In Search of the Miraculous

£14.975
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In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Miraculous

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Price: £14.975
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Aside from his final piece, Ader’s best known body of work is a set of 16mm films known as the Fall series. Each film was recorded in a single static take. “ Fall 1, Los Angeles” (1970) opens with Ader sitting on a chair on the roof of his home. The camera is set at a distance, with only the house and Ader occupying the frame. The artist suddenly leans to his right, loses control, and begins to roll off the roof and into the bushes below. The work’s levity is bolstered by the artist’s use of slow motion. In an extra-comic twist, one of Ader’s shoes flies off before he hits the ground. Another film from the same year, “ Fall 2, Amsterdam” (1970), is presented at normal speed. The camera overlooks a road beside a canal. Ader enters the frame on a bicycle, cycling steadily. He abruptly swerves into the water a few seconds later. Crucially, both sequences are cut before we see Ader remerge. He essentially vanishes. Self-remembering is having the awareness of your own self, the observer and what you are observing, simultaneously. It is essentially a vivid sense of your own being, the fact that “you” exist, here and now. It can come to us out of the blue, and many examples of self-remembering can be found in literature; the episode of the madeleine in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a classic example, although, of course, Proust doesn’t use the term “self-remembering.” In this sense, Gurdjieff shares much with the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, who also believed that man’s greatest problem is what he called “forgetfulness of being,” loss of the sense of our own existence. Gurdjieff and Heidegger also arrive at the same remedy for this. Our forgetfulness or sleep in the face of being can be broken by a vivid grasp of the reality of our own finitude – our death – a medicine Heidegger prescribes in Being and Time and with which Gurdjieff agreed in his own perplexing jawbreaker of an esoteric masterpiece, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. In fact, with its extravagant eroticism and big, brash aesthetic, Wiley’s work shouts loudly about its own contradictions, pre-empting any protests and leaving little room for conversation. At times the artist handles these ironies with an almost world-weary knowingness. He once described his output as “high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers”, and here, above the rolling waters, one suggestively bent-double youth freezes his audience with a hardened stare. When I went to see the exhibition of Remedios Varo I saw a book that interested me among his collection, one of Peter D. Ouspensky with the title "In search of the miraculous: fragments of an unknown teaching".

Gurdjieff said about groups, “When a group is being organized its members have certain conditions put before them… First of all it is explained to all the members of a group that they must keep secret everything they hear or learn in the group and not only while they are members of it but forever afterwards. This is an indispensable condition whose idea should be clear to them from the very beginning.” (Pg. 223) His heroes act out tragic scenarios of existential adversity, but they do so with the psychological disposition of a stubborn child who cannot recognise tragedy for what it is and, because of that misrecognition, successfully manages to overcome it. They don't recognise reality as an obstacle. If they fall they simply get up and keep on pushing until reality gives up its resistance and allows them to have things their own way." He concludes, “G. invited me several times to go and live at the Prieuré. There was a good deal of temptation in this. But in spite of all my interest in G.’s work I could find no place for myself in this work nor did I understand its direction. At the same time I could not fail to see… that there were many destructive elements in the organization of the affair itself and that it had to fall to pieces… On returning to London I announced to those who came to my lectures that my work in the future would proceed quite independently in the way it had been begun in London in 1921.” (Pg. 389)P.D. Ouspensky begins this book, “I returned to Russia in November, 1914… When leaving Petersburg at the start of my journey I had said that I was going to ‘seek the miraculous.’ The ‘miraculous’ is very difficult to define. But for me this word had a quite definite meaning. I jhad come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road… But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say…. The ‘miraculous’ was a penetration into this unknown reality. And it seemed to me that the way to the unknown could be found in the East. Why in the East?... In this idea there was, perhaps, something of romance, but it may have been the absolutely real conviction that, in any case, nothing could be found in Europe.” (Pg. 3) A characteristic of In Search of the Miraculous, which from all other accounts doubtless reflects the Gurdjieff teaching accurately, is the unique mingling of cosmological ideas with teachings concerning psychology. Ouspensky now begins the long, powerful portrayal of Gurdjieff’s teachings about the origin and structure of the universe, the laws behind the appearances, laws and forces that govern everything from the creation of galaxies to the movements of atoms to the energy transactions within the human organism.

Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain, 11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990) and latter rebranded as Osho was leader of the Rajneesh movement. During his lifetime he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement leader and mystic.There are in fact many I's, not just one, as when we refer to ourselves in the first person. This is because our minds are split into many different factions based on our feelings. Essentially the unity we think we possess is an illusion supported by buffers between the different parts that prevent harsh collisions. In this sense we are not one person but many, which explains how we can react in ways seemingly contrary to our previous convictions.



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