"A man usually has many unnecessary, imaginary fears. Lies and fears—this is the atmosphere in which an ordinary man lives. Just as the conquest of lying is individual, so also is the conquest of fear. Every man has fears of his own which are peculiar to him alone…"

"Every psychological event, whether it be a sensation, or a feeling or a thought, consumes a certain amount of energy if it is identified with, whereas if you are in a state of Self-Remembering energy will be created and conserved for further use." (Maurice Nicoll)

A.R. Orage said, "When we begin to be aware of ourselves as an image, we have completed the first step," and he spoke of the "Mirror called consciousness." ...

"Gather, accumulate the results of the struggle. You will need them in order to continue. You must accumulate them. You have accumulators in you in which you must build up this substance, like electricity. This substance can only be created through a struggle."

"You need a higher attention. But your higher attention is taken when you are negative. Begin to be interested that there are different qualities of attention… We need to have a scale." (John Pentland - "Exchanges Within," p.19)

"You cannot enter the kingdom of heaven and at the same time eat cakes." (Gurdjieff - Paris Meetings, Tues Feb 8, 1944)

"I AM often asked questions in connection with various texts, parables, and so on, from the Gospels," said G., on one occasion. "In my opinion the time has not yet come for us to speak about the Gospels. This requires much more knowledge…"

Gurdjieff and his direct pupils leave us a lot of written material, among other things. It is true that merely reading this material, and thinking about them with the ordinary mind, will at best simply give a theoretical grounding on which to base practical work...

"Electricity: in our usual opinion there are two forms of it, positive and negative; but there is also a third form, viz., the field within which the positive and negative forms are related to each other…"

Orage says, in "How Not to Give Oneself Away," that there is the possibility of separability between the inner state and the external manifestation. Yet is this so? That is, is it so, as opposed to the usual hypnotic influence between centres? ...

One of the indirect aims of Orage (for our benefit) seems to be not so much to veil our inner states from others, as helpful as that may often be, but to "deceive the Devil himself—in short, your own dark mood," and transform it into something beneficent and conducive to growth. ...

"ON MANY occasions we have involuntarily revealed what we wished to conceal. There are many situations in which the control of expression is essential to success; many in which it is essential to the happiness of others and oneself..."

Gurdjieff speaks of the divine impulse of genuine love in compelling terms in his writings, and yet also very witheringly about the degenerate forms that it has taken. Love is an evocative word, yet one that is prone to sentimentality…

"At this point I ended my survey of the system of cosmoses from the point of view of the theory of many dimensions. " 'There is a great deal of material in what you have just said,' said G, 'but this material must be elaborated... journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/current-li...

"In order to be assimilated and transformed, impressions have to be received by essence. This requires a conscious effort at the moment of the impression." (Jeanne de Salzmann - "The Reality of Being," p.13)

"...every man has two completely separate parts, as it were two different men, in him. These are his essence and his personality. "Essence is I—it is our heredity, type, character, nature. "Personality is an accidental thing—upbringing, education, points of view— ...

"When you think you have intuition, disclaim it; disclaim your prejudice; clip away all such preconceived ideas and feelings - this is the beginning of your education - to remove obstacles to your discovery of truth." (A.R. Orage - "How to Read Men," in "Psychological Essays")

"PEOPLE are the most interesting books in the world. Books themselves interest us only because they are about people, their actions, their words, their feelings and their thoughts..."

"Question: Can one write music harmonically, without knowledge of mathematical laws? ...

"This idea should not leave me: for every man working for his liberation, every minute lived now must serve to repair what was wrong yesterday and to prepare for what will be tomorrow…"

"Everything has to be done today. Forget yesterday and forget tomorrow. With today, you repair yesterday and you make it possible for yourself to do what is necessary tomorrow." (Gurdjieff in Paris Meetings 1943, Thursday November 11)

"Everything has to be done today. Forget yesterday and forget tomorrow. With today, you repair yesterday and you make it possible for yourself to do what is necessary tomorrow." (Gurdjieff in Paris Meetings 1943, Thursday November 11)

"Make every encounter with people a laboratory experiment in psychology. Say to yourself in the presence of another person or persons: 'Here is a wonderful collection of chemicals of which I know only a tiny number. I wish to know and understand them all..."

"You must understand and feel this law [of octaves] in yourselves," he said. "Only then will you see it outside yourselves." (Gurdjieff speaking in "In Search of the Miraculous," p.135) journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/current-li...

"Boredom begins where our mind leaves off; and to be easily or quickly bored merely means that our intelligence is either small or very idle..." (Alfred Richard Orage - "Psychological Exercises) journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/3-ar-orage...

"The idea that all life is based on transformation is so obvious, physically, that really not to see it is due to mental blindness or to a deliberate dislike of seeing any meaning in anything—and this is a common modern disease that leads to negative emotion by itself."

"Truth lies between the opposites." (Maurice Nicoll)

"The seven-tone scale is the formula of a cosmic law which was worked out by ancient schools and applied to music."

"I told them that this was the center of gravity of the whole system and of all work on oneself; that now work on oneself was not only empty words but a real fact full of significance thanks to which psychology becomes an exact and at the same time a practical science..."

"The purpose of the Method is to bring each candidate more energy, more activity, more consciousness, more life; not less in any of these cases. Nothing is really harmful that does not injure “I”; and our chief and final criterion is consciousness itself..."

"Thinking in a state of negative emotion is necessarily distorted by the agitated medium through which it passes. It is like looking at an object through stirred and muddy waters. Thinking in this state never arrives at truth." journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/2-ar-orage...

"I do not know what you call 'cosmic consciousness,' " said G., "it is a vague and indefinite term; anyone can call anything he likes by it… journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/fragments-...

"You are not responsible for your thoughts, unless you think them..."

"You are responsible for what you have understood." (Jane Heap)

"In this Work we have to move consciousness more and more internally." (Maurice Nicoll - "Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky," Vol.V, p.1659)

"The next lecture began precisely with the words: 'Know thyself.' " 'These words,' said G., 'which are generally ascribed to Socrates, actually lie at the basis of many systems and schools far more ancient than the Socratic.' " journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/fragments-...

Gurdjieff wrote about cancer as “this terrible human scourge” and later called it “the most terrible contemporary scourge.” journalgurdjieffstudies.substack.com/p/gurdjieff-...

1/4 Commentary on Orage's "HOW TO LEARN TO THINK" Here we take the first essay of the fifteen "Psychological Essays" of Orage. With such a title, "How to Learn to Think," one might imagine finding instructions in it on techniques of thinking. But this is not so...

UPDATE: You can now find Orage’s “Psychological Essays” in low cost paperback or Kindle version in the following link: www.amazon.com/dp/191225514...

"WE TAKE it as a matter of course that man is a thinking animal. But there is a world of difference between what may be called natural thinking and deliberately developed and trained thinking..." (A.R. Orage - from "How to Think," in "Psychological Essays")

The Kindle version of Orage's Psychological Essays is available on the following link. A paperback edition will also be available shortly. www.amazon.com/Psychologica...

“What is required to come to an inner sensation, an inner feeling of reality? We need to know the way, the process, accepting that as we are today we have no means to open to reality amid the activity of life..."

"…it is important that you should define your own aim. The teaching by itself cannot pursue any definite aim. It can only show the best way for men to attain whatever aims they may have…"

"How can I keep an inner silence, a quietness, that will help me become aware of that still, small voice and cease to be deafened by the clamor and hysteria of my usual state? How can I earn the right to have my own director, my own conscience, as a guide? ...

"…there is no greater force we can create in ourselves than understanding. …anyone in contact with the Work must continually seek to increase his understanding of it. It is the parable of the talents over again. For otherwise the Work gets cold and begins to die."

On January 10th, 1927, Orage told his New York group, as reported by Sherman Manchester, "We hypnotize ourselves into all sorts of diseases." ...

"[Gurdjieff] Very important you know body as a whole, for this work." (Solita Solano, diary)

"It is necessary to sense the whole of your presence." (Gurdjieff - Paris Meetings, Saturday July 24, 1943)

"Unconscious fear is a very characteristic feature of sleep. "Man is possessed by all that surrounds him because he can never look sufficiently objectively on his relationship to his surroundings…"

A.R. Orage said that “There are in nature only three notes: do, re, mi…” and that “Unless purpose is introduced at “mi,” it will run down to “do” again…”