Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

While speaking of man's will and of the different aspects of its supposedlyautonomous manifestations, which for contemporary so-called "inquiringminds"—but in our view, naive minds—serve only as material for wiseacringand self-adulation, it will do no harm to quote what Gurdjieff said in yetanother of his talks, because the ideas he brought on that occasion may wellthrow light on the illusoriness of that will which every man is supposed tohave.He spoke as follows:"A man comes into the world like a clean sheet of paper, whichimmediately all around him begin vying with each other to dirty and fill upwith education, morality, the information we call 'knowledge,' and with allkinds of ideas of duty, honor, conscience, and so on and so forth."And each and all claim immutability and infallibility for the methods theyemploy for grafting these branches onto the main trunk, called man's'personality.'"The sheet of paper gradually becomes dirty, and the dirtier it becomes,that is to say, the more a man is stuffed with ephemeral information andnotions of duty, honor, and so on, which are dinned into him or suggested tohim by others, the more 'clever' and worthy he is considered by those aroundhim."And seeing that people look upon his dirt as merit, he himself inevitablycomes to look upon the dirtied sheet of paper in the same light."And so you have a model of what we call a 'man,' to whom such words as'talent' and 'genius' are frequently applied."And the temper of our 'genius' when he wakes up in the morning isspoiled for the whole day if he does not find his slippers beside the bed."The ordinary man is not free in his life, in his manifestations, or in hismoods.