At the combined meeting of Wednesday 16 March 1988, Mr Adie read the following notes he had made.
Man, as he is as he is born, is only an interim figure. Man is born an interim man. That is, a man on the way who could be a becoming man. Because of the laws of heredity, a man may be more becoming or less becoming a man. That is to say, he may have within him more or less of positive tendencies, and hence more or less of negative tendencies. They are always equal. They have to be.
When he is born, or rather, when he is conceived, he receives, besides the positive and negative elements of the male sex, the positive and negative elements of the female sex, he also receives the positive and negative elements of the creator of all that is of the creator of all that is. The elements of the Theomertmalogos, that is the word God, that is the holy neutralising force in the order of reconciling force, the harmonising force, the completing force. But this force only enters in the order of the third force of the conception. And so, while conveying the seed of the will of the Creator, it leaves man, as said, an interim figure.
From the point of view of the Absolute, the Creator of the whole of Creation; Man starts with only the seed of the Divine will. And until it has been developed into a real will through his own work effort, the will of man cannot take its designed place as the possessor of real will, the dominating factor in a man’s being. When man has completed his being-work, he then has his own real will. And all the attributes that go with this will, namely, the powers of all knowledge, of all being, of permanent I, of self-consciousness, and of the power to do.
Then finally, he can join and be one with the Creator, become one with the Creator, the triad of man.
After a pause:
Today I have received fresh energy. I feel as if I have been given a fresh strong force to work for the justification of my given life. That it shall not end, this passage on earth as a disgrace to mankind, as a failure to fulfil to a certain definite degree the sacred intent planted within me as within every man in the form of the seed of conscious being. That is a man. So that I shall at the time of reckoning, at the end of this stage of this given life, be able to have contributed something to the work of the Creator and hence shall not die like a dog, but shall die an honourable death. Again, to bear within me the spark of conscious life so that more and more of my emanations and my manifestations may correspond to real man’s life.
I am this, I am that, I am, Amen.
After a little, he said extempore:
It’s the extraordinary value of just a few moments in the beginning of the day that can give you such a force, such a glimpse of something that should never be missed. I’m reminded at the moment of an instruction that Mr Gurdjieff gave you, George. He told you to work before eating, you remember? “Work before eating.” If we do that, if we manage, it doesn’t have to be very long. It has to be serious. I have really to be serious about my work. That’s all that’s necessary.
The George he spoke to was his son. He then read this note:
To be real is to be serious. To be serious is an attribute of a real man, that is, a man who can and is serious because he never forgets himself: the custodian, the owner of his own unique cosmic reality. He has received a gift of the seed of life. He has tended the gift, cherished this gift, so that by it, he has become a fully developed man being, with all a man’s faculties and even a man’s presence. All the powers and all the graces are his and at his call he can say: “I am thou, thou art I.”
