Theos-Talk Archives (January 1995 Message tl00254)

I must confess that the discussions re: chaos between Jerry S.
and Murray are a bit (well, more than a bit) over my head.  But
as the discussion has touched on Gurdjieff's conception of the
laws of fate and accident I thought I would try to clarify.  He
doesn't really present them as rigidly exclusive categories so
I think the continuum idea probably conveys his meaning OK.
That is, in any given situation, the more we experience it as
individually meaningful the more individual meaning it will
have; the more we take it as random chance... you get the
picture.  But more than this rather self-evident truism is the
promise that how we take our experiences affects what our
future experiences will be.

Basically, living under the Law of Fate makes one keenly aware
of omens.  If you take experience as individually instructive,
you are alert to "warnings" or promptings from the
unconscious.  If you take experience as random and accidental,
there is no such thing as a warning or prompting.

To put this in practical terms, I have on occasion found myself
stumbling into unfortunate situations and realizing after the
fact that there were plenty of signals to change course, but
that I had ignored them.  On the other hand, I have also obeyed
inner warnings of danger without knowing precisely why, only to
find that the path from which I turned would have led to
disaster.

Does this yield any fodder for the chaos/karma discussion?