TALKING this was written by mrs. staveley

"Let us think today about talking - inner and outer talking - and the
harm we do ourselves and others by this mechanical process.
We have an experience and immediately feel the urge to burst
into speech, to translate it into words, to try it out, as it were, on
others.

We have done this so much in the past that we no longer believe in our
experience unless we put it into words. It is not real to us unless we hear
ourselves. Isn't it very strange when you think about it? Surely the reality is in the experience and not in the words I dress it in which inevitably limit and contain it. And yet we believe in words. It is almost a compulsion to talk. With some it amounts to disease. We can see, or
rather hear this in others, but do we hear in in ourselves?

I have an experience. It is mine, unique to me. If I put it into words
I externalize it, limit it, even distort it. My experience is no longer
mine. It is a newspaper or textbook account of itself.

Try to see this: How much is lost, how much is changed, so that I no
longer live my own life but a newspaper account of it. It is dull,
banal, stereotyped.

In Ecclesiastes it is said: "There is a time to speak and a time to remain
silent." Do we know this? Can we sense it? Even when we remain silent
outwardly the talking machine is racing ahead inwardly so there is no
room for a new impression to enter. The work tells us to practice inward
silence even more than outer. Do we try to do this? Do we even know
where to begin? Perhaps not yet. We have to begin with outer talking.

It is very well known that it is less difficult to remain silent
altogether than it is to refrain from speaking about one particular thing. Is there something you very much wish to speak about with others? Try to catch the moment when you fail, when you forget - the sensation of indulging a weakness, the self-justification that follows, the turning aside from any flicker of conscience. Or perhaps by some accident you are able to refrain from outer talking; then watch the rush of words in your inner world. Make the effort to stop, to avert your inner attention to something else. Almost always when one can do this there is an accession of strength. My not speaking (inside or outside) strengthens me; or rather, I keep my strength for myself. I can sense that the compulsion to talk weakens me. Try to do this. It is a very important part of the work."

ancestors

They knew flowers’ names

And used words that we no longer use any more

Words that we never heard before

Pitched and falling

Singing archaically and calling to us

In a way that we don’t feel called by any more.


We’ve gone on,

Left fields and trees behind

Left moments that filled spaces

And lived like silence, we’ve

Squeezed out silent spaces

And built our homes on hardened science

Made our highways out of untied ties

To drive a lighted terror

Deep into the endless night.

dissolute dood friday

Love was betrayed by us

Sleep does not last

Regret has delayed us

As they say,

What is past is past.

Laughter won’t survive the night

Tears will dry and having dried

Silence finds us empty

And we have denied Christ

On Saturday morning

just a poem

Can this be seaside sunlight?

The south-east sky so blue,

I can see it in a window

Spring white, light green

Leaves and blossom waving in the wind

Much more than anything that window scene

That square of shifting white and blue and green

And they say, more and more are we

Remember things that you have never seen

And long for things beyond the dream of dreams

Sun and sky and wind and trees

We are beyond your time,

Beyond your mind,

Beyond your reach.

now

this
is the soap in the bath moment

little effort for an ungrasped statement
a little bit of i -don’t- know
but the feeling of slippery now and its inarticulate especiality,

so much has been ruled out

in the time lag between the line and its inscription,

the maybe and the risk of the decision

to face the light

not now,
but in a million cold dawns,

bereft of reminiscence

Gurdjieff International Review

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THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS