Last year's experiences with other groups often left me with the sense that older students as well as group "managers", group leaders, (or whatever it is they are identifying themselves as these days), still struggle with linear thinking when working with the "Gurdjieff work language". And of course, quite naturally newcomers to the work ideas are just beginning to hear the "work language" for the first time and are learning how to listen from a very different place in themselves. These are learning how to understand the "ideas" and how to put them to the test on the experiential level. They are learning how to verify the Gurdjieff ideas for themselves.
"Trying to do the task is like trying to jump over your own knees." ~Dr. H. Goa
You must come to understand the 'language of the work' in order to truly work with the Gurdjieff ideas
"One of the reasons for the divergence between the line of knowledge and the line of being in life, and the lack of understanding which is partly the cause and partly the effect of this divergence, is to be found in the language which people speak. This language is full of wrong concepts, wrong classifications, wrong associations. And the chief thing is that, owing to the essential characteristics of ordinary thinking, that is to say, to its vagueness and inaccuracy, every word can have thousands of different meanings according to the material the speaker has at his disposal and the complex of associations at work in him at the moment. People do not clearly realize to what a degree their language is subjective, that is, what different things each of them says while using the same words. They are not aware that each one of them speaks in a language of his own, understanding other people's language either vaguely or not at all, and having no idea that each one of them speaks in a language unknown to him. People have a very firm conviction, or belief, that they speak the same language, that they understand one another. ..." ~ Gurdjieff, Ch IV, ISOM
When we seek to practice and verify the ideas, in both group and personal work, virtually every word each of us uses has mundane and metaphysical or esoteric meanings - the number of meanings per word are innumerable.
Depending on your state and level of experience with the ideas your current understanding of what knowledge, truth, lies, understanding etc., is being conveyed by the words will change. As you mature in your inner work, your understanding will mature from subjective to objective. For some this process is quicker or slower than for others - this is not important - what matters is that one is always striving to understand with all of one's entire being - honestly and sincerely. In the work, everything must be understood viscerally, at the experiential level and to achieve this one must practice the work.
LL. 2012
