Fracture

The search for a path through life

I'm often asked what it takes for real inner change to take place.

It's a legitimate question, after all. After all the exercises, the meetings, the weekend and weeklong retreats, silent and otherwise, things may stick… but just a little bit.

Everything seems incremental, and although there are perhaps bursts of insight and even real experience, poof! Off they go into the past.

One eventually gets the impression that all change is temporary (think about that one for a moment and laugh) and that we can't raise the level we are on (think about that and laugh for a minute as well.)

There's an interesting book called, quite simply, Fracture by Philipp Blom that traces a moment of destruction that affected the entire western world – we refer to it today as the First World War. It opens with a positively harrowing account of the suffering that people underwent and is followed by an examination of various fault lines in society that were ripped wide open by its consequences.

For those who are interested, by the way, it serves as an essential backdrop to Gurdjieff’s work and the way he exquisitely pitched it to the Zeitgeist of that era. The chapter about the widespread public presence of the idea that man is a machine may be of particular interest to Gurdjieff pupils. He hardly invented the idea, as it turns out.