difficulty of initiation

Gurdjieff’s has a bunch about the mysteriousness of initiation and the unbelievable hardship of “The Work”, the nigh impossibility of true understanding. Not because it is really hard. It is easy. But it’s also something you gotta do for yourself, and so, it’s something people wont do.

affectivity::aphorisms

§ Why do people prefer an empty promise to a sincere statement?

§ Morality is not inclusive by definition! Any morality is based upon contrasting [good] and [bad] — and thus excluding [bad].

§ Every judgement is an act of exclusion.

epistemology::aphorisms

§ Epistemology is a subtopic of language theory.

§ Methodological consideration: do not assert something if you’ll need 15 minutes to qualify what you meant.

§ There is no antonymy in the world.

§ All certainties are negative — just bits of invariation we extract from the world. They are never central to existence. They are the exception, not the rule.

§ The current idea of an alien — big head, big black eyes, skinny elongated features — all could be explained by a too literal reading of a drawing of a person.

belief::aphorisms

§ A belief ain’t a basic unit of cognition. It is a unit of one kind of behaviour, one kind amongst many.

§ Beliefs are related to memories, but there are important differences.

§ The number of new ideas you can have increases with each new idea you have.

§ A good translation for “belief” is “what you hold dear”.