There Is in Me Something Very Real
A Short Reflection for September
Dear Friends and Family,
Today’s first-of-the-month reflection comes from Madame Jeanne de Salzmann, twentieth-century French-Swiss dancer/teacher and devoted pupil of mystic ‘Seeker of Truth’, G. I. Gurdjieff.1
You will recognize intimations of emptiness and an inner attitude of poverty—the inner hunger (desire) that pulls us toward presence with being.
I have added space between sentences where in the original text there is not—each sentence being a completion, followed by a next completion that enfolds what came before it.
There is in me something very real, the self, but I am always closed to it, demanding that everything outside prove it to me.
I am always on the surface, turned toward the outside in order to take something or to defend myself.
Yet there is perhaps another attitude, another disposition, in which I have nothing to take, I have only to receive.
I need to receive an impression that nothing outside can give me—an impression of being, of my self having a sense, a meaning.
The movement of knowing is a movement of abandon.
It is necessary to open one’s hands.
In moments of greater attention, I have an awareness of “being here”—a look, a light, a consciousness that knows.
. . .
I begin to feel what it means to be true, that is, the moment when my thought knows itself as it is and my feeling knows itself as it is.
Another kind of thinking appears—immobile, without words, capable of containing my usual thought—and there is a feeling of my essence, a feeling that is not of my form but that can contain the form.
I have then a new thinking and a new feeling that see the fact, that see what is.
So, the only reality for me today is in my effort to be present to myself.
Nothing else is real.
~ Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being
Jeanne de Salzmann, “An Experience of Presence,” in The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 2011), pp. 39–40, emphasis original. Special thanks to Connie J. for prying open my hands with the gift of this text as a 2022 pilgrimage send-off.
Dearest Renée, I have been unforgivably absent in commenting on your letters for too long but for reasons purely linked to a lack of time and emotional energy. Summer has been complicated by many unexpected external intrusions of which these words are deeply pertinent.
The inner journey of self-awareness and the struggle to connect with a deeper, more authentic sense of self; why do we always seek external validation when these experiences can never fully satisfy?
I wish I weren't guilty... and yet, still I constantly turn away from inner reality, focusing instead on the external world for proof of existence and worth. Always I find need to defend myself.
How often our human need to connect with an inner truth is obscured by the distractions of daily life. It suggests that this truth can only be found through a deliberate effort to turn inward, to be present, and to let go of the need for external validation. I am learning... thank you so very much for Jeanne de Salzmann, and The Reality of Being, I think I must print this out and read often.
With love to you X
True knowledge arises from a place of openness and presence rather than from rigid frameworks or preconceived notions. Beautiful, Renée.