“The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.” “Ive found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.” “People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other peoples negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.” - from The Psychology of Mans Possible Evolution (1950) by Peter Dimianovich Ouspensky (4 March 1878 – 2 October 1947) was a Russian mystic philosopher, (also known as Piotr Dimianovich Ouspenskii). He was a student and expositor of the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P._D._Ouspensky
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 03:28:52 +0000