Social Unrest and the Work

When the World Falls Apart, Pay Attention:

I. A cosmic prank
Reality, said Gurdjieff, is an exquisite joke—most of us are asleep, dreaming with our eyes open, and occasionally someone hurls a pie at the face of our felicitous illusions. And what better pie than social unrest? Let us begin with a paradox: turmoil is a ladder, and sometimes the ladder is set on fire. But it still gets us upward, if we climb with conscious attention.

II. The Work in the furnace of chaos
Ouspensky recounts that in In Search of the Miraculous, as “revolution and war are moving close; all around the madness of mankind is becoming more and more apparent,” he emphasizes that the only way to understand cosmic laws is “to observe them in himself, and this through the special forms of the work which are rapidly developing in the group”
Implicit here is a recognition that when external reality fragments—when society shatters in riot or upheaval—it becomes easier to spot the fracturing within.

The universe is poking the slumbering Work with its razor-sharp fragments. The noise of dissent, the clamor of the streets, are not enemies of the Work—they’re its percussion section.

III. Effort, Intentional Suffering, and group vibration
We turn to the Fourth Way teachings for context—Gurdjieff emphasized conscious labour and intentional suffering as the bedrock of transformation. “Conscious labour is an action… present to what is being done… and intentional suffering is the act of struggling against automatism... In Beelzebub’s Tales he states that ‘the greatest “intentional suffering” can be obtained in our presences by compelling ourselves to endure the displeasing manifestations of others toward ourselves…”

Imagine a group sitting in the Eye of the Storm—arguing, resisting, getting upset. In that friction, the Work reveals itself. The dissonance becomes the tuning fork for self‑observation. Social unrest isn’t a distraction—it’s the ember that scorches the veil of sleep.

IV. The “bone buried deep” and the necessity of effort
In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff purposefully constructed his prose to be labyrinthine, stating that he would “bury the bone so deep that the dogs have to scratch for it”.

In the grand allegory, layers of obfuscation are not obstacles—they are the Work in material form. Social unrest, then, is a similar kind of deliberate complexity: a challenge to be met, not avoided.

If life were a soporific lullaby, no one would be coaxed awake. But when the ground shakes—cultural norms detonate—our receptors awaken. The bone rattles, and the dogs (us) start digging.

V. Truth, study, and the communal furnace
Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff: “To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; and one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to be able to speak the truth… the wish alone is not enough… to speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself.”

Social unrest forces us to confront lies—not the easy ones that politicians propagate, but the personal ones inside the mirror. We cannot hide behind polite acquiescence when crowds roar. The Work, especially within groups, thrives when it's stripped of pretense, when its members must stare at their own reflections in the glass shards of upheaval.

VI. The Playful Cosmic Joke
Cosmic irony loves a riot. The Work wants drama—in the absurdity of the fray, we find opportunity. The group is neither safe nor still; it is a pressure cooker. Let the pressure build. Let social unrest be the tuning of the cosmic dial that clears frequency.

In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff embeds layers of allegory—beings, satellites, Kundabuffer, cosmic law—yet beneath it all is the point: evolutionary jolts break ossified thought. Likewise, group work amidst external unrest cracks open the door to awakening.

VII. Conclusion: Unrest as essential ferment
So: if the Work in group form is an alchemical brew, social unrest is the yeast. The bubbles—self-remembering, observation, intentional suffering—will not rise without it. Ouspensky's moment of “madness of mankind” surrounding his group wasn’t coincidence—it was the crucible of awakening.

When daylight fractures, we see the divisions within us; when society reels, the Work is no longer abstract—it is urgent.

Let us then salute the riot, not as nihilistic chaos, but as the cosmic slap that enlivens consciousness. For as Gurdjieff’s deeply buried truths demand, the deepest work comes not from comfort—but from the soul-chilling hum of a world in vertigo.

Then We Changed

 

You were the mountain and I was the wind.

"I have birds in me."
I whispered through your trees.

 I breathed over your body, cool, invigorating, stirring the leaves, bending the boughs, scattering the snow from your greatest peaks.
Water cascaded down your face and flowed away to distant lands.

"You have trees on you."
I whispered into your ancient caves, brushing over moss, moaning through your dripping stalagmites.

Delirious Couture

Do try not to be any trouble, won’t you. The night dresses at Juicy Couture advise that good girls like to sleep, and so they shall, swaddled in their sweat shop fashioned cotton couture lying atop a mountain of soft fluffy pink sheep (also fabricated for a nickel a piece in some god awful plant in the People’s Republic of China). Across the street from the Juicy Couture you can shop for silverware in a place called Christ Awful, well actually I believe it is spelled Christophel, however the pronunciation is almost the same, and anyway, if you weren’t born with a silver spoon sticking out of your mouth you can do what a good citizen should do and take the train downtown, or walk or ride a Vespa and use a MasterCard to buy your own Christ Awful silver spoon so that you can mimic the monarchy like a good little ape.
Please note that I have not compared you to a monkey, as monkeys have long curly tales and you most probably do not have a long curly tale and are therefore an ape rather than a cute squirrelly little monkey with a pointy toothed grin and an overwhelming desire to bedevil all less agile creatures which cross your path. No, you are an ape, which is content if the keeper puts a diaper on you so that you wont crap on the concrete, and provides you with a shiny red trike to ride around on, and maybe once in a while dresses you up in a tutu, bonnet, and make up and has you wait in the window of a burning prop building so that a clown can rush up a ladder to rescue you while a man with hairy elbows, done up like a woman in grease paint, a wig, and a sequined gown, points to you and shrieks: "My baby! Help! Somebody save my baby!" and if you are cooperative you get all the bananas you should like later, and maybe a mug of cheap yellow ale while the clowns all sit around in their stained undershirts playing poker and smoking smelly cigars.
That most definitely describes you. So be a good pet and dress up like a grown up human and toddle off to an office building and fake your way through the day so that you get paid, and then go and purchase things which are way beyond your means so that you look even more grown up and sophisticated and successful. If you can’t manage an office because you lack a degree which signifies the degree of humiliation you are willing to suffer in order to get to a truffle or a wedge of cheese, then you can always work at the Seven Eleven or a fast food restaurant, or do some hard labor and you can at least shop at one of the low level department stores which offers things which are similar to those things which can be bought over by Union Square, only there are certain differences which have been purposefully made apparent so that the good truffle sniffers and ass kissers can show of their meritous conformity via fashion, as if their shoes, handbags and jackets were brownie buttons commemorating their ideal citizenship.
If you are a complete fuck up in the areas of ass kissing and truffle sniffing there are several options available to you. You could become addicted to drugs, sex, or alcohol or any combination of the three. As far as the system is concerned, it might be better if you choose drugs which will inhibit your ability to perform sexually considering you are not likely to produce any offspring which will be no more socially adapted than yourself and will therefore also fail to join the workforce and become perfected consumers, I mean, citizens of our fair nation.
Another option is to become a skilled criminal, which means that you break the law continually as a way of life. Addicts often succumb to criminal activities out of need, so that they can get more booze, coke or whatever floats their boat, and of course we must not forget that most of the best substances to abuse are illegal to obtain or keep in ones possession, so it is assumed that those that take option A are also already criminals, hence the word "skilled" is employed to give distinction to those who choose option B. That word, "skilled", has been selected to imply that criminality is a craft which may be honed, and if you are already ill equipped to thrive as a model citizen, this may be a good life choice for you, because in its own way it does help the system. Police officers need bank robbers, counterfeiters, con artists, petty thieves and gangsters to chase after. (Politicians, embezzlers, and preachers fill a more specific niche within this category, but really such a career should only be selected as a last option if you find that you are nearly completely inept and suffer from serious mental and emotional aberrations.)
Option C is, of course, suicide, though it really is a pity that option C comes after option B because the world would probably be better off without Politicians and Preachers. C is the most respectable of all options and if there is any way that you can find it in your heart to boldly and completely self-destruct before you breath up one more ounce of the scarce supply of oxygen being sputtered out into the atmosphere by the few trees to have escaped the fate of being converted into housing projects or papers to push around on polycarbon desks, then I hope that you will go through with it.
The very last option, option D, is open only to those who are beneath even death and who are completely certifiably insane but who have managed out of a sense of self preservation and desperation to escape the notice of professionals in the field of mental health. If you have by some great cosmic error discovered that death offers no respite and are either so misfit and maladjusted to the popular culture, or so disdainful of it that to eat one more banana will cause you to drive a plane into the tallest circus tent that you can find at the heart of the great empire of apes, then for you there is a fourth way, an option D. The D may stand for Doom, Destiny, Deconstruction, or Delirium or all of the above. This option is for bad girls who will not sleep on mountains of pink sheep, and worse boys who will be outfitted in the dehydrated couture of the reversed current, who sit together in darkness and play life back-words, reciting the tenant of Hassan the Assasin, "Nothing is true, all is permissible."

Eat Dog

One half has gone off to where they grow worms under green carpets, in a land far away. There they put signs in the hills warning people not to play soccer lest they fall through a hole and find themselves in a subterranean city where the worms rule, crawling over the steps of ancient pyramids and through little village huts over the perfectly preserved hand of some old Mayan mother where she lies encased in volcanic soot upon the floor. Another part is filling the bathtub with Indigo and in it sits a woman, a baby, and a man, all turning blueberry purple.

Brad Pitt explains to me that Pit Bulls have gotten a bad wrap. Many of them are kind and loving animals, faithful companions to mankind. I couldn’t agree more, but if something should go wrong, the result would be lethal. Is that a risk you are willing to take with a baby in the house? If a Pit Bull bites a baby, it won’t ever let go, its teeth will sink down into the soft flesh until blood springs forth and then involuntarily its jaw will lock and it will have to shake its victim until the life has left it, and only then will the maw of death slacken.

Is that small dark woman me, or is she that other? In the bath she storms at the man as called for in the script. “Are you crazy?” she screams at him, but he is very calm and answers her very calmly. She wants to fight with him, but he will not fight, and she is forgetting the baby, who is slipping into the dark water. I am the one who cleans one half of the tub and the bathroom mirror later. What can I do with the dark blue spider web hanging over her bed? She really should do more dusting. Now I will have to clean it up, otherwise when she comes home in the dark tonight she will extend her hand to switch on the bedside lamp and the poisonous little spider will bite her. I can’t allow that. I am responsible now that I have noticed what was neglected.

All those Indians crowded together naked to make indigo to stain dresses to be sold in Paris. They were not human so we put them all together naked, hungry, exhausted, and cracked the whip over their heads, (and on their bare backs from time to time to keep it lively), and left the dead ones in with the live ones to be sure that production never slowed and the fine aesthetics of fashion would be upheld. Today the only Indians left are spotted black and white and walk on four hoofed feet, or at least they would if we didn’t have them crowded in tiny pens with machinery hooked up to their swollen udders while in another steel building not far off we keep their calves hidden from the light of day so that their tender insides will taste all the better and fetch a higher price on the market.

There are a great many primordial woes swirling around under the carpet, being processed by the faithful little worms. I dared to lift the carpet up an inch or so too look in on their toil. ‘My God,’ I thought, ‘somebody is raising worms! But why? What a strange harvest.’ Why raise worms? To eat them? Maybe to be eaten by them. We have yet to come to fully understand the great transformational value in being eaten. It seems likely that we of the three dimensional dreamkind will come into full maturity when we begin to grasp the greater truth in this. There is no point in always consuming, tis far greater to be utterly consumed by something. Being a worm is more useful to the earth than to the worm.

Now, if you should happen to poke your head up through the carpet and be eaten by a bird… well then that would be the best possible thing. To be a worm eating dirt, that’s alright, but to be a worm eaten by a bird, now that is really something. You couldn’t ask for any better if you were a worm. Sure, you think I’m joking, or being sarcastic and political. No, not so, not so.

Perhaps you have heard the old adage, “You are what you eat.”? In this model when a bird eats a worm it becomes part worm, and likewise the worm has become part of a bird. This is the ultimate. This is how we change shape, by being consumed.

Like now, I hold my defenses at bay, and leave myself open to the pounce. And voila! That thing from the dark side leaps on me and devours me and this that you read is the sign of struggle left in the sand. A clever tracker could read it and come to understand what came to pass. Put otherwise, I make a sacrifice of my dominant, waking, survivor consciousness, and that dark bird of prey, the so called subconscious, swoops in and feeds.

Now if you were a very clever, but very simple life form, you would seek out other, alien life forms a bit more complex than yourself and entice them to devour you. This union would create a whole new creature, which would look very much like the old complex alien it used to be, but the inside my friend, the inside would be very different indeed. The difference would be undetectable from the outside, but conformity is only skin deep in some cases.

Evolution is what we call this tricky game played between eater and eaten. The very frightening thing is that while bathing under the sprinklers in the garden and chirping with your friends, you will never know which ones are really birds and which ones are worms that have become birds. If only the world were more full of babies which had devoured dogs.

The Blanket

Never say more than you can get out in 800 to 1200 words, and certainly never say any less than can be said in 600 words. I am referring to words written in the English language, the only language in which I have any capacity to speak, read or write. I can interpret the ramblings of all manner of creatures, whether they speak English or Cantonese or chirp like crickets, but my interpretations will never match word for word the intended meaning of the issuer of such sounds. This is of little concern.
What matters ultimately is that no matter who speaks or what twisted tongue they speak in, it is always really me whispering something to myself through the animated biological blanket. Like a child laying in bed with its fist thrust up into the cover to make two shapes, two separate peaks, which in the child’s imagination may be two rabbits or two children or a woman and her pet dog, no matter what the child imagines, it is a true and beautiful play, but underneath, it is a conversation the child has with itself. This is not to say that if the child exists then the woman and dog do not exist, or that if the woman and dog exist the child does not. The whole woolly ensemble and the maestro behind it are one multidimensional creature, real and unreal too.
So you can see why I do pay attention to what the other peak in the bio bed spread is telling me. I listen to it no matter how unintelligible it’s ranting, rambling, squeaking, or grunting, with the complete knowledge that the child is working something out through us, talking to itself, banishing loneliness and boredom, filling the dark unending night with something. Trust the child to be present in every adversary and every friend, in every door knob and every carrot.
When I awoke today my mantra was this: "It is all me. This is my day, my day to create, and what I don’t create today, will never be created. " The possibility that this day held will never return. It will never be the same day, I will never be the same creature. What I create tomorrow will be different from that which I have, or would have, created today. Different by a 24 hour window of time.
Time is our enemy and our friend. Time is a matrix in which we may create. When it ceases to be, that opportunity to create has passed. What comes next only the child can know. Even through tears today I repeated, "It is all me."
Walking up the drab fog enshrouded street flanked by a block of construction and a block of apartments with all the personality of a no name motel, I could feel myself moving through the scene, both outside of my cracked lips and pounding temples and inside of them. Just one foot in front of the other, the cold air sucked into my lungs and expelled with a touch of desperation due to my uphill voyage, and the invisible eye watching, feeling, and perceiving the movement of one of its most compelling points of observation. Even the doorknob reflected the light back at me with an appropriate degree of meaningfulness when I told it, "It is all me. It is my day."
But even with so many cooperative elements and a fair measure of lucidity I struggled. It hurts no less to be betrayed by Judas knowing that somewhere beneath it all, it has always been you, your dream, your kindness and your cruelty. Certainly it manages to squeeze some tears from my woolly blanket head, and I walk down the stairs choking on a measure of self loathing.
Three or four times today I delivered a line or even kissed the lips of a lover and felt that I was out of character. I could see myself not as the character I usually portray, but as another character which I know and interact with as part of my apparent life. The horror of it. Not only to understand philosophically that you are that creepy clammy other, but to experience yourself as that other.
The differences between the characters constructed of the blanket are all a figment of the imagination of the management. Both the internal and external management are insisting that this personage is unique, has this or that quality and not this or that other quality. But behold! There is only one. The lint covered fabric of apparent life and its manipulator, the magician, the child, the immortal beloved. Knowing this cannot lessen the strain of experiencing it, of containing it. How much easier it is to travel unaware of the secret manipulator. How fierce and terrible and wonderful to hold within one tiny body the reality of its creation.
Less than 600 words would be to few to hold it. More than 1200 would be too much to say at once.

Bon Appetit

Let me ejaculate upon you a bit, you hapless reader that has suffered the great misfortune of stumbling upon this, my scattered seed, which takes the form of letters conjoined to form words, which attached to various impressions and associations may convey a multiplicity of meaning, of which you will ingest only a miniscule portion due to an unfortunate condition of your consciousness which causes you to reflexively "spit" rather than "swallow". All of this is of course most unfortunate. I go on pouring myself out as if there is no end to the richness which has come to tentatively inhabit me as the result of my being just the sort of psychic fluff girl that enjoys bringing once hidden teachings to a head, a fount from which I may suckle a while on the knowledge that is forbidden in the common culture, and swallow all that I can stomach without loosing control.
And you, unfortunate soul, are either reading this by accident, or are reading because for some reason you desire to acquire a taste for this troublesome potion mixed and re-mixed by twisted clowns, liars, and devious alchemists. This potion you have been seeking, if you are a seeker, would do more than you are likely to like, if only you could manage to ingest and digest just a bit of what I presently attempt to blow up your blow hole. The problem is that particular malady of your consciousness already mentioned. What goes into your head usually falls right back out, what goes into your being is flushed out by the head, and you will find, if you dig deep, that as a whole, you, along with almost all others of your species, suffer from a form of spiritual bulimia.
That great way you have of categorizing, understanding, and navigating through this experience that has been termed "Life", is the way of the shallower surface consciousness which we usually refer to only as our "consciousness", as if it is deserving of the role of Rudolph the red nosed sled dog in the internal structure of self. This aspect of consciousness is your DOS operating system. It is a simple consciousness designed to get you through the brute world with your tail still attached. When you try to stuff it with things it is not designed to deal with, things that reach far beyond your tail, it will spit up, like a Nun that has been asked to gargle down a warm glass of semen before bed, all of that precious stuff that it is so unaccustomed to taking in.
If it is among your chief desires to cultivate within yourself the fruits that these fragile seeds may become, it is necessary to take it in with the appropriate part of your self. The part to which I am referring reaches deep beyond the surface consciousness into regions that the previously discussed consciousness cannot fathom. It has inappropriately been referred to as the "sub consciousness", as if it were secondary and lesser than its counterpart. It is in fact the truer of the two. What successfully burrows into its mysterious folds will infect the entire human organism, and its perceived reality, without fail.
Therefore I thoroughly encourage you to spread wide those folds and let those things which you long to know penetrate there, where they can be properly digested and assimilated, in that deep, dark, and fertile region.
Perhaps you do not want to let these seeds in. If that is the case you should stop reading immediately. Chances are that you have already ceased to read if you don’t want to let these tiny linguistic intruders into your fortress, and if you are continuing to read now it means that you sincerely desired to offer them sanctuary, for at this point you have passed through the first barrier.
Getting this far has required that you exercise a measure of attention, a difficult feat for those raised in this culture that intentionally contributes to the decay of that particular faculty for the purpose of selling more cars, shoes, and cigarettes. You are being called upon to make an effort to take in the transmission that rides, like Achaeans in a wooden horse, in this configuration of the written symbols of the English language. I hope that you can accept this gracious offering of mine without gagging too much, and moreover it is my wish that you take good care of it. Warm it deep within and see what springs forth from it…perhaps a winged horse or an armored goddess, perhaps a balloon. I make no promises.
Take or leave this shot in the dark.