“It is only when we get beyond fantasy, beyond wishing and dreaming, that the real conversion takes place and we awake re-born….for reality is the goal, deny it how we will,” wrote Henry Miller (and thank you to Josh Baran who posted it on Facebook so it could circulate in the world anew). “When the individual is wholly creative, one with destiny, the god-feeling is so intense everything beats with divine rhythmn. ”
In the documentary “My Architect,” a Yale professor describes the architect as artist, as someone who had the feeling and capacity to wish to serve what we call god without sparing himself (my paraphrase). When I watched this scene last year I wondered why I had never before thought of Madame de Salzmann as an artist–she was a musical prodigy as a girl. Why had I never thought of Gurdjieff as artist? Not just the Movements but all the forms he brought were created. It occurs to me that to make the kind of effort that Madame de Salzmann describes in The Reality of Being it is necessary to live experimentally, like an artist, willing to abandon fantasy and allegiance to the false self to risk a greater wholeness. Miller sounds strikingly like de Salzmann when he speaks of “the moment of supreme individuation, when the identity of all things is sensed.” In such a moment “the umbilical cord is cut–there is neither longing for the womb or for the beyond. The sure feeling of eternality. Beyond this there is no evolution, only a perpetual movement from creation to creation.”
Isn’t this what it must mean to serve God, to help His Endlessness, however you conceive it, to be one with Reality?
Tracy Cochran 
Tracy,
What you say is certainly true but I think that none of it is possible without another state of attention. A completely different attention than the one which takes us through the journey in ordinary life. A higher/finer level of Attention puts us into an altogether different world and a different view and ability to DO. Gurdjieff, Madame de Salzmann and others have attained this. We are fortunate to be able to understand in a very limited way what they were and what they created. To understand it all would have to mean that we have the same level of Attention and this we do not have…..yet. They paid for what they obtained an had the necessary help from those who had gone before them. What payment are we willing to make and is the help we need available and are we open to it?
When you choose a fantasy of what you wish would be over what is, you cease to function. When you choose a fear or a memory of what you wish had never happened over what is, you stop perceiving reality. You are not connected to, not even seeing the world around you. You may as well be watching television.