You can't just jump to the end - we have to 'learn', to go through the processes. But actually it is possible to see that the end is quite simple.
Hmmm, after we are adults, I think one can start at the end: it would depend upon an individual's capacity to suspend one's disbelief. It would depend on how well someone can already "Stop!" as Gurdjieff would say. Some can do that via the experience gained from the course of their lives -- trained automatically in a tolerance for ambiguity, trained to duck and bolt forward and run back, trained to change the script and the sheet of music. Such a person would not impugn the linear "steps" but instead see the wisdom and beauty in them. (And ... get a lot more out of them.)
I remember when I had my stint with hypnosis, speaking of separating the centers and listening with more than one of them. In the episode in which I "caught" the hypnotist, he led me into an induction by ostensibly talking about what he learned at a conference he attended on self-hypnosis. That was the premise of the discussion, anyway. Rather than tell me the topics discussed and the deduction of his observation/experience, he began by leading me into an induction.
Wanting to be polite, I listened, and clearly recall how I was processing it at the time. I said to myself, "Ah, so he is not going to teach this material deductively, like a good teacher would. A good teacher would tell us the conclusion/principle (or theory) first, and then break it down into details, be they inductive pieces of data or experiences. He is going to give it all inductively.
"So, I will listen with two ears: one so that I can glean the underlying principle, and the other so that I can remember these steps that he is now echoing."
As it turned out, I had already been induced before, unbeknownst to myself, and this two-earedness of mine was a by-product of the fact that he had already induced trance. He had already instilled the separation, between unconscious and conscious. And if you want to look at it another way, he had already created a dissonance indeed in me between the deductive and the inductive. To me, despite whatever bitterness I still have regarding those dark years, this is no way to teach. If one gives the principle first, then the learning of the inductive pieces, the particulars, the seemingly-elementary steps, have far more meaning. Perhaps it's an individual matter, I don't know. After all, there are different learning styles and proclivities.
I've just figured out why I've resisted Gurdjieff, anyway. I'm setting that aside, though, as I have begun to read him.
(Pardon me for what might seem to be a digression. I was examining the dissonance, and why I was having a lot of red flags and alarms going off. It's my "stuff", and I didn't miss the point that G is talking about 3, not 2. I suspect, though, that I will probably always have a resistance to him. I spent years trying to undo the separation within myself -- years. It doesn't mean that I can't learn from his writings, at any rate. Gone, gone, gone the days, decades ago, where I can approach a learning situation with blind faith. Call it damage if you will, but know also that I can compensate for it. Meanwhile, I look at whatever study I might make of Gurdjieff as a way to understand you, Michael -- and it's certainly a worthwhile endeavor therein.)
