December 17th, 2013

Horror as a Prompt for Awakening

“Human beings are attached to everything in this life; attached to their imagination, attached to their ignorance, attached to their fear, attached even to their own suffering — and possibly to their own suffering more than anything else.

A person must first free himself from attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things, keeps alive a thousand false I’s in a person. These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born.

But how can they be made to die?…It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue.

To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, as well as one’s complete and absolute helplessness…So long as a person is not horrified at himself, then a person knows nothing about himself or life.”

— P.D. Ouspensky quoting G.I. Gurdjieff
 

Photograph: In the Paddy Wagon, by Weegee, 1920


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