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

Or Mr Brown, who has eaten spoiled crayfish, gets poisoned and, since noone is able to save him, dies the next day.Anyone can easily picture all these. But can the ordinary man contemplatefor himself the same possibility as he admits for Mr Smith, Mr Jones, and MrBrown, and really feel and live through all the despair of facing such an eventualityfor himself?Think what would be the state of a man who could clearly picture tohimself and experience the inevitability of his own death!If he seriously ponders and succeeds in entering deeply into this so asreally to cognize his own death, what could be more terrifying?In ordinary life, over and above the terrible fact of the inevitability of ourown death, there are many other things, particularly in recent times, which, ifwe would even imagine having to live through them, would evoke in usfeelings of inexpressible and intolerable anguish.Suppose that those contemporary people who have already entirely lost allpossibility of having any real objective hope for the future, that is to say,those who have never "sown" anything during their responsible life andtherefore have nothing to "reap" in the future, suppose that one day theyshould become aware of the inevitability of their imminent death—from thethought alone they would hang themselves.As a result of the specific action of the consequences of the properties ofthe organ kundabuffer on their common psyche, most contemporary people—those three-brained beings in whom were placed the hopes of our Creator aspossible servers of higher purposes—are prevented from knowing any ofthese genuine terrors And thus they are able calmly to carry on their existencein unconscious fulfillment of what was foreordained, but in the service only