David Hurst

On a side note this meme perfectly illustrates Gurdjieff’s analogy of the 2 streams of life. They are both right in their own way. The story goes that in the first stream, which is a metaphor for the unconscious world, the stream is taking you downstream towards death. This is the stream that we are born in and it’s a struggle to escape. However with enough effort in the right way, one can create enough momentum to eventually jump streams like a fish into the 2nd stream. This stream leads to life instead of death. It does not require a struggle, one has to simply follow the light of their conscience. The whole problem lies in first understanding that one is in the wrong stream and making the adjustments to move out of it. Carl Jung roughly said that outside influences will impose themselves upon us and we will call this fate. However this is just the fate of the 1st stream. It speaks to how our personality is attached to habitual reactions due to previous conditioning. This habitual behavior imposes a certain fate on us until we make the right kind of effort to break the pattern a choose a new pattern with a new fate.