems of ‘I’s in yourself that enjoy making you suffer and that you think you are.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p137
The Necessity of Acceptance
“We are told, in fact, to like what we now dislike, for this is acceptance, and all acceptance means the giving up of useless suffering. If you persist in dislike and justify it and make a mass of internal accounts in connection with it, you are simply adding to your mechanical suffering and wasting your force and stopping the development of understanding.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p872
“No one can reach a higher level of Being unless he gives up his present forms of suffering.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p851
The Higher Contact
“Real suffering is utterly different and always opens us to a higher level: fraudulent suffering closes us. It is extraordinary how a moment of real suffering makes everything false fall away from you and at such moments you understand quite plainly what this Work is about, but fraudulent, self-invented suffering comes between us and Higher Centres—that is, between us and the voice of the Work that is always speaking to us, and which we have to learn at first from outside, from a teacher, and after a time can begin to hear speaking to us inside.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p853
“In order to have a contact with the higher centers, it is necessary to increase the intensity of the lower centers. Their vibrations have to intensify through seeing and suffering the lack, a conscious suffering.” Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p214
The Path of Development
“I am not open to a higher level, a higher thinking. I have to suffer this lack, to stay resolutely in front of it. Little by little this will become more important than anything else. But it requires giving all of myself. And the ego always reasserts its dominance. To stay in front is voluntary suffering.” Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p238
“To believe, to hope, to love are all indispensable for evolution of being. But they can be lived only if, at the same time, voluntary suffering allows true, higher feeling to appear. It is necessary to feel remorse of conscience. The voluntary effort is to prepare conditions and stay in front of my inadequacy— to suffer my insufficiency. In this way a will develops that would not otherwise be produced, and a feeling arises that is not a reaction. When one is touched by a higher force, the experience of suffering is not the same.” Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p259
Logion 2
Yeshua says...
If you are searching, you must not stop until you find.
When you find, however, you will become troubled.
Your confusion will give way to wonder.
In wonder you will reign over all things.
Your sovereignty will be your rest.
Logion 58
Yeshua says...
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Jeanne De Salzmann, The Reality of Being, Shambhala Publications, 2010
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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