These quotations chosen by the editors of the Fourth Way Today illustrate how our lower functions relate to our higher parts. Basically, the lower functions, or four lower centers, are part of our being. But how do they serve consciousness? Are they our servant or our master?
Ouspensky and others on Using the Lower Functions
We have to introduce a certain valuation of functions from the point of view of whether they are useful or harmful for self-remembering.
– P.D. Ouspensky, A Further Record [see the book here via PDF]
You must know that the outer man may be active,
whilst the inner man remains wholly free and immovable.
– Meister Eckhart
Consciousness is light; light is the result of certain energy; if there is no energy there is no light… We waste energy in imagination, considering, lying, identifying, expressing negative emotions, idle talk.
– P. D. Ouspensky, A Further Record
The burdened earth is sprinkled by the rain,
The winds blow cool, the lightnings roam on high,
Eased and allayed the obsessions of the mind,
And in my heart the spirit’s mastery.
– From the Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha
Gurdjieff on Changing One’s Point of View
First, you must decide: is the Way necessary for you or not? How are you to begin to find this out? If you are serious, you must change your point of view, you must think in a new way, you must find your possible aim. This you cannot do alone, you must call on a friend who can help you—everyone can help—but especially two friends can help each other to revalue their values.
It is very difficult to be sincere all at once, but, if you try, you will improve gradually. When you can be sincere, I can show you, or help you to see, the things you are afraid of, and you will find what is necessary and useful for yourself.
-G. I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World
HOMER [the poet is speaking:] …This was the very earth—turning in heaven, as a ripe fruit falls spinning from its tree. And all the forests and hills and living things we know were no more than this down upon it. And beautiful colours— rose and gold and green—shimmered upon its skin of lands and seas, as the sun sweetened it. I knew— I know not how—that beneath this skin was flesh of marble and iron and gold that Zeus might eat. And in its inmost core, a terrible hard stone, black kernel that can come to nothing till the earth dies, when from it another earth might spring, and so eternally.
-Rodney Collin, from his play Hellas