Questioner:
I am not able to stop associations while I work.
Gurdjieff:
It is necessary to prepare before the exercise of trying to see with three parts.
Questioner:
At the beginning when I was working, I felt in myself an emotion. Now I cannot find it any more. I have a constant sensation of dryness. Yesterday this warmer feeling came back, but much weaker.
Gurdjieff:
It is the sign of a crisis. It is because you have arrived at [the note] mi. You must pass this interval by yourself and find in yourself the necessary strength. Your head, which is as though separated from you, must help you.
First Questioner:
How?
Gurdjieff:
It must convince you. It must allow you to see yesterday and tomorrow.
Questioner:
But my head is weak.
Gurdjieff:
Yes, but without your head you also would be weak. It is necessary to use it in this way.
Questioner:
A little while ago I started to read again, but I find in myself that which has always prevented me from working, a sort of avidity which leaves me at the end of a short time tired and having retained nothing. My time has been wasted.
Gurdjieff:
It is because you only read with your head. Do an exercise. Read only a little—a page at a time. At first you must try to understand with your head, then to feel, then to experience. And then come back and think. Exercise yourself to read with your three centers. In each book there is material for enriching oneself. It doesn't matter what you read and it doesn't matter the quantity, but the quality of the way of reading.
Questioner:
Following a shock, I have really seen what has been my life—empty, sterile, useless. And I don't want to lose this vision, this feeling. Otherwise, I feel that I will fall again and again lose my life.
Gurdjieff:
Cosmic phenomena for which you are not responsible go against your work. You can only give yourself your word that when life becomes quiet, you will set yourself to work.
Questioner:
I feel that my intellectual center is different and that I do not find in myself any affirming force. What can I do?
Gurdjieff:
There is a little secret there. It is that you are a big egoist. You only know yourself. You have no responsibility. It is because of that you lack this affirmative force. For everything that you have, everything that constitutes you, you are under obligation, and you must repay for all this, so that then other things may be given to you. But instead of this, you are astonished not to have received even more.
Questioner:
I am not able to sense myself. What can I do to get a of myself?
Gurdjieff:
Only your head wishes to remember. Your effort is theoretical. You must establish a contact between your head and your body. Place one leg in iced water and leave it there, trying to establish this contact. Then do the same with the other leg.
Questioner:
Since the time that you advised me to be egoistical, I have done it. But I constate in myself a desire to live only in this better part—I would like to stay there always and ignore all the rest. I
feel a great laziness invading me in relation to external life, and the smallest thing is for me a great effort.
Gurdjieff:
It is very good that this state appears in you. This proves that later you will truly become someone responsible, like a man, and I love you in advance for this. But now it is necessary to struggle
without rest. You must maintain a constant conflict between this state and your understanding. The more you wish to do nothing, the more you must make yourself do. You must struggle unmercifully and it is a struggle which will produce in you the necessary substance that you may, with my help, create in yourself a real "I."
Questioner:
I see how I am always beaten by my functions. My habits form an automatism which is in me like a block on which I can get no hold. On one side I have my work, and on the other my life, in which nothing changes.
Gurdjieff:
We have already often said that if one develops one side, the other will develop also. One must struggle.
Questioner:
But rightly, I am not able to have a conflict in myself.
Gurdjieff:
Because you do not do. In order to take for oneself everything from this table, you have to go over the table. Otherwise you will never be able to go further. You can continue to live like this ten years, a thousand years. You will never change. Even God, if he wished it, would not be able to help you. He would not have the right.... Only you yourself can struggle against your laziness. There are two tendencies in you. But you, you sleep. It is necessary for you to get up and fight.
Questioner:
Is this laziness born in me or acquired?
Gurdjieff:
I think that it is a natural tendency. The more your psyche wishes a certain thing, the more the body refuses. Perhaps it has been placed there by Nature, so that there should be a struggle. Moreover, it is a good thing. These are conditions of work. If it did not exist, it would be necessary to place something in you, in order to replace it. It is also a factor for remembering. Each time that you feel it, you must think about your work. It is also a good thing that you see your laziness, because many people are lazy, but they do not see it.
Questioner:
I have known it for fifteen years, but I haven't made any headway against it.
Gurdjieff:
What did you do then? You were sorry about it. But in this way in a hundred years nothing will change. There is no reason for it to change—only if you set yourself to struggle conscientiously.
Questioner:
I need help, because I am going through a very profound crisis and I have even lost the taste of work. When I wish to work, I fall into a leaden sleep.
Gurdjieff:
Something is preparing itself in you, but you do not see it, and the work must be more and more painful for you, since you have less and less contact with yourself. In spite of this, you must continue to force yourself. You must take this step by yourself. Think that it is not only for you that you work, and that perhaps (and it is absolutely true in a proportion often percent) the future fate of others depends on it, is tied to yours.
Questioner:
I am asking for help because I am no longer able to work. All these bad interior things are there again. I have an intense desire to work, to remember myself, but I am unable to do it. My body no longer obeys me. It is the body which is master.
Gurdjieff:
I am very happy for you, because this state is objectively good. Keep going. In a few days I will give you some help.