Staying with the Void

From *The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff* by Jeanne De Salzmann

I have a new impression of myself but it is fragile. I am not sufficiently steeped in the sensation of being a living Presence, and the feeling revealed here is still too weak. Tensions reappear. I feel them. But I know what they separate me from, and because I know it, they fall away. This is a movement of ebb and flow in which my feeling becomes stronger. It loses its negative and aggressive elements, and opens more and more to a sense of the subtle, the higher, a sense of life itself. My intelligence has to understand the meaning of my tensions, and something in me needs to leave more and more space - not out of obligation but from necessity, a necessity of my being. I seek to understand this state without-tension which brings me closer to the void, to my essence.

I become aware of a world of finer vibrations. I feel them, I have the sensation of them, as if certain parts of me were irrigated, vivified, spiritualized by them. Yet I am still not entirely under the influence of these vibrations. I realize this. But I feel an ever greater need not to resist them. My usual "I" has lost its authority and, as another authority makes itself felt, I see that my life has meaning only if I am attuned to it. In working for this accord, I feel as though situated in a closed circuit and that, if I could remain here long enough, the miracle of my transformation would take place.

In order to feel these fine vibrations, I must come to real stillness of the body, a state without any tension where the thought is simply a witness which without comment sees all that happens. I will then understand what it means to have pure sensation-a sensation with no intervening image. My body is under this vision with no tension. Relaxation appears by itself as my seeing becomes clear, and with it I feel that separate islands of energy in me need to be more deeply related. This fine sensation is a sign of incarnation, the moment of penetration when the spirit materializes and takes on a definite density.

In a more objective state, where an order is established, my breathing can take on new meaning. Only in this state am I capable of receiving the finer elements of the air and absorbing them. I feel the energy circulate freely in my body, with nothing stopping or deflecting it, nothing projecting it outside or fixing it inside. It flows in a kind of circular movement, which takes place without my intervening. I feel it as a movement in which I exist. I discover my breathing---the absorption and discharge of energy.

I breath in…….I breathe out.
I know that I breathe in…..I know that I breathe out.
In a quiet body I breathe in…… In a quiet body I breathe out.
Slowly I breathe in……. Slowly I breathe out.

I am awake to this breathing that is taking place in me. I am awake to my body. I do not separate them from each other.

In a light body, I breathe in……. In a light body, I breathe out.

The body feels lighter. I let myself exhale completely, all the way to end.

Without avidity, I breathe in…. Without avidity, I breathe out.

I feel the impermanence of the movement. I do not seek to hold back anything whatsoever.

Feeling, free, I breathe in….. Feeling, free, I breathe out.

Words and forms lose their power of attraction. A kind of clarity lights the state I am in. I become deeply quiet in order to awaken to what I am.