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GURDJIEFF Whereas my formal education in psychology at college had left me confused, empty and provided no real understanding of myself, Gurdjieff’s presentation had just the opposite effect. When I came in touch with the Gurdjieff Work, it felt as if I had walked by a gigantic magnet and every part of me — my thoughts, emotions and my body — was magnetized and pulled towards it. I felt for the first time that I was being fed real ideas, concepts, practices, and everything was experiential and not just intellectual. I started to understand myself and what I was experiencing. Whereas everything that I had learned in college felt purely subjective and liable to change at any moment, the Work was different. It illuminated and made understandable many experiences that I already had and I sensed that this knowledge and understanding came from a very high level — beyond Gurdjieff as an individual man — from a center of knowledge and understanding that existed outside of any particular time or culture.
By the time he was in his early twenties, Gurdjieff had decided to devote his life to answering the questions of the purpose of life on the earth and the aim of human existence, and the nearly unbridgeable gaps between the vastness of human potential and humanity’s limited development thus far.
Gurdjieff created conditions to help people experience and understand the reasons for their “abnormal” state of consciousness and its terrible consequences. He developed methods to enable them to verify their inadequate state of consciousness and to improve it.
The unexamined belief of both therapist and client that they are awake is never examined. Is their belief correct? Are they awake? If we look carefully at certain terms used in psychological parlance, such as “transference,” “countertransference,” and “projection,” they are actually clues that unconscious mechanisms operate in the midst of this “conscious” therapy.
To wish to wake up, one must notice that he or she might not be fully awake; for this to occur, one must see this sleeping aspect of their “conscious” state repeatedly.
observation. When a person sees through the veil of sleep and gathers proof that he is asleep most of the time, then the wish to escape from this waking-sleeping state may take hold. The Work is a vehicle for helping people become fully alive, wake up out of their semi-sleep, gain their own independent knowledge, and find the purpose of their own and humanity’s existence.
We live out our lives moving toward what we have come to like and away from what we dislike. What is beyond like and dislike? Almost always, we remain uninterested in what this might be.
It remains unremembered because although we experienced it, it was not recorded by us in a useful way. We were not present. There was no “I” there to record it, only the mechanism of ourselves going through the motions.
How can human beings be made aware of the fact that they are not conscious and might still become conscious, if they already believe they are conscious and thus remain uninterested in making any effort? I have found the following analogy useful in understanding my condition. Imagine a young fish swimming in a foul, polluted area of a river near a factory that dumps chemicals into the water continuously. The water she swims in is not fresh, yet it is the only water she knows. Because of her limited experience, she is uninterested in finding fresher water, since most of her time is spent just looking for things to eat and trying to avoid predators. Such is the state of consciousness of most people. They are not aware of the precariousness of their situation and the limited nature of the consciousness they are swimming in. They will not be aware of it until they have glimpsed another state of consciousness. Then they must see how easily they drop back into their habitual patterns, back into the muck they are used to.
“Attention” may be defined as the state of mind wherein a person concentrates on some feature of his environment to the relative exclusion of the rest. If his attention is haphazard, yet the primary means he has of collecting facts about the world or self-knowledge, then the knowledge he receives will likewise be fragmentary and limited. Thus we have a very limited and rather eclectic array of self-knowledge that is stored in us as associative memories. These associative memories do not give us any kind of reliable self-knowledge. Nor do we have any method for learning to focus our attention more accurately.
AI Summary
Gurdjieff’s Transformational Psychology by Russell Schreiber presents key insights from the Gurdjieff tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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