Constraints
Take a moment and focus on your breathing. You can direct your breath specifically, making it shallower or deeper. Most of the time, however, your breath is simply working independently without needing attention. While most people realize this reasonably early in life, another process is continually running outside of our awareness: the Mind.
This may seem like an unusual comment. After all, isn’t the Mind synonymous with consciousness? If my Mind is working, then aren’t I, by definition, aware? In general, this is how we like to think about the operations of the Mind. However, as Gurdjieff taught in multiple different ways, even in our waking lives, we are little more than asleep, ascribing to ourselves the conditions of wakefulness. In most cases, the Mind is working with as much awareness, attention, and direction as your breathing, only with more serious potential consequences.
The unique human consciousness that the Temple of Set terms Isolate Intelligence or “The Gift of Set” is, as far as we know, the most powerful leveraging tool in the Universe. Simple electrical charges and chemical reactions can reshape the world for good and for ill—the greatest works of art, science, religion, and magic spring forth from the Gift. So have our greatest tragedies, cruelties to Life, our destruction of our kind, and our despoliation of the environment.
In its default form, unrefined, our human Mind is adapted for a world that no longer exists for us. For the longest stretch of its existence, which runs at least 200,000 years into the past conservatively, it adapted itself primarily to survival issues. In tandem with our biology, its primary focus has been upon a particular mode of survival, namely survival at the moment. We are adapted to deal with immediate threats in ways that will allow us to survive that encounter with no consideration for the long-term consequences of that survival. Living, not living well, is the priority. As such, we often have difficulty seeing the long-term consequences of our actions or the broader context in which we exist.
However, this is not a doomed condition. As far as we know, the objective brain and the subjective Mind are the most adaptable things in the Universe. The Mind and brain can overcome their biases and default conditions through various methods, refining the Gift of Set into a powerful engine of transformation, success, and Initiation. The Gift of Set’s capacity to adapt to ever-increasing levels of complexity with sophistication has been its most powerful feature. You simply have to put in Work for this capacity to come into being in its fullness.
This series does not rely upon any particular cultural background or school of social or magical thought. Instead, it will focus on the “hardware” of being human that underlies and supports our biological, psychological, and social capacities. As such, its insights can be adapted to nearly any tradition, neo-tradition, or context you choose.
Setemheb 