"Felt something is missing"

For me, it is a feeling similar to being in love with someone. It is a yearning that has a blend of some pain and sorrow for not being filled, together with some sweetness of the awaiting possibility.

How can this be? What is this weakness? You are a modern educated rational person, with Engineering degrees. You can not find a single logical reason to believe in God, and many reasons not to. Yet it is there, this emotion, very easy to connect with and monitor. It is there, right now, in the chest, the area that Gurdjieff places the Emotional Center. The heart? The spiritual heart?

What is it? A psychological disturbance? Is there a relevant entry in the DSM IV? Depression? An illusion? The empty meaning of modern life? A need for compensation for my social and career failures? A fear of death? Maybe several of these. But, I can not ignore it.

My wife does not report about feeling it in herself. Certainly most people I know closely never mentioned anything like it. Others however are talking about something. The focus on the heart is of course ubiquitous. The Kabbalah talks about a point, a spark inside the heart - the soul - that is connected to its divine root, by an invisible thread. The Hasidic masterpiece, the Tanya ( תניא) , has an explicit "physiological" model about the flow of the divine aspect of the soul, into the right side compartment of the heart.

This is a source of motivation, to search, to try, to be attracted to "things of beyond". You can probably call it the magnetic center talked about in Ouspensky's Fragment (ch. 10). It may be the reason why you arrived here and reading this now.


Practice. Theory is secondary, if not a distraction.

What is it all about?

1. Felt something is missing - Ten years.
2. Searched ways of filling - Ten years.
3. Practicing until reaching a certain threshold - Ten years?
4. Will progress step by step? - Whatever left.
5. It is unimaginable what is waiting for us there - Priceless...

There is no time to lose, as Hillel the Elder (הלל) said: "If not now, when?" (Pirkei Avot 1:14). The threshold can be reached much faster. At least one Kabbalah source reports about 10% of my plan.

In the next several postings, I intend to discuss the five phases above.

Practice. The theory is secondary.

You live only once, you may die twice

There are two possibilities of a first death. One is when a person dies emotionaly or intelectualy. Such a person loses their opportunity to grow. They are completely and without any escape under the mercy of the incidental. Their essence is dead while their personality and body are alive.

The other possibility of a first death is of course the conscious death to yourself. As appears in Ouspensky's book, In Search of the Miraculous. This is the breaking of the personality egg shell, so that the more fragile protected Essence can come into expression.

The second death is the "real" death, the inevitable death of the body.

The Numerical Laws

The law of the Three and the law of the Seven are fundamental in the cosmology of Gurdjieff, and of course, have parallels in other religious paths. The Hindu Trimurti, for example, is reminded to us in Peter Brook's movie Mahabharata.
For one example in Jewish thought we can look in The Book of Creation, Sefer Yetzira, considered one of the oldest documents in Jewish mysticism. The short book is traditionally attributed to the patriarch Abraham, and modern studies find traces for it as early as the 2nd century AD.
I will now sin by, out of context quotes (Aryeh Kaplan translation):

"Three Mothers... are fire, water, and breath. The hot is created from fire, the cold is created from water, and the temperate from breath decides between them."

"Seven... Seven and not six, seven and not eight. Examine with them and probe from them, make each thing stand on its own essence, and make the Creator sit on His base."

I encourage you to read the full book. It contains much more. Here I would just say that it actually refers to the numbers 3, 7, and 12, that their sum, 22, is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

Any metaphysical multiplicity discussion in Judaism is EXTREMELY risky. ALWAYS remember that there is only ONE. ReMember, we are only talking about observable laws of a created cosmos. There is nothing we can say or even think about the creator.

Practice. The theory is secondary.