Letter to a friend

Letter to a younger friend

June 25

…the difficulty with you, and others in the work, is that you want to come to some big golden experience. Preferably, this will happen after a prescribed pattern of activities such as Magickal Exercises which will verify everything you think you have been taught.

Your suffering so far is worth more than every exercise you will ever undertake. If you double your suffering, maybe something will happen. It will be small. You have to stop expecting big things and thinking you have seen big things or are having big things happen in you. 

If you keep working and suffering, perhaps you’ll keep this email and read it again on this date 20 years from now—when I may or may not still be alive—and you will understand what I say when I tell you that the whole point of the Gurdjieff work is tiny changes over a very long period of time.

All the golden experiences you think you are having during this period will be worthless. Only those tiny, incremental changes will make a real difference in you; and that difference will only make you more human and, if you are lucky, very much less special than you think you are now.

The reason that changes have to take place in very small amounts over a very long period of time is that you will otherwise become imbalanced and some part of you will become very great and also very hard, so hard that it will need to be broken if you want to go further than that. 

If you make the tiny changes, everything gradually adjusts, and the parts that can resist are outfoxed.

Go and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.