The Sphinx

Occasionally I continue a series of posts for friends in the Gurdjieff groups and other traditions. Bystanders can listen in, or surf back to play-by-plays of the psychotic world (always just a convenient mouseclick away).

Over the years I made little bits of notes on Work experiences, remarks from teachers, questions and reflections. Lately I've dug up old notebooks, slips of paper containing spidery scribblings from early days. What good they do lying around in a desk drawer may be a few atoms less than bringing them into light of an obscure blog like this one. If anything helps you, that is at least a few atoms real.

Mrs. March -- Sitting 1/1/83

The idea of the Sphinx as a symbol which I take into myself. The Bull representing constant force and application. . . Wings are for me in having always the concern or vision of non-ordinaryness, the higher possibilities. How to get Work from just in my head -- into the blood, into the fibre. The Sphinx is a measure of myself.

In Beelzebub's Tales, the Sphinx is described as "an allegorical being, each part of whose planetary body was composed of a part of the planetary body of some definite form of being existing there. . .who, according to the crystallized notions of the three-brained beings there, had to perfection one or another being-function."

Those parts included: trunk of a Bull; legs of a Lion; wings of an Eagle; breasts of a Virgin. Strength, courage, vision, impartial love. And in totality (within the society Akhaldan for which this sphinx was an emblem), it was known as Conscience.