Intellectual Attitudes

Intellectual Attitudes

From our friend Lindsey V. of the New York Center

A powerful tool in this work lies in choosing attitudes intentionally. In the Fourth Way, the Work begins with right understanding, right attitudes. Attitudes are intellectual and emotional points of view, many of which we have unconsciously adopted from our education and from imitation of those around us. Normally, these habits and patterns are invisible to us, but they can drain our energy and keep us asleep. To be free from them, we must begin to understand that everything we think and feel is subjective.

Our attitudes are like wires which connect us with events, and certain currents produced by the nature of these attitudes flow through these wires, and the nature of the current determines the kind of influence we receive from a given event. If a certain event produces an influence on us, this influence can be changed by our attitude. ─ P.D. Ouspensky

Attitudes are divided into those that help us awaken and bring more presence and C influence into our lives, and those that perpetuate sleep. We can cultivate the former and eliminate the latter. Of the many intellectual attitudes that obstruct awakening, probably the chief one is our belief that our attitudes are objectively correct. Changing intellectual attitudes is within our power, but if we don’t recognize them, how can we change them?

We can experiment. The Fourth Way offers several intellectual attitudes that we can intentionally adopt. Adopting these time-tested attitudes, even before verifying their truth, provides a connection with higher worlds and their subtle influences, which bring about spiritual changes that we can verify. Attitudes such as not expressing negative emotions, cultivating gratitude, refining impressions to evoke higher states, and viewing my current life situation as exactly what is needed for my awakening are a few that have become the basis of my personal work.

This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you. ─ Hafiz

As we continue this work, with more experiences of presence and higher states, we come to know that awakening is not of the lower centers, not the intellectual center, nor the emotional center. It is of another world and not expressible in the language of the lower centers.

Words gently end at the edge of the Unsayable. ─ Rainer Maria Rilke

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Perfume bottle in shape of Heracles' head wearing lion skin, Corinth, 575-550 BCE, National Museum, Copenhagen.