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No one can escape from prison
without the help of those who have escaped before. Only they can say in what
way escape is possible or can send tools, files or whatever is necessary.
But one prisoner alone cannot find these people or get in touch with them.
An organisation is necessary. Nothing can be achieved without an
organisation.
G.I. Gurdjieff
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Why
Group
Work?
Many
of us may observe that we are experiencing increasing isolation and
alienation and the degeneration of meaningful community and society
at large and that there is an ever growing need for our working
together to find a greater sense of quality in human life. In
Fourth Way group work we have the possibility of developing a sense
of connectedness and communication with others. Group Work involves
coming together to understand one another and how we may together
come closer to what understanding itself means. Understanding is the
means by which we are related to our experience, states J.G.
Bennett. It does not just concern what goes on in our heads and the
various explanations that we codify in and around our perceptions.
We are easily imprisoned by our habitual capacities to behaviour,
sensations, emotion, and associative type thinking. Working with
others allows us to awaken to the fact that all of us can often
perceive “reality” quite differently, and that we all have something
to uniquely contribute to our understanding of how we can strive to
experience true liberation in this very life. For liberation must
entail that we can remember ourselves ever more and more. Pierre
Elliot has said, that we all have a role to play in the Work - that
is with respect to helping each other to awaken from the sleep
within the conditioned world. He further said that "we must strive to
do
different things and do things differently."
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About Group
Work
Group
gatherings comprise studying the psychological and spiritual ideas of The
Work; the ideas of G.I. Gurdjieff and J.G. Bennett and Pierre Elliot and all
of those that have given their useful interpretations of the Work within the
lineage of the teachings that is the Fourth Way. Engaging in group work
means that we explore the inner life together and do thematic work on a variety of topics that
are related to our efforts to find a means toward the conscious
development of self and the potential soul through the harmonization of our
centers of thought, feeling and body. In group work we learn to practically
apply psychological and spiritual teachings into our everyday lives. We
explore the inner life and work together along with others of different
types and thus more easily awaken from the human conundrum of mechanical
somnolence. One aim of group work is to acquire different methods of
self-observation in order to transform the energies of reactivity,
mechanicalness, an evolving
understanding of who we really are and to learn to form and engage in useful
aims toward these. In group we
also learn about the psychology and cosmology of Gurdjieff, to learn to
comprehend the language of the Work of conscious evolution and our place in
the greater scheme of things. Through working with others we observe the
relationship between personality and essence and actively strive to overcome
obstacles to our psychological and spiritual development, such that our personality does not
become as an idol and we rather become more self coherent as essential to
the growth of our Being.
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