Today I started to talk; I have been having a cold, the first one for almost three years - I thought something was wrong with me, but I feel OK now, the proof of it is that I still get colds just as before! It has been and continues to be a strong cleaning process, most of it happening on the inside of my body, including work on myself.


Reijo: I have a strong suspicion that Ouspensky put into Gurdjieff's mouth many things that he never said or did not mean in the way they are written in "In Search". One of them is the expression of negative emotions. I know it says in the book that self-observation and self-study must be accompanied by the struggle against the expression of negative emotions. For me this does not look at all right today.

Follow up:

Agi: You are partly right; it is so that in the beginning, without experience of working on oneself, to enable us to see emotions working in us it is a help when one tries not to express them.

Reijo: The other day we talked about emotions and I came with the observation that my emotions are very much connected and tied up with the body, they seem to work very closely together. Not a very novel idea when I remember that the carriage is tied to the horse. You then...

Agi: Yes, come and see (showing me the first wall of the fresco in Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii) - this is how it is shown 2000 years ago. Just as you said the body and emotions are closely connected to each other. It is only much later when some transformation has taken place that we can see them as separate, when emotions have become independent from the body. This can happen when instead of the body the emotions are joined with knowledge Then we are no longer compelled to use the energy of anger, which is originally pure, in its transformed form when it changes to aggression.
See Article.

Tsögyam Trungpa expressed this in a very clear way in saying how emotions are pure at origin; they only become problematic when they are misused and become secondary emotions by getting mixed up with other, negative (habitual) emotions, which act like parasites. Then the energy is often used in a way that has nothing to do with the original emotion; this is generally what happens. Reijo: It is often said in psychological texts that the essence of a human being is emotional. The higher animals have also their emotions. As long as our emotions are tied up with the body we are like the animals. Agi: This is very exactly expressed in the frescos, how the result of the process is that emotions are shown separate from the body. This is possible after the new body has been built. This body can survive the death of the physical body. Reijo: I was a bit in pain recently (i.e. I sensed the pain in my body) and I could see clearly that when I can bear the pain in the body and keep my emotions out of it then the pain is fairly easy to bear. But if I start "promoting" my feelings about the pain it becomes soon unbearable. Agi: That is it - you see, "intentional suffering" would also become impossible if the suffering emotions would be attached to the body - we would become ill at any suffering. Without some substance it will not succeed. What did Gurdjieff say: "To know you will have to suffer, you will have to suffer for a million Francs. But as you are you can not suffer enough for one Franc."