George Gurdjieff was a challenging, paradoxical, and enigmatic spiritual teacher. He is chiefly remembered for an esoteric system known as the Fourth Way - also called "the Work."
One argument has it that in order to experience the spiritual we need to be awake. We have to wake up. Most of us are asleep, although we don't know it. Put more helpfully, we are not fully alive to our world as it happens, moment by moment. We never get to appreciate our lives fully ... our being. Or our human be-ing.
And all the mystic traditions, Buddhism, Sufism and Christian agree on one thing: All is well; all is as it should be.
Unless we are mindful of the present moment, we sleepwalk through our lives. And we miss the fact that all is well. We cannot see it because in our nightmare - where our feelings about the past and our fear about the future blind us to reality - everything is a mess.
At this moment, there is only this moment. Nothing else exists.
A concept that would find considerable support among particle physicists, who embrace the scientific method while conceding that causality may not be reliable... which may go some way towards explaining the close relationship between genius and madness?
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