Richard Smoley > Quotes

“someone with access to an inner source of spiritual insight does not need the church—or does not need it as ordinary people do. Furthermore, such a person often has an inner authority lacking in many leaders of established religions. This was precisely the response Jesus evoked when he began to preach: “And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).”
― Richard Smoley, Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism

“Broadly speaking, religion fulfills two main functions in human life. In the first place, it’s meant to foster religious experience, to enable the individual soul to commune with the divine. In the second place, it serves to cement the structure of society, upholding values and ideals that preserve the common good. The word religion derives from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind back” or “bind together.” Religion’s function is to bind individuals both to God and to one another.”
― Richard Smoley, Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism

“Traditionally, reaching the state of illumination symbolized by the center bestows a different fate from that of the ordinary person who accepts salvation. For the latter, life after death will persist in many different planes of being — higher ones, no doubt, where existence is less painful and burdensome and where spiritual aspiration faces less resistance. But those who attain gnosis are freed from this spiral entirely. They can choose to return to manifestation for a special purpose or can dwell in absorption into God — known in the Christian tradition as the “beatific vision.” They are, to use T. S. Eliot’s famous words in Four Quartets, “at the still point of the turning world.”

In the Gospels, one name for this still point is “the eye of the needle.” As Christ says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). This means that the “I” has to be very fine and subtle to reach this still center of being. A “rich man” — one who is encumbered not only with property but with the heavy baggage of a pompous self-image — is too big to make it through. Obviously, this is an inner condition and so does not necessarily refer to all rich people, though in practice it probably applies to most. Francis de Sales, a Catholic spiritual teacher of the early seventeenth century, observes:

A man is rich in spirit if his mind is filled with riches or set on riches. The kingfisher shapes its nests like an apple, leaving only a little opening at the top, builds it on the seashore, and makes it so solid and tight that although waves sweep over it the water cannot get inside. Keeping always on top of the waves, they
remain surrounded by the sea and are on the sea, and yet are masters of it. Your heart . . . must in like manner be open to heaven alone and impervious to riches and all other transitory things.

Money — “mammon,” as Christ called it — is only one of the forms the force of the world takes. There are people for whom money holds no allure but who are beguiled by sex, pleasure, or power. And for those who are indifferent even to these temptations, there is always the trap of apathy (accidie or acedia, derived from a Greek word meaning “not caring,” are names sometimes used in the tradition). There are many variations, which will take on slightly different forms in everyone. Freeing oneself from the world requires overcoming these drives in oneself, however they appear.”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“The idea is doing [A Course in Miracles] is itself a way of saving the world. And one of the things that is very, very clear if you pay attention to the course - you have what the course calls your 'special function', some work here that only you can do, in this world. Nobody else can tell you what it is for yourself because they're lucky if they know for themselves. And your function may be quite different... I think what happens is people want to do something for the world but they do it in kind of very naive ways. One example is whenever there's any disaster, all these people come to help. 'Do you know how to do anything?' 'Well, no not really.' I mean yeah they need doctors and nurses and stuff but they don't need some ordinary slob hanging around. Oh and by the way this ordinary slob has to be fed and housed. In addition to all these people who lost their homes and their livelihoods. So they're like the second wave of the disaster. And that's kind of a naive way of helping the world. Uou have to do it in a way that's in a sense shrewd, that makes sense to you. And it necessarily follows that what you do and what I do and what you're supposed to do and what I'm supposed to do are really quite different things... A lot of people equate saving the world with embracing some cause or another. And... your work, very likely, is nothing to do with that. The problems, you know, the usual disasters and calamities that the human race is predicting for itself, yeah, those problems are there. Your job might be something quite different. And you have to know yourself well enough to know what your own job is. To paraphrase a line of the Bhagavad Gita 'It's better to do your own job badly than someone else's job well'...”
― Richard Smoley

“Gurdjieff’s teaching offers another perspective on the mastery of the body. Gurdjieff’s central teaching was, as we have seen, the “sleep of man” and the fragmentation of the human psyche. The only way to begin the long and arduous task of unifying the psyche is to remember oneself. Casual readers of Gurdjieff may think he is talking about being self-conscious in the ordinary sense of the term: accompanying one’s actions with a convoluted mental narrative. But of course this accomplishes nothing. Self-remembering in Gurdjieff’s sense first has to do with conscious sensation of the body.

As one contemporary Gurdjieffian puts it, “Someone who is in the Work is never far from the sensation of the body.” Although the theory behind this approach is extremely intricate and obscure, its central point is clear enough. The human being is fragmented because the mind, emotions, and the body are badly connected with each other. As a way of unifying them, practitioners of the Gurdjieff Work consciously direct the attention of the mind to immediate bodily sensation; mind and body thus draw closer together. Later, attention to the emotions is brought in as well.

While this integration is important, there is also another dimension to this type of work, which, in the terms I have been using in this book, has to do with the liberation of the “I” from the world. Ordinary consciousness is passive. If it is aware of the body, this is usually because the body has brought some item to its notice: a pain, an itch, a change in temperature. Once the problem is fixed, the mind moves along to something else, borne along on the stream of associations. Consciousness here has no volition, no power of its own. The “I” is passive, the world is active. This state is the bondage from which spiritual work attempts to liberate us.”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“... more than most forms of discourse, esoteric thought calls upon you to assimilate it, not on the basis of citations and credentials, but by its resonance with your own being.

The Gospel alludes to this issue when it says of Christ “that the people were astonished at his doctrine, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matt. 7:28-29). The "scribes" are the spiritual pettifoggers of all eras, who insist on quibbling over chapter and verse. Christ was able to take them on, as many passages in the Gospels show, but his authority did not come from erudition or skill in debate. Rather, it came from a knowledge that went deeper than the letter of the law. This is what “astonished” the people. At the same time, there had to be some deeper knowing in the people themselves that could recognize this authority, that could hear in it the ring of truth. It is this intuitive knowing... which all of us possess, whether or not we pay any heed to it...”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“Gurdjieff's ideas, like those of the Bible itself, are clearly mythic: they attempt to speak metaphorically of truths that do not lend themselves to ordinary language or thought. As for humanity serving as food for the moon or the moon turning to blood, the old esoteric maxim holds good: "Neither accept nor reject." There is an attitude of mind whereby one can entertain and contemplate ideas like these dispassionately and openmindedly without falling into the traps either of credulity or reactive skepticism. This is not an evasion or an attempt to deflect legitimate criticism: rather, it is meant to cultivate a certain freedom of thought that can go beyond the boundaries of dualistic yesses and nos.

[...]

Finally, there is John, the Gospel that is different. It does not talk about Jesus' birth, it does not show him speaking in parables, and it says little about his preaching in Galilee, which probably occupied the greatest part of his public career. The Gospel of John takes place mostly in Jerusalem, and this detail, while apparently inconsistent with the synoptics, offers an important key to what John is trying to accomplish. His Gospel does not speak to the three lowers aspects of our natures, as the others do; it address the highest part, the spirit, or "I", which unites and harmonizes these three; it rises above them, which is why it is symbolized by the eagle. In the Bible this part of the human makeup is symbolized by Zion or Jerusalem, the seat of the Temple, where Israel makes contact with the presence of the living God. John does not show Jesus speaking in parables because at this level analogies and stories are unnecessary and possibly unhelpful; what is disclosed in encrypted form by the synoptics is uttered openly here.

There may be some value, then, in approaching the Gospels not as if they were newspaper articles giving contradictory accounts, but as sacred texts presenting the same truths in a manner that speaks to different types of individuals as well as to different levels of our own being. Such a perspective may help us to step beyod the apparent discrepancies that have dogged so many readers of these texts. If we can open the manifold aspects of our natures to the Gospels, they can disclose themselves to us in our fragmented state and help to integrate it.”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“Of course, the polarity between love and knowledge is not a rivalry. These two opposites are like the sexes; they are differentiated to create not strife but dynamism. Left to its own, devotion becomes sentimental and even fanatical, while knowledge becomes dry and pedantic. When the two are connected and integrated, knowledge—which after all arises from a love of truth—begins to feed and delight the heart, which in its turn warms and stimulates the energy for further exploration”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“The sources of Gurdjieff’s teaching are a matter of speculation and debate, and no really satisfying answer has emerged, but he hinted that he was teaching esoteric Christianity. At his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, a school he set up near Paris in the 1920s, he once told the pupils: “The aim of this Institute . . . can be expressed in few words: the Institute can help one to be able to be a Christian. Simple! That is all.”

The essence of Gurdjieff’s philosophy has to do with “the sleep of man.” Although we think we lead our lives in waking consciousness, he says, in fact we go around in a hypnotic stupor. The chief feature of this stupor is dissociation between the three principal parts of our being: the mind, emotions, and body. Only by long and assiduous work in unifying these “centers,” as he calls them, can one truly fulfill the commandments of Christ. Otherwise it is impossible: a person is too much at the mercy of the conflicting centers pulling in opposite directions. “Let every one ask himself, simply and openly, whether he can love all men,” Gurdjieff said. “If he has had a cup of coffee, he loves; if not, he does not love. How can that be called Christianity?” For Gurdjieff, attaining higher consciousness is a prerequisite for being able to carry out the teachings of Christ.”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“To make a conscious effort to sense yourself, to do something even as simple as deliberately feeling your elbow on the chair while reading this book, introduces a powerful catalyst into the situation. The customary situation is reversed. The “I” consciously wills itself to experience the world in the form of the body. Now the “I” is active and the world is passive. Moreover, consciousness is not so intensely and immediately confused with its own contents, but is able to step back from them, even if only for an instant or two. This small but powerful polarization is the beginning of freedom.

In the Gurdjieff Work, the fundamental meditative practice is known as “sitting,” and the basic directions are simple: to be aware of the sensations of the body while sitting upright. Anyone with even a little experience of this practice is likely to make a startling discovery: sensations begin to lose their solidity, their thingness, and become fluid and dynamic. Under certain circumstances one can even sense a circulation of subtle energy.

The question then arises of whether this circulation is going on all the time or the direction of attention has somehow brought about an inner transformation. Gurdjieff said, “Even a feeble light of consciousness is enough to change completely the character of a process, while it makes many of them altogether impossible. Our inner psychic processes (our inner alchemy) have much in common with those chemical processes in which light changes the character of the process and they are subject to analogous laws.”

With directed attention to the body, sensations seem to move from solid to liquid; what was seemingly hard and palpable suddenly turns out to be fluid and changing. One discovers the enormous difference between the body as physical object and the body as it is felt within. To have some familiarity with this experience gives a glimpse of what esoteric teachings mean when they speak of the “subtle body.” While most systems say there are many such bodies (in Gurdjieff’s there are four), the most immediate and accessible is this subtle body to which we gain access through our own sensation.”
― Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

“Like Rappaccini's daughter, the professors' touch can prove poisonous. I have a degree in philosophy myself, so I have firsthand experience of how academic hairsplitting and pettifogging disputes over the meanings of words have all but killed that discipline. A glance into just about any theological treatise will leave one with the same impression. So I'm not sure that academic inquiry will really do justice to the spiritual traditions of the West, particularly since scholastics, from the time of Aquinas onward, have been notoriously bad at distinguishing intellectual knowledge from the deeper, experiential understanding called "gnosis." Even Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, was nicknamed "the accountant" by kabbalists because they saw his knowledge as being merely of the intellectual kind.”
― Richard Smoley