Chapter 17, Chief Weakness
Posted: June 13th, 2010 | Author: Teresa Dietze | Filed under: UncategorizedSound file for Chapter 17:
17 Chief Weakness
(Approx. 7 minutes.)
PWOS Group 18a
(Approx. 53 minutes.)
PWOS Group 18b
(Approx. 31 minutes.)
Please comment below.
This chapter – Chief Weakness – provides an excellent example of how a well meaning editor can unintentionally undermine the benevolent intentions of an author.
As indicated in an earlier comment the commercial book Practical Work On Self which we are using in this class is an edited version of Volume Two of Secret Talks with Mr. G. which was published privately in a Limited Edition of 200 copies in 1979.
The first paragraph in this chapter from the 1979 Edition of Volume Two reads as follows:
“Chief Feature is to assume that one is already what one could someday learn to be. It is the imaginary result of life, substituting for the reality of one’s actual nothingness the culmination of personality as if it were something genuinely attained. One factor by which we can recognize Chief Feature is that it requires no effort at all to develop it and no special effort to maintain its quality.”
The second paragraph of this same chapter illustrates – yet again – how an editor can alter the original intention of the author for the “benefit” of the reader.
The second paragraph reads as follows:
“Man the machine can do nothing as a source of force. Everything of which he believes himself to be the causing factor in reality just happens by itself. For him to be able to do, he must understand and learn to apply to himself and his world the law of the inner octaves and be able to activate real will at those crossroads of possibility which are open to him by applying shocks from his centrum of gravity toward the outer world.”
My point – yet again – is that all publications by E.J. Gold PRESUME a knowledge, mastery and understanding of the foundation laid by G.I. Gurdjieff in his trilogy All and Everything.
I’m just now (Wed. afternoon) noticing what the exercise for this week is though I have been asking the question, “What is Chief Weakness and how can I begin to catch glimpses of it until I’m able to connect most of the dots and see the outline of it?”
One clue is “To really suffer intentional Purgatory, we must see what we ought to do, and know the weakness of the machine which makes us unable to do what we should do.” This echos with being separated from that within us that would allow us to be and to do in a real sense. At the very least we should be able to activate the transformational function of the HBM by exerting our influence over the machine to bring it into the waking state, if not immediately, then at least in the course of our going through the day, we should be able to chose those inner and outer conditions that will lead to the HBM coming into the waking state.
All week I had over-looked the following and what made me over look it was not neccessarily my C.F. but it was one of the many minions that my C.F. activates to keep the machine calm and fast asleep.
The exercise as suggested in the chapter is contained in the following quotes from PWOS: “Our work just begins when we can see exactly (clearly and directly) what it is that we must struggle against.”….”How can we struggle against our Chief Weakness when it is only active during periods of deep sleep of the machine and is therefore invisible to our observation? We can listen to the machine’s thoughts and words as if listening to a stranger speaking on a radio over a long distance.”