Occult of Personality

“We cannot hope to understand Gurdjieff unless we attempt to share his sense of the historical significance of spiritual traditions. He knew that periodic renewals are inevitable, but he was convinced that there is an eternal unchanging core of wisdom to which mankind has always had access. He frequently referred to traditions four or five thousand years old, that were still preserved when he travelled in Asia, as well as to more ancient teachings going back to human origins.” ~ J.G.Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World

On Saturday, our Meditations on the Tarot study circle met to discuss The Sun and it was another insightful, delightful, and beneficial conversation! ✨☀️ The recording is now available on the Occult of Personality Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/occultofpersonality. Enjoy!

The Pythagorean Library Various authors This anthology, the largest collection of Pythagorean writings ever to appear in English, contains the four ancient biographies of Pythagoras and over 25 Pythagorean and Neopythagorean writings from the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The material of this book is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand the real spiritual roots of Western civilization. https://tradition.st/the-pythagorean-library/

"By the way, I remember the words of a Persian philosopher who formulated a thought for the first time about the past, the present and the future. Near a city in Persia, there is a monument on which it is written, ‘The present exists to repair the past and to prepare the future.’ It is just a monument. Simple thing, isn’t it? And at the same time, what a great thing. … It is only with the present that you can repair the past and prepare the future. The future and the past do not exist without the present. The present exists for you to repair all your errors and prepare the future; that is, another life that is desirable for you. "It is very important for you to feel the present. To have a present, you have to do everything possible. You have to be in the present. The past is the past, yesterday, finished; it will never come back. Tomorrow may come: a different tomorrow depends on the present today. 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, Paris Meetings, 1943

The Book of Life Marsilio Ficino Marsilio Ficino, born in Florence in 1433, was one of the greatest exemplars of the Renaissance as a rebirth of classical learning. Ficino was the leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy and translator of many neo-Platonic and Hermetic works, including at the urging of Cosimo de Medici, the Corpus Hermeticum. The Book of Life is not a translation, but an original work by Ficino written as an introductory guide to the practical application of esoteric knowledge. The work is mainly focused not on the soul or body, but on the spirit, with the first part discussing physical health, the second prolonging life, and the third celestial phenomena. https://tradition.st/the-book-of-life/

“The experience commonly called 'entering Nirvana' is, in fact, an intuitive realization of that Self-nature which is the true Nature of all things. The Absolute, or Reality, is regarded as having for sentient beings two aspects. The only aspect perceptible to the unenlightened is the one in which individual phenomena have a separate though purely transitory existence within the limits of space-time. The other aspect is spaceless and timeless; moreover all opposites, all distinctions and 'entities' of every kind, are here seen to be One. Yet neither is this second aspect, alone, the highest fruit of Enlightenment, as many contemplatives suppose; it is only when both aspects are perceived and reconciled that the beholder may be regarded as truly Enlightened. Yet, from that moment, he ceases to be the beholder, for he is conscious of no division between beholding and beheld. This leads to further paradoxes, unless the use of words is abandoned altogether. It is incorrect to employ such mystical terminology as 'I dwell in the Absolute', 'The Absolute dwells in me', or 'I am penetrated by the Absolute, etc.; for, when space is transcended, the concepts of whole and part are no longer valid; the part is the whole — I am the Absolute, except that I am no longer I. What I behold then is my real Self, which is the true nature of all things; seer and seen are one and the same, yet there is no seeing, just as the eye cannot behold itself.” John Blofeld

"All the possibilities are in me, but I can pass my life without any real change. The highest energy, which gives birth to all others, is in me. It is part of me. The question is not to make it appear but to allow it to appear, to submit to its action. The more I try, the more the way is restricted; nothing gets through. I must learn to submit voluntarily to its influence." ~ Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being

"The Guest is inside you, and also inside me; you know the sprout is hidden inside the seed. We are all struggling; none of us has gone far. Let your arrogance go, and look around inside. The blue sky opens out further and farther, the daily sense of failure goes away, the damage I have done to myself fades, a million suns come forward with light, when I sit firmly in that world. I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken, inside 'love' there is more joy than we know of, rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds, there are whole rivers of light. The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love. How hard it is to feel that joy in all our four bodies! Those who hope to be reasonable about it fail. The arrogance of reason has separated us from that love. With the word 'reason' you already feel miles away. How lucky Kabir is, that surrounded by all this joy he sings inside his own little boat. His poems amount to one soul meeting another. These songs are about forgetting dying and loss. They rise above both coming in and going out." ~ Kabir

"You must remember that there is nothing dead or inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive, everything in its own way is intelligent and conscious. Only this consciousness and intelligence is expressed in a different way on different levels of being—that is, on different scales. But you must understand once and for all that nothing is dead or inanimate in nature, there are simply different degrees of animation and different scales." ~ G.I. Gurdjieff