Spiritual Reality, Work, and Prayer

Work as if everything depends on work. Pray as if everything depends on prayer. 

Turdjieff s ideas contain so many useful psychological understandings and techniques that it is possible to study them on a purely psychological level. That is, you can profit from them without any interest in or acceptance of spiritual ideas, ideas that we are more than our physical bodies. 

In some ways this is fine. So much nonsense has been promulgated in the name of the spiritual that our culture s aversion to it has many healthy aspects. At the same time I am convinced that there are vital spiritual realities, and if we do not come to terms with them and spiritually evolve, we and our civilization will die. To believe anything and everything because it is labeled spiritual is the height of foolishness. To automatically disbelieve anything and everything associated with the idea of the spiritual is just as foolish. Intelligence, discrimination, and personal experience are what is needed, not blind belief or disbelief. 

What I shall do in this chapter is present an interesting example of the kinds of events that are truly higher than our ordinary functioning, an example associated with my attempts to share some of my understanding of the human situation. It is time we had a respite from the necessary focus on the pathology of consensus trance anyway. I shall then use this example to illustrate something about the idea of prayer. 

More than a year and a half before I began this Awareness Enhancement Training work, one of the people who would later become a student, Mary, had a dream. She had been keeping a regular dream journal at the time. The following dream made no particular sense to her when she had it, but she recorded it and forgot it for almost three years. Here is Mary s dream. 

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