The reason that the visitors stayed in my life for nine years was the Path. Because I was struggling to make it part of my soul, a whole spectrum of beings paid attention to me. They were genuine teachers and they knew it. They brought their mastery to my questions, and I was able to use what they offered to help me on my journey.
I hope that the book I have made out of this is an effective tool. Certainly, it accurately portrays the inner working of the path it describes, and shows how to make it part of oneself.
But the path is a huge thing. It can make a big difference in a person’s life because it offers clarity where previously there has been a lot of mythology and symbolism. It’s plain and simple, and, I hope, as spiritually powerful as it is meant to be.
The reason that I want it to work fast is that we need its strength and clarity of vision very badly right now. We cannot spend a lifetime constructing a path out of the bits and pieces that have been left behind. Times are changing, and great storms are coming to our world, and we need something that can give us the strength we are going to need, or at least point us in the right direction.
I hope and trust that the Path is such an instrument. Back in 1970, I joined a group called the Gurdjieff Foundation. I did this after reading a book called In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky. Essentially, the Gurdjieff work is about learning to use one’s attention as a tool, rather than letting it fly aimlessly from one thing to the next.
Trying to really do this was the beginning of my life’s inner journey. In 1983, I left the Gurdjieff Foundation on the theory that, if I could not do it on my own after thirteen years of intensive effort, then perhaps I wasn’t strong enough.
Two years later, I found myself face-to-face with real masters of inner work, my visitors. To this day, I do not know who or what they were. I have learned to use my questions about them as a source of growth. But I do know this: they were true masters. They knew the soul’s journey, and they offered themselves as guides for me on mine. Because of my understanding of the laws of three and seven — the law of structure and octave — that I had learned in the Gurdjieff Work and learned to internalize on the Path, I understood what was on offer, and was able to take advantage of it.
In other words, there was real communication. I have described some of these interactions in my books about my life with them, but I have never written about the reason they chose me, nor the task that I was given, which was to make something in our world that would serve others the same way the Path served me, as the foundation of real relationship with higher beings.
I might add, here, that I am sure that I will get letters from people warning me that I must have been in “contact” with demons. I was not. The visitors I knew were good beyond the frontiers of goodness. They knew what my soul needed, and they were wise enough not to offer it to me, but to create conditions under which I could grasp it of my own free will, if I had the strength and the courage. In short, they were wise enough and brave enough to trust this confused, frightened and lesser creature to bear the weight of his own search without either going mad or seizing on some clever, empty answer.
When I went to meet them, it was always in the dark of the night. But the meetings flooded my search with light. I have written the Path so that others might attract their attention in the same way, by revealing useful need to them.
I see the way the world is going very clearly, and I can predict the future. There are many abuses taking place now that are going to come back to haunt us. Among other things, our failure to address issues of environmental decline in a clear-headed and productive way, our indiscriminate unleashing of rogue genes into our own food supply, and our inability to resolve so many of our conflicts will combine with ongoing and developing natural changes to throw our world into chaos. This will happen. It is absolutely inevitable.
A great part of the reason that I have written the Path is to provide users of the book with an inner anchor that will stand the test of chaos, that will enable them to keep feeding their souls even in the very worst of times. The sublime part of it, though, is, if we manage to reach instead toward the heaven on earth that science seems to be putting within our grasp, the Path will become, then also, a foundation for inner work that will offer real growth, no matter the times in which the traveler finds himself.
It’s so amazing to have finished it. For all these years, I have been challenged by a question: will I ever be able to accomplish this? What if I die before I’m ready, or if I’m never ready? Then why have I lived?
I have lived, in great part, because of this. And now it exists. It’s real. So many, many times over the past 26 years, I have said to myself, 'you'll never write it, you'll never learn how.' But I did learn how, and now it exists. I can hardly believe it. I am so glad.
This, incidentally, is my 100th entry in this journal. That's a coincidence — I suppose. ~
