Take the power back: the two different kinds of suffering

Jared Witt   |   Nov 27, 2020

Sometimes my mind reaches an impasse in its efforts to understand itself. I wheel around and around the same problem like I’m in a Parisian roundabout, and the issue that I’m having is the center island. It rarely occurs to me to just take the next exit off to the side and get on with my life.  And whenever a particular street sign catches my eye and alerts me to that option, I’m utterly dumbfounded that I’d probably missed it countless times before.
 
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff is unlikely to be a household name for most, I’m guessing. But if you’ve studied the Enneagram at all, it may ring a bell. He reclaimed and codified many of the concepts of the Enneagram, though that was more or less a side hustle in his intellectual oeuvre. The eccentric Armenian left home at a young age on the hunch that it is in fact possible for humans to achieve a higher state of consciousness and improve their “state of being.” For him, this occasionally meant high forms of meditation, but more often, it meant simply not yelling at the dog because you’ve had a hard day at work. In fact, he would develop a way of speaking about the latter as being no less a transcendent topic and every bit a part of the conscious spiritual life as, say, sitting legs folded, palms up on a mountain top.

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