As Lao Tzu said, “In the pursuit of Knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped.”
Mark 11....
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 13 And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. 14 And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”
She from West Virginia y'all?
https://youtube.com/shorts/tH8cqt1D6iw?si=qIItLk4eLMetHXRo
What's up so I went into an art studio and started talking to the curator lady there during an 'e' period. An E period is the seventh part of the day (3 hours and 25 minutes) ruled by Saturn.
This lady and I really hit it off. I was curious to know more about where I could hold an exhibition for my AI art and we got to talking about art and all kinds of stuff. I mean she wasn't sexy, pretty overweight and like almost sixty or something but she was nice to talk to. Anyway then I noticed she had a book right behind her about art called Paris Interiors. If you've ever been to Paris you'd notice probably more than anywhere else they like dark strong colors in their interior rooms like dark reds etc. Not everywhere but it's certainly not considered schizophrenia in that culture by a long shot. Anyway as we were covering a lot it then reminded me of seeing a book in my parents' library. My parents had so many books. I've gone the opposite way with my kids having not so many books for them however the biggest reader so far is the middle child who reads from an Amazon Kindle kind of screen. She likes the Hunger Games at present. I approve of the use of Lenny Kravitz in this movie otherwise I have nothing to say. There was another movie the girls were watching like Alice in wonderland but they were doing like opera singing. I definitely approve of that. I like opera. I think it's called Descendents.... I wouldn't watch it as it's for little girls but I approve of operatta style singing....
https://youtu.be/N4irAQhBVu0?si=r_W-BWoJyb9T663h
Ok so the book I was remembering after seeing the Paris Interiors book was Ouspensky's Talks with a Devil.
Let's take a deeper dive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Ouspensky
From Wikipedia...
Ouspensky's lectures in London were attended by such literary figures as Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Gerald Heard and other writers, journalists and doctors. His influence on the literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s as well as on the Russian avant-garde was immense but remains very little known.[19] It was said of Ouspensky that, though nonreligious, he had one prayer: not to become famous during his lifetime.
I personally read Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous during my graduating year of high school. My love interest in those days was a young Serbian woman around four years older than me who saw that book and thought I was bookish. I also hung out around seven years later with a bunch of Vietnamese Americans in Virginia at VCU who categorised me as an intellectual snob. The main takeaway from Gurdjieff, Ouspensky's mentor and guru for a time, everyone should know, is that Gurdjieff believed in Mental, Sexual and emotional centres in the body, maybe glands or something but they're just translated as centres. If people are hyper bookish like I was as a teenager then Gurdjieff would say their mental centre is using energy from the sex centre so they're asexual or something. Alternatively, people ranting emotionally all day like Hitler, even just union bosses or feminism activists or whatever, their emotional centre is pilfering energy from the sex centre. I mean that's the real meat on the bone from Gurdjieff looking back. I was just looking at some Tibetan monks and Harvard doctors looking at how Tibetan monks reroute their chi energy or life force to hat you their bodies during a blizzard or whatever to stay warm. I mean there's all ways to dissipate one's energy one supposes, mentally or emotionally. Certainly actors have to master emotionality.
Gurdjieff proposed that there are three ways of self-development generally known in esoteric circles. These are the Way of the Fakir, dealing exclusively with the physical body, the Way of the Monk, dealing with the emotions, and the Way of the Yogi, dealing with the mind. What is common to all three ways is that they demand complete seclusion from the world. According to Gurdjieff, there is a Fourth Way which does not demand its followers to abandon the world. The work of self-development takes place right in the midst of ordinary life. Gurdjieff called his system a school of the Fourth Way in which a person learns to work in harmony with his physical body, emotions and mind. Ouspensky picked up this idea and continued his own school along this line.[23]
Ouspensky made the term "Fourth Way" and its use central to his own teaching of the ideas of Gurdjieff. He greatly focused on Fourth Way schools and their existence throughout history.
Self-remembering
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Ouspensky personally confessed the difficulties he was experiencing with 'self-remembering' - the practice of a deep state of mindfulness, rooting one in the present moment, whatever one is doing. (The present definition of the term in the teachings of Advaita is “to be in awareness”, or “being aware of being aware”, while in Buddhism the corresponding practice is 'mindfulness'). 'Self-remembering' was a technique to which Ouspensky had been introduced by Gurdjieff himself, the teacher having explained to him that self-remembering is the key to all else in ‘the Work’. While in Russia, Ouspensky experimented with the technique with a certain degree of success, and in his lectures in London and America he emphasized the importance of its practice. The technique requires a division of attention, so that a person not only pays attention to what is going on in the exterior world but also in the interior. A. L. Volinsky, an acquaintance of Ouspensky in Russia, mentioned to him that this was what Wundt meant by apperception. Ouspensky disagreed and commented on how an idea so profound to him would pass unnoticed by people whom he considered intelligent. Gurdjieff explained that in order to bring about a result or manifestation, three things are necessary. With self-remembering and self-observation two things are present. The third one is explained by Ouspensky in his tract on Conscience: it is the non-expression of negative emotions.
