Schools

Schools

This post, written by my friend and fellow student, Sergio Antonio of the Modena, Italy Center, is excerpted from his book, A Question of Presence, which is available at Amazon.com

Some conscious beings establish schools. In order to have a school, a conscious, living guide is necessary, someone who has already escaped and so can teach others how to escape. In the absence of a conscious teacher, a group of people—even if formed with the best intentions—can be considered a laboratory, an experiment, an exploration, but not a conscious school.

A school, therefore, comprises a conscious teacher and different levels of students. Everyone, to climb, must put someone else in his or her place, to use a concept mentioned by Gurdjieff, that of “climbing the ladder.” One can think of an inner circle of student number fours studying to become five, and an outer circle of one, two, and three working to become four.

A school is destined to perform various tasks. One of these is to generate a certain number of conscious men and women. A school is work for the teacher as well as for the students. The teacher, in order to climb, must put students on the steps of his “ladder.” A school is a collective movement upward, the only one possible.

If at the teacher's death there are other conscious men and women in the school, the school can continue. Otherwise, it degenerates and becomes something else, a movement of thought without awareness, such as a codified religion, until it runs out of energy and dies. Conscious Influence C turns into influence B. The school decays into laboratory, experiment, or an undeliverable dead letter—the preservation and empty repetition of the original master's precepts, without the state of presence. Sometimes, when a new conscious being uses and absorbs the tradition, the great energy of a conscious master is revived and generates more schools over time. We can think of Christ and the school constituted by him and his disciples. Afterward, in addition to many dark and unconscious periods, there were many moments when Christianity was once again a vehicle of conscious influence. From the early Christians to the builders of Romanesque churches, then to the builders of Gothic cathedrals and the Philokalia fathers of the Eastern Church—in all these movements the trace of presence is recognizable.

Often spiritual traditions succeed in passing on symbols even though those who pass them on have lost awareness of them and no longer understand them. Someone will later, thanks to presence, be able to recognize those symbols and reinvigorate them.

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Jacob’s Dream, William Blake