Someone Who Has Done It

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Gore Vidal (Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, 2004) wrote …

“We hate this system that we are trapped in, but we don’t know who has trapped us or how. We don’t even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside.”

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Paul Beekman Taylor (Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium, 2001) wrote …

“Negative emotions are waste energies, he [Alfred Richard Orage] said; and waste, he noted that Ouspensky had argued appropriately, is sin. Hate wastes the forces of the emotional center and propagates other waste emotions, while love generates positive emotions. The emotional center must be coordinated with the other centers. When the intellectual center is a function of the emotional center (i.e., under its influence or control), thought is expressed as rationalizing; and when the emotional center is a function of the intellectual, thought is expressed as reason. ‘Sin is identification with the mechanism,’ rather than with its controlling force. Machines are tools that have their potential actualized by human control, but we must avoid ‘mechanicalness’ in our self.”

According to the same source …

“Gurdjieff had a precept that, to escape a prison such as modern-day consciousness, we need to know, first, that we are in prison. Then we need a tool for unlocking the doors, and finally, someone who has done it before to tell us the way to escape.”

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 Octavius Sturges (Chorea and Whooping-cough: Five Lectures, 1877) wrote …

“It deserves notice that nothing resembling chorea is to be seen among the lower animals. A nervous affliction of dogs has, indeed, received the same name, but it is expressly stated by those that have described it that the name does not apply. The nearest approach to chorea is to be found in the faces of nervous monkeys, yet it is but a faint and partial resemblance of the human disorder.”

According to the same source …

“From the fact that chorea can only happen to muscles which have been intelligently employed, it follows of course that the range of vulnerable muscles increases as life goes on. Until the organs of speech begin to be used as such there can be no speech-chorea (the affection of the tongue, as has been said, is peculiar, and seen only when it is moved to command); until the face is exercised in expression there can be no face-chorea, while afterwards, when expression begins to centre there, it becomes of all localities the most liable to it. In the chorea of approaching puberty, the face, I believe, is always affected, as it is said to be in the chorea of pregnant women, which is often, as Dr. Barnes points out, but a revival of the same affection in childhood. But, whatever the special seat of chorea, it will readily yield its place when the affected muscles can be held, the disorder being then transferred to some other part.

“Cases occur now and then which the nosologist might decline to call chorea, yet wherein some of the elements of the disease are displayed under interesting and instructive modification. Thus, for example, the muscular disorder, instead of being continuous and only increased by emotion, may be intermittent and entirely subject to that cause; or, again, over-movement may be replaced by over-stillness, or, as it is more learnedly expressed, ‘chorea may be complicated with catalepsy.’ I have a country youth under my care at the present time in Westminster Hospital, a farm labourer, of ordinary intelligence and robust health, who, when addressed, or rather when about to make reply, has an agitation of the right arm and shoulder, which of himself he cannot restrain. Yet there is no want of co-ordination in that limb. He is right-handed, and his writing is better than with most of his class. When his arm is held, or when the boy is carrying a heavy weight in that hand, the opposite side takes on the movement instead. If he is made to speak continuously, the right arm being held the while, not only is the movement transferred to the left arm and shoulder, but, as he continues his task, the agitation spreads until all the limbs are choreic, and at length his voice and face betoken true mental emotion. When the patient is told to keep his left (or still) arm in continuous motion to and fro, questions may be addressed to him without causing the usual movement of the affected side; and in the ordinary talk of the ward, when not under observation, the movements are but slight.”

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Causing a LOCALIZED left- or right-sided trauma to go SYSTEMIC is a corrective Mind Hacking technique — especially when the traumatized person yawns and stretches at the same time.

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