"Animated automaton" - Gurdjieff quote

Every one of you is a rather uninteresting example of an animated automaton. You think that a "soul," and even a "spirit," is necessary to do what you do and live as you live. But perhaps it is enough to have a key for winding up the spring of your mechanism. Your daily portions of food help to wind you up and renew the purposeless antics of associations again and again. From this background separate thoughts are selected and you attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as valuable and as your own. We also pick out feelings and sensations, moods and experiences and out of all this we create the mirage of an inner life, call ourselves conscious and reasoning being, talk about God, about eternity, everything imaginable, judge and discuss, define and evaluate, but we omit to speak about ourselves and about our own real objective value, for we are all convinced that if there is anything lacking in us, we can acquire it.

If in what I have said I have succeeded even to a small extent in making clear in what chaos is the being we call man, you will be able to answer for yourselves the question of what he lacks and what he can obtain if he remains as he is, what of value he can add to the value he himself represents.

-Gurdjieff, "Views from the Real World" p49

May we all develop the spiritual parts of ourselves so that we are not just animated automatons. May we share wisdom to educate and enlighten. May we all be aware and un-automaton-like. Amen.

Love and light, Teo

Teo Barry Vincent IV Composer Performer Sound-Designer & Information Systems Support

Writings: Third Millennium Thinking, Lyrics (PDF file)

Forums: Givnology (by Teo), Unkle Bobs, IAM-Simple, CuteFamilyPets, PagenPoet, NewsForNow, Infopop, Teodor's index @ Deepak Chopras

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