A Record of Meetings held by P.D. Ouspensky - HolyBooks.com

You must understand (certainly it is quite obvious) that every kind oforganization needs material means, needs money, needs people wholook after it and so on And at the same time you must understand thatyou have already been coming for some months and had all theselectures, and that nobody has asked anything from you This ispossible only because other people pay for you And now the questioncomes—will you be able to pay for yourself? It is generally calculatedlike that a certain group is taken together, and then I see how muchthis group can pay, and according to that the future is arrangedBecause, suppose that group cannot pay, or can pay so little that itcannot exist independently, then the question arises is there anothergroup that will continue to pay to make its work possible or not? Ithas been going like that for a long time We have tried to arrangeor establish some kind of equal payment for everybody, but found thatit was impossible, because, even with the minimum standard whichwould make it possible to go on, the majority of people cannot payThis is very natural because there are many people who have to earntheir living and earn only just enough, or even not enough, and thereare young people who have no possibility to give anything, and so onUntil now, owing to the organization which I am explaining, we havenever refused anybody because they could not pay But it may not goon like that for much longer, because the number of people increases,and with it the number of people who cannot pay also increases Soperhaps we shall be obliged to limit the number of people who cannotpay, or who can pay only very little It was impossible, as I have said,to arrange any equal payment, so it is really a matter which peoplehave to decide for themselves, how much they can pay And, as I havesaid, it is counted for the group (fifty, sixty or seventy people) andthen all further arrangements are calculated on this basisI think now you better try to ask questions—I have given you thegeneral idea Now let me know which details you want to know andthen later we can pass to other questionsI only must add some other things to that at present we have verymany people, and it is really the fault of older people that they did notexplain this situation well to newer people As a result of this manypeople who have been coming for a long time do not pay an) attentionto the question of material means of the work, and that creates astrange atmosphere And not only do they not do anything themselves,