"This life is temporary; in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, the constant proximity of death and the lack of any miracle cures or drastic methods of resuscitation brought people, I think, to a much closer sense of this — a sense that has been deteriorating ever since. People's sense of their own importance leads them to do terrible things; these young men who murdered the cartoonists and grocery store customers in Paris are an excellent example. These men— objectively violent and tragic to the rest of us — thought they were terribly important, and that what they were doing was terribly important. Perhaps that is the essence of terrorism — not the outward action, but the narcissistic tyranny of self that confers Godlike agency on us. It's one thing to grab an automatic rifle and kill people this way; yet I think that all of us, due to the action of this self-importance, indulge in thousands of tiny little acts of murder of compassion and love within ourselves all week long.
It's this inner dilemma from which all the outer actions spring; everything outward is an expression of an inward action. All these inward actions begin with the belief that I am important; and only the certain action that I ought to focus remarkably on the present moment, because I will die, seems to be a dose of medicine that could counteract it."
http://zenyogagurdjieff.blogspot.de/2015/01/the-missing-mind-part-iv.html
this link leads to the previous post here .:
"In failing to distinguish between the inner and the outer, and understanding that mindfulness (in so far as it works within one) addresses the inner, and the outer—
but not the intersection between the inner and the outer—
which is the terrifying location of consciousness itself, the location we forever avoid because of the difficulty of standing between these two powerful forces —
—we conceptualize.
I would say, generally speaking, that this tendency towards the superficial—which is relentless in this age of endless media and the growth industry of willful ignorance—has infiltrated the spiritual subsystems of cultures in the same way that it has contaminated everything else.
Now, this is a very important point, because the spiritual essence of a culture is the BIOS, the basic input output system, on which everything the culture represents is based. It lies embedded deep within the machinery of not only the culture itself, but the souls of the individuals that inhabit it; and when our attention spans grow short, our memories of tradition are abridged, and our commitment to the long, deep, essential pondering that is necessary for spiritual growth is abandoned, our culture decays, and everything along with it.
We live in an age where this form of degradation is not only accepted, it is celebrated."
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