Having only recently found your blog, I can’t pretend to know what you’re on about.  However, I glimpse in this recent post a similar dilemma to what I have suffered and have actually recently resolved through channels, unseen, that have occurred to me through contact with this blog and its links onto others.  And so, I got to thinking about the end result of stripping away the false personality, and rendering quiet at least, all the competing I’s in one’s being in order to get to Real I. 

My teacher (now deceased) had said that our old emotional selves were thoroughly poisoned and our personalities were necessarily riddled with toxicity.  We needed to die to our selves and establish within ourselves a new emotional self--a New Jerusalem.  I thought to ask, but didn’t, what are we left with when our old emotional self has died, before the birth of the new?  We cannot function in the modern world and in society on essence alone, blissful that state may be.

I reached a point not long ago, of fully realising the poisonouse state of my emotional self, and prayed and prayed and prayed and demanded, a new will, but killing off my personality, in my case anyway, seems an almost impossible task.  What would it leave me with which to relate to others and what would I have left to work with?

The one thing that I am left with, the most valuable tool at my disposal is the ability to self-observe.  While other work practises such as non-identifying have become almost impossible to do when once they were easier, self-observation is the one constant in my life that I cannot now stop.

The Work my teacher taught was not solely the Gurdjieffan tradition, but drew inspiriation from his teachings and methods along with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (amongst other things).  Gurdjeff appealed to my intellect, got me in, and finally Swedenborg spoke to my heart.  My teacher has now gone, and we are no longer spoon fed.  And I have wondered whether anybody has succeeded in this Work?

Beyond the Fourth way seems the only way, but there is no teacher.  Teachings die with teachers.  This is both emancipatory and gravely worrying, and while I flounder and struggle with my false personality and false I’s and feel that I am more than ready for the establishment of a New Jersusalem within myself (bring it on!) I know that I have a long road to haul and that this, given the strength of my personality is probably not going to happen while I am attached to this mortal coil.  SO, all I can ‘do’ is self-observe.  This has been the most useful of exercises, if only to point to myself in the short-term what a complete dickhead (idiot) I am!  And so back to the greatest of all esoteric teachings.  “Know thyself” “Watch! “ Egeris!

Sorry for the long-winded comment.
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HI Link. Thanks for the comment which really sums up the whole issue and also is something I can fully identify with. I’d like to pick up on a few points:

What are we left with when the self dies? Who knows? - that is the key point. Just as with actual physical death, we can actually never know. It’s impossible. And just like with physical death we desperately want to know, desperately resist both the literal and actual deaths.

Of course the ‘spiritual’ self does not want to die - for the simple reason that is exactly what you said: lack of knowledge - and hence, fear - of what lies ‘on the other side’ (this is what I was touching on by the motif of ‘Jesus dying for us’ btw) and it is this factor that makes us vulnerable to all sorts of shysters, hucksters, preachers and lunatic religionists. All snake oil salesman - and just like in the ‘real world’ we all line up to buy and buy again.

I am not saying there are no real teachers or no real students (though I am not one of either) but in a quarter of a century of interest in this area I could count the genuine ones I have encountered on one hand of a particularly inept chain-saw juggler. There have been some but they are in the lower end of single figures. Quite near zero in fact (I discount certain genuine people who I correspond with through this medium and have never met in person).

This is not so bad in itself but when weighed against the totality of people I have met in this area - which is numbered in thousands - it absolutely should give one pause for thought. And it’s not just that - most of these thousands have actually been very, very odd.

Personally its all just reached critical mass for me and I had to ask myself a simple question which I could no longer avoid: why are people involved in esoteric studies often light years from what I understand the goal to be? (that is, in terms of what I personally am looking for - these are the only terms each of us can have).

And when this question was asked the answer was not pleasant (which is why the question was avoided like the plague) and it led to another question: what the hell have I been doing with my life?

These questions will be ‘heresy’ to some but just like you, I suspect, I realize know they are developmental. Real. More real than virtually everything I have been doing.

I also meant to say that I valued your comment immensely and it is the more valuable now I read it again. I hope it is of use to other readers also.

You seem very down and hard on yourself Link and even at the end of your post you are apologising for your self. Too much energy seems to be given over to worrying about the self altogether. There are some people in this world who just follow a path of service and never give there self a single thought and these people shine through with what they do for humanity. They may well just be born that way as a different type. On the other hand those obsessed with themselves and their spiritual development somehow need to let go of this and focus on the real being God for want of a better word otherwise all there energy is just still focussed on themselves whether as a negative or a positive.

Segovius, I was extremely fortunate to meet a genuine teacher, one of only a handful n the world.  I travelled searching and soon realised that at home, in a small suburban living room humbly spoon-feeding us was the real thing. 

The latahan helped very much in developing an awareness in me of charletans and shysters and I found myself able to easily assess anyone whose writings or teachings were aimed at appealing to my wallet or my ego. Such people comprise the overwhelming bulk in the dubious areas of pop spirutality/ enlightenment.  I would recommend the latahan to you.  Not as a religion simply as an exercise.  Done alone or with others, it is a beautiful, gentle, ordering exercise.

Paul, if you’re looking for a rise I suggest you fish elsewhere.

Link - can you mail me at my personal email? I think you have it.

As I understand it, the point about Sufism, about any genuine self-realization, is to be yourself - your true self - as much as you can be, to relish life, to exercise heart and mind to their fullest, which is why the real Sufis were wildly creative and maybe also wild. There’s a saying I picked up (I think in Victor Gollancz’s A Year of Grace), the gist of which is in the after-life they won’t ask why you weren’t Moses, they’ll ask why you weren’t you.  I did a degree in French and Italian.  It trained my mind as it was supposed to.  I use it, sometimes quite extensively, in my musings about religion and religiosity - you can’t study a thousand years of French and Italian literature without learning a fair amount about the Roman Catholic Church, especially (evil grin) when your special subject was Voltaire. It was never enough.  What I am is creative, a writer and latterly, having discovered Photoshop, an artist.  In creating I use all of me, in academe not.  Does that strike a chord?