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Faith, Hope and Love, Gurdjieff considered them the three sacred impulses. He would see direct parallels into the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You can see, I believe, very direct parallels into the three brains. Faith is of the first brain. You must have faith–strength. Strength comes from that.

Faith, Hope and Love, Gurdjieff considered them the three sacred impulses. He would see direct parallels into the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You can see, I believe, very direct parallels into the three brains. Faith is of the first brain. You must have faith–strength. Strength comes from that.

There has to be personal contact; there has to be a real caring on the part of people to be of some assistance to other people who have questions about life and its significance and so forth. Now, to some degree, we all bear that responsibility with regard to our children, but that has to be done, again, with discretion. My three children are very respectful of the Gurdjieff work. They all have copies of my books. I doubt very much if they’ve read any of them. They might have read an essay here or there. But, that’s the line of their life. After all, they had to put up with me over a long period of time, with my own emphasis and with group activities going on in my house. So, they were exposed to a great deal of things. One of them, my oldest daughter, was involved in group activities for a while. She was down at the Pinnacle, Mrs. Popoff’s center, once. But then, at her age–she was only 19-20 years old, she just pulled back and said, “I really don’t want to go down that road.” Now, that’s the way it is. So, other instances; Michele de Salzmann, a son of Madame and Gurdjieff, became the head of the Gurdjieff Foundation, in Paris, after his mother died.

That’s one end of the stick. The influence on children can be very strong. A daughter of one of the long-lived leaders of the foundation in New York is now a leader in New York. But, there are two other kids in the family who have nothing to do with them.

So, there is unpredictability to that kind of thing. Yet, it does demonstrate that we’re all called to be responsible, and there has to be that recognition that we are all individuals. I have no right to swamp you with my propaganda about worth. If, through my example in life something gets across so that you have questions and you become interested in pursuing certain ideas, fine. That’s the way it is supposed to happen. (end of part two)

Faith, Hope and Love

Faith, Hope and Love, Gurdjieff considered them the three sacred impulses. He would see direct parallels into the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You can see, I believe, very direct parallels into the three brains. Faith is of the first brain. You must have faith–strength. Strength comes from that.

Faith, as a sacred impulse is “This is what I am! Take me for what I am. Don’t make me into something other than what I am.” I have confidence in that. I see into my physical nature and this is what I am. It is really important that I have faith in that and faith in the capacities that are given to me as a physical body. They are not blown up; they are not imaginary. They are limited to what capacities I have as a physical body. When I said it’s an assessment of capacity, I mean of my physical capacities. When I was younger, I could climb mountains; I could chop down trees; I could work hard, physically hard. I had certain capacities with regard to cooking. I could cook a meal. I could do the wide variety of things that we do physically in ordinary life. When I have confidence in those, when I know those capacities, then I have a measure of faith–what I would consider to be faith. I have faith in my capacities. They are there; there is no question that they are there.

We move to Hope. In this perspective, hope is a commitment of all of that faith to an enterprise that is indeterminate. But, I must commit my faith. If it is willy-nilly hope, then I hope the Mega Bucks will pay me a million bucks tomorrow, even though I haven’t bought a ticket. This is what Gurdjieff calls “silly hope” because it is endless. We hope for all kinds of impossible circumstances. But, real hope, sacred hope in Gurdjieff’s terms, for me, is the commitment of my capacities to an enterprise. I’m committed to something; I hope this will turn out. But, I do that knowing that it might not turn out that way, and I have to accept going into it that, while I am committing my capacities to this, I know that, lawfully, it may not work out. For me, that is the essence of hope. As a sacred impulse, Gurdjieff put that in the proper place in the emotional world. Emotionally, or in terms of–I commit my physical capacities to help you. I do that with the only condition being that I know that it can’t possibly work out. I can do the best I can; I can commit myself to that, and I hope it will be of use. That’s the kind of qualification of the first brain and the second brain.

For Gurdjieff the third brain, as he considered it, is the true Holy Affirming. It is the carrier of Love, of Divine Love, not emotional love. What I called it in one essay that I tried to write on the three sacred impulses, the best I could come up with—and I realize that it may have lots of shortcomings—was the impulse of Good Will toward All and Everything. That, regardless of what it is at its own measure throughout the Ray of Creation, I wish it well. I could understand that as an expression of Divine Love. It’s not a namby-pamby thing. It is very hard, but it’s very constant, very constant. Good Will never ends.

Conscience

Those three sacred impulses, also, it is possible to collapse them, if you will, into the will of endlessness. endlessness must have the three sacred impulses fused into One. So, then we can say that Faith, Hope and Love have One higher expression within the triune Will of endlessness. Then we can talk about what that means. There are the three sacred impulses–Faith, Hope and Love, and the way in which I talked about them. Then Gurdjieff comes along and, in the Tales, he talks about the coming of Ashiata Shiemash, one of the great messengers. When Ashiata is born and comes to his maturity, and he is looking around at the state of Man. He goes through great sufferings and, you know, he sits for 40 days and nights, and he pulls a hair off his chest every day…

So, after three 40 day sessions, Ashiata finally looks around and he says, in effect, my mission is to try to help Man free himself from Kundabuffer, from all of the lack of consciousness and so forth and so on. He looks at the prior manifestations of the great messengers. Some have come and they put their central teaching in some form of Faith, others in some form of Hope, and others in some form of Love. He comes to the conclusion, after very careful evaluation of all of this, that they didn’t work. So, he has to take up a different path. His path is Conscience.

The core of Ashiata’s teachings is the development, in normal three-brained beings, of the impulse of Conscience. Because Faith, Hope and Love are Divine Impulses, they are present throughout the Universe; they are present in planets, in Suns, in everything. Therefore, they are vulnerable because they are out there. Conscience, however, as he says, is deeply, deeply buried in our emotional world, and it escapes, you see. Faith, Hope and Love could be corrupted, and they were corrupted. The message of the great messengers was turned upside down within three generations; it all became muck. But, Conscience was preserved almost in its pristine, infantile form. So, the teaching of Ashiata is bent on gradually unfolding the reality of Conscience and then bringing it to the forefront more and more.

Some authors have claimed that this is really the core of Gurdjieff’s teaching. It is certainly a core aspect of the Gurdjieff teaching.  To me, Gurdjieff’s vision is even bigger than that.