Gurdjieff International Review
These talks have been taken from tape recordings of meetings led by Paul and Naomi Anderson and were delivered to a specific audience—individuals immersed in the reading, contemplation, and application of the ideas contained within Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. The following talks on “Time” refer directly to the text contained in Chapter 16, “The Relative Understanding of Time.” [G.I.R. Ed.]
It is, of course, impossible to convey in written form the experience of direct presentation, at the proper moment, by a teacher. Nevertheless, here an attempt has been made to preserve the stylistic flavor of Mr. Anderson’s talks. He had a great gift for communication, but in this he differed greatly from the superficial or formatory styles which we have been taught to associate with “clarity.” He had achieved that level where speech becomes the bridge of presence from being to being. His talks invariably sank deeply into the psyche of the listener, to be revitalized later—perhaps many years later—with a stunning impact.
Time, the ‘Merciless Heropass,’ is meted out for us all. And it is so doled out that we have only limited amounts. Yet we act as if this were not so... Our attitude about Time does not reflect any of its real meaning and real point... Time is a very important thing for us to understand in this Work, and especially the idea that it is doled out; and that it is connected with the law of ‘Trogoautoegocrat’ and with the operation of the universe as we conceive it from our standpoint. Also, since Time is meted out to us, and since there is a limit to it, and since we are in the Work, we must never, never miss the opportunity of taking advantage of what is before us at any moment ... because it may never come back again in that way, and you may never have the opportunity to experience it, and, once having lost it, you will not be able to get it back.
What am I? What are we? We can say that all of our life is Time, and that the present moment of our life is in the Allness of our life—a point in the magnitude of our greater existence. We are our life. A man is his life, and his life is Time. And if his life is Time, then a man must make use of every moment so that he may enlarge the present moment to cover the whole of his life, and in his life he must miss no opportunity. How can he become the master of Time if he does not have this realization?
When we can bring a sensation of urgency into our Work, “passing time” begins to disappear, because this “passing time” in itself is one of our major fantasies. Within us there can then arise an awareness of Nowness and the importance of performing efforts now. The arising of such an awareness means that there is no longer any wondering about what to do next, what to say, how to excuse oneself, and, in the midst of activity, to be already looking ahead to something not yet done or even visualized. Perhaps this may help bring the inner cognition that this kind of performance, or the lack of it, is an example of what is known, when considering Time, as the condition of always becoming, never getting to where you are going—a becoming where nothing ever is, where nothing is achieved, and there is never any conclusion. This is passing time, which is dream time. Nothing can ever be in passing time. It is the time of mechanical and sleeping man.
One can recognize that there is such a thing as Nowness—something that lies outside of, or above, or which is “vertical” to what we call “passing time” (that is, in relation to the time that is always our dream state, but never reality, because it is on the level of sleeping man). Now is. As we have said, Now is vertical to ordinary time, but not even in any way like it. Thus, if we speak of the Present Moment, we must recognize that it is not the so-called moment of passing time, but the Now of something immeasurably greater than any passing moment could ever be because passing moment is in imagination. In Gurdjieff’s chapter on “The Relative Understanding of Time” (Beelzebub’s Tales) he refers to the two kinds of principles of being duration, ‘Foolasnitamnian’ and ‘Itoklanos.’ It is important to understand the difference between these two kinds of duration for human beings on the planet Earth. And one should note also the subtle point Gurdjieff brings in regarding their different functionings or different impacts on the cosmic interchange of substances. In this connection ... may we not now point out that, instead of being where nothing ever is, or ever happens, the Work can create new possibilities for us if we make true efforts, and if we can be present in the Now. Now contains all the time for us. Now does not mean ‘Itoklanos,’ but it means ‘Foolasnitamnian’ for those who can make extra efforts persistently. Hence we have a means for discriminating, and also for maintaining an aim to strive for higher consciousness, or for true self consciousness. This should also indicate to you: that it is not the decisions of man on the level of ‘Itoklanos’ (or who lives by this principle) that count here in this Work ... at any time or place ... not in the tasks, nor in the performance of the Movements, nor in the struggle to learn how to be able to change the level of one’s being. Such decisions, the decisions of sleeping man, are made from life in time—even though they may be decisions that you consider to be the right things to do, and about how to perform acts in the right ways—but they are always based on the ‘disease of tomorrow’ ... that is, they are of “passing time.” Decisions and efforts and activities on this level are never real; they are not from the Work. Only the Now counts here.
It is the Now that is concerned with the trusting of the Work, with making the efforts required to self-remember, with being above and standing above the passing moment, and in such efforts that bring about thinking and feeling and acting in new ways. Hence they are also outside the mechanical associations which exist on our passive levels of negativity, crystallized attitudes, laziness, and sleep.
You are confronted here with an immense challenge, with an immense technique which, when understood, means that you can no longer go back to your old ways, or justify them in any way; nor can you conduct your relationships and activities in the old way because they are meaningless. You must find new ways based on decisions made from another part of you, and from another part of the Work. Work values have nothing to do with the level of passing time; and you mix them at your peril.
Gurdjieff cautions you against soiling the purity of your impressions. Thus we have to struggle against passing time and all its imaginations and fantasies, because, from Time viewed in the Work way, we can never afford to feel guilty or to feel self pity, or that it is too late—all that nonsense goes with ‘Itoklanos’ and the ‘Kundabuffer.’ It means, though, that we can stand outside our ordinary notions of Time, and that we can change our relation to the ordinary level of Time in order to achieve the necessary understanding—and further, that we can in this way discover many new and presently dormant possibilities for living and working. And so, also, we can begin to develop from this theme a taste for what is genuine and what is to be distinguished from what is not genuine. Our true life now is not in tomorrow. Never. It can only be discovered by being awake, by making super-efforts, and by ‘being-partkdolg-duty,’ and by practicing sincerely on whatever level we are ... but that is your decision and not ours.
One of the very greatest “secrets” of this Work is connected with our experiences with Time and with its durations. In the chapter by Gurdjieff on “The Relative Understanding of Time” Beelzebub, after making comparisons between human beings and beings in a drop of water, and between human beings on the planet Earth and those dwelling on the planet Karatas, tells Hassein that there are two principles of duration and being-existence applicable to the planet Earth because of its very strange development ... and there are currents included of what happened when they had to establish the organ Kundabuffer. The author mentions these occurrences after he compares the life of a being on Earth with that of Hassein, who is from Karatas, and then tells him that human duration is as nothing or “almost nothing” from an objective point of view... Taking into account, as Beelzebub does, the many and varied causes of our subjective flow of time, that is of what we call “passing time” or “moment to moment time” or “past to future time,” we can never forget that the main ground for all the said results, and what brings us to the subject that we are now discussing, continues to be “the abnormal conditions of external ordinary being-existence established by them themselves”—that is, by us ourselves.
I wish to pause for a moment to point out that Gurdjieff, at this particular part of his book, and before he begins to discuss world laws and world creation and all the great questions, here takes time to deal with Time, the subject of Time, because this is a very important topic, and it does contain many very great elements of the Work—and even contains a very great secret which is very important for you to progress in this Work. This is the challenge that he utters when he talks about the said results. This is a direct challenge, and it is also the arena in which all the action that concerns us does take place, the action concerning ourselves.
Thus, if we examine our position now in light of the Work, it is apparent that the process of the diminution of our existence or, otherwise, the speeding-up of the flowing of our time so that little, if anything, remains in the memory of past events, even immediate past events, all of this is an association that is in flux. This is a flux in which things go up and down, some are clear, some are dark, but never is the whole known, or remembered by ordinary memory. In this flux our centers exhaust themselves and perish away, and they do it in parts, by thirds as it were, sometimes even by less, until in the end there is nothing but a small momentum remaining ... which also diminishes after his death, with the last dying of his associations. This dying away in pieces or parts is an example of what is meant by the speeding-up of “passing time.” The more we are in negative states, the more it speeds up; because we cannot experience a moment, but are always going from past to future ... and we know not the present, and so continually approach nearer and nearer to nothingness as the final associations begin to catch up with us there.
What Beelzebub is trying to tell us is no abstraction, nor is this an idea which we can talk about, or chat about, or wiseacre about, it is something very real, and it is realizable for each one of us, if you are in the Work. And, indeed, most of you here have been through some form of this realization, especially if you have tried to be present to yourself, or to self-remember, or if you have tried to study your mechanicality and found out how our one centeredness is really a state of hallucination. This is that duration known as ‘Itoklanos’ in Gurdjieff’s terminology. It is the duration of existence typical of one-brained and two-brained beings, not of three-centered ones ... and it has been established because Great Nature had to make compromises in order to keep the whole process of energy exchange, and of human life on the planet Earth, continuing. For three-brained beings something additional is demanded, and this also comes into Gurdjieff’s first discussion about Time.
Once, in speaking about the one-sided “development” of man, Gurdjieff spoke of the centers as “machines.” The man in whom only one or two machines function cannot be called a man, or considered as such. This “man” can be considered as a quarter, or a third, or as a diminishing proportion of what would be a man—and, in Gurdjieff’s words, such “men” are worthless. Now it is clear that at this point we begin to realize that we are no longer dealing with abstraction, or speaking about Time in order to make pleasant conversation ... and, also, that Gurdjieff is not doing this. The process of the devolution or inversion of being is one in which the centers are little, if ever, utilized—and, hence, without spiritualization. It is a process of centers dying and diminishing in Time because they are not being used, and therefore there is nothing there that you can call vital or meaningful about them.
So stop now. Think, reflect, feel, and try to experience that the theme referring to Time is, for you, something that can lead to a very practical realization, very important for all those who are in the Work and are serious about our position, or states, and about the aims and meaning of our existence ... that particular “something” that is demanded from us if we are going to be three-centered beings. For those who are on the path of the Fourth Way, which is the path of the intelligent man, we must examine ourselves first to understand this particular kind of experience about Time, about the past, and the future, and the now, as well as about all reality which is encompassed in this kind of consideration. So now we have no illusions about ourselves and our responses about Time, passing time, and ideas like recurrence and eternity, and so on, because about these we have only faint, and very strange, and often distorted ideas. These will come in when we understand something of the duration that Gurdjieff calls “Foolasnitamnian” duration, the second principle of duration that we mentioned earlier.
Again, we must also understand that we speak now of internal experiences, of the interior life that we have, not the outside or external events that we call life, or time, or meaning. We have to learn now how to move into time that is far different from the time that we have experienced in our lives as yet, that time which moved from past to future, time which is never here now, and which is all illusory ... practically, or mainly in a dreamlike memory state. ‘Foolasnitamnian’ duration is that proper to the existence of all three-brained beings arising on any of the planets of our great universe, as Gurdjieff says, and he goes on to tell us that there is a fundamental aim and sense of the existence of these beings ... that there must proceed through them a transformation of cosmic substances ... the ‘common-cosmic trogoautoegocratic-process.’ This is not the case for those who are in ‘Itoklanos’ duration.
Further, when Kundabuffer was removed from the beings on the Earth they, like all others in the great universe, became obliged to exist until there is coated in them that which is called by us the ‘body Kesdjan’ ... thus there is introduced here a very great point, a division between normal and abnormal man. The former lives under the ‘Foolasnitamnian’ principle, the latter under the principle of ‘Itoklanos.’ For us, this means that progress in the Work is to be judged by our movement from the abnormal to the normal. And the reason or chief cause for the existence of these two principles is that there goes on in the presences of some beings the result of the process of ‘partkdolg-duty’ ... while in others no such process goes on, but rather one of non-effort making. For the first there is an increase of duration, for the latter a diminution of duration. In the first there was a realization of what it meant to be a three-brained being ... and, in the latter, no realization ... but only unconsciousness and dwindling non-meaning. Further, because there was no realization of the processes of Great Nature, or of the importance of those processes to the universe on the part of the latter, ‘Itoklanos’ duration people, ... Nature had to make adjustments in the duration and, as was mentioned, to do so without allowance for conscious participation on the part of those people, ... hence, no consciousness in the process by which they were forced to give their share or their support to the local necessity of the ‘trogoautoegocratic’ processes...
For those who are in ‘Foolasnitamnian’ duration, or living by that principle, they have an obligation and a function in the universe, a very important one, and it cannot be simply ignored because to do so means that we are looking at Time in the wrong way, and do not realize that it has an imperative necessity for us to understand it. Hence, there is a need for conscious men in the universe...
But before all this we must come first to understand that there is a difference between literal mentation and mentation by means of allegorical thinking, or allegorical mentation. To continue in this Work, and to develop a feeling for understanding Time, for the real experiencing of Time—which, for most of us, is something barely visible on the distant horizon—it is necessary to use the techniques furnished by this Work in order to realize that the centers in each man are all wound up like watch springs, ... and, if man wishes to live longer, or to experience time in new dimensions, he must first study how not to let his centers “run away”—or, as Gurdjieff puts it, “not to give oneself up to those of one’s associations resulting from the functioning of only one or another of one’s brains.” This is a fundamental directive, a rule, a reason, a way to guide one’s life. But to do this, you must make effort. These efforts must be made in order to achieve a harmonious association, and this can only mean that there must be a regulator to govern all the centers so that they do not run off in all directions, so that they can become harmonious or made to harmonize.
Thus, if you wish to understand Time in all its wonderful and really unbelievably great dimensions or vistas, ... if you wish to move out of flowing time, and to be able to experience the Now, the eternal Now, the ever renewing and creating Now, ... you must learn to confront yourself, to practice how to work on yourself, and how to observe so as to develop a possibility of having an active regulator which can only come through these techniques and through the study of your centers, knowing how they behave and function at any given time, and the principal areas where there is harmony among your centers, ... and one’s very real purpose for being a three-centered being in this universe. When this much has been achieved, or at least when we have tried to achieve it, we may then study or realize Time as a relationship which man has with all the activity, all the aims and purposes, all the laws and operations in this universe.
You can, if you work on yourself diligently, relentlessly, mercilessly—as Gurdjieff would say—consciously arrive at that place where Time is no longer what we have taken it to be, or what we think it to be, but has become something beyond the ordinary level, and something in the nature of an eternal but ever changing Now, ... living and eternally creative.
This theme relates to the greater subject of the meaning of Time for man on the planet Earth. There are seven aspects to every theme connected with this Work, and all of these aspects are interconnected and are in themselves parts of other octaves which are also sevenfold in pattern. Hence, “learning to live in the Now,” about which we hope to say something this evening, brings into view as well the theme of “the nature of Time for normal man”—that is, Time for man who is in this Work and trying to change from abnormal to normal.
Every “Now” must be a fully defined three-dimensional experience. This statement may seem like just a lot of words, but it is something that one has to prove by experience and by “taste.” So, ... listen carefully. One must be fully aware that Now is not a line or a dot in a line of Time, but it is an all comprehensive experience which changes every aspect of your life in some creative manner if you are in it. What is meant by three dimensions of Time? First, ordinary “flowing” time or “passing” time is usually drawn as a straight line with an arrow pointing to the right, and a beginning from the left at birth and on the right, death. Yet, as we all know in this Work, there is more to Time than a line of dots from past into future, because at every instant innumerable others are also affected—not only those in one’s family, but also one’s friends, neighbors, country, continent, planet, and so on. But the chief thing to remember is: among us it will be the Group. Hence we must recognize that instead of simply a line of Time, there is a plane—a surface of Time which is a kind of simultaneity of experiences happening to many people at the same instant. And from this standpoint we can say that the people comprising the whole population of the planet Earth are also experiencing Time in that way even though they are unconscious or not conscious of what is going on, and therefore do not realize it.
So, already the notion of Now has an added dimension for us—from a line it has become a surface area involving all other human beings on the planet. But this is not all. It must be quite obvious to you in the Work that there is a direction perpendicular to time—that is, there are several levels, or simultaneous levels or surfaces, so that Time, when viewed from this point of view, is more like a cube or a solid of three dimensions. The direction of Time perpendicular to the line of time that we usually draw is called Eternity. We have heard of Eternity, and this is what it means in the temporal sense. Eternity is generally considered to be the Time-cube or “volume of Time.” In this volume we must also see that there is a spiral which may go upward or downward; very much as in the Ray of Creation where there is a movement downwards, then upwards, in the flow of energies and densities of vibrations, so there is movement in a similar sense in the cube of Time. And this view of Time takes into account ideas like that of Eternal Recurrence, as well as various other theories of the same kind, including Reincarnation and so on.
What is important to us in this Work, and in this Group, is the realization that there is a movement upwards from absolute nothing to the All-Embracing Absolute, or God. Thus various subjectivities, each of which is ideally uniquely subjective for each being on each level, exist—so that Gurdjieff’s statement that Time is the “Ideally Unique Subjective” has a very wide application. Now, ... this has meaning to you in the Work of a very illuminating brilliance if you consider that each movement upwards requires that someone be there to take your place before you can move upwards. Who is going to take your place in this Work if you move upwards or when you are ready to move upwards in the Work? There is a kind of hierarchy which you must recognize here, even if you don’t want to see it, and even if it does not seem obvious to you: a candidate becomes a pupil; the pupil introduces other candidates; the pupil becomes an instructor; the instructor, perhaps, becomes a teacher. Thus there is recreated amongst us, on our level, a model of reality and an experience of the volume of Time which is alive: it is living Time; and it is Time with meaning; and it is creative Time because it can change everything.
Progress in evolution proceeds by an octave, and then, too, there are intervals in the semitones where outside assistance may be necessary, and where interval accumulated resonance may be acquired in order to pass upward into another octave. So, if you consider this analogy or, perhaps better, this allegory, it may become clear to you what “learning to live in the Now” can mean to us in this Work, and also how it relates you to Time in a way that offers you a very powerful and wonderful possibility or series of possibilities. Certainly it gives you a very wonderful technique.
At any given instant there are available many potentialities or possibilities to any individual man, and the more you realize these possibilities, the greater your experience of Time and its duration is. To be able to understand this from the Work level, and to apply it, you have to make many special efforts. First, you must learn not to go with one-centeredness in any situation; more, you have to learn to strive against inertia, against forces pulling you downward as to negativity, laziness, egoism, false personality, dream states, and also our refusal to see reality and face up to it, and to self-confront, and so on. And for this purpose the mastery of the Work is necessary.
The beginning of Faith in the Work is a very vital thing. It is based on mastery, and is directed towards greater consciousness. Every single event, or any part of the Now, wherein you confront yourself in the Work and with its support, is enlarging that Nowness by helping to increase your potentiality, and also, simultaneously, it is raising the level of your Being. This means that, if you live consciously in the Now, you are beginning to alter the patterns that you call “the past,” and thereby becoming even able to change your own future. This does not mean that you can do; it means that you have these possibilities if you are in the Work, and if you begin to enlarge the scope of your “coverage” accordingly.
Incidentally, all of this brings about a realization that, if “Time is breath,” as Gurdjieff once said, then, the wider one’s realization of the potential, the correspondingly greater are the field of possibilities that are available to one, and therefore the greater the duration of Time which is available for a human being who continues to develop consciousness. So above all, we can see that Work on this level will lead to the most, shall we say, creative understanding of the relation of Time to you, of Time as it is in this Work, and of Time as offering a different view of the Reality in which we are all immersed. Ultimately you might say that this Work enlarges the Present Moment until eventually it can embrace the whole of the human activities that take place on the planet Earth. For this there was once given a special exercise, and it can be given again.
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