(Recognizing life’s insufficiency as the starting point for real search)
When a person feels that this life cannot be explained in terms of itself, when he or she sees that life taken by itself without any added explanation is largely meaningless, “a tale told by an idiot”, a history of crime and bloodshed and frustration, when such a person begins to see that it is very doubtful whether there is any such thing as progress and that everything begins and ends almost before it has begun, then he or she is in a position to search for other meaning and new knowledge, convinced that it must exist. And when people begin this research with any sincerity and any real depth of feeling, they will be astonished to find what a great number of memorials exist in the literature of the past which point unmistakably towards another kind of knowledge and meaning. In all this literature the theme is the same.
A man has to die in some specific and definite way to himself, to certain sides of himself. And if he dies in the right way, he is born again as a new man, another kind of man, called in this Work a Conscious Man as distinct from a mechanical man. He will then know the meaning of his life on this earth—namely, that it is not an end in itself but a means to another end—for it is by means of a certain kind of struggle against what life has laid down in us that the end or purpose of Man’s existence is achieved. If everything were easy, there would be no re-birth, but, as this Work teaches, Man cannot
be re-born rightly nor can he die rightly—that is, he cannot see the right things to die to in himself—unless he first awakens.
Reflect for yourselves now on this point: if it is said: “Seek and ye shall find,” you will have to lose first. How can you possibly seek, unless you feel you have lost?
(Personality and essence must reverse; inner growth requires truth)
Personality is active and Essence is passive. At least this is our ordinary state in ordinary life. The change that has to take place eventually is a reversal of this customary state so that Personality and Essence change signs. This obviously implies a considerable upset of oneself. However, it takes place gradually, up to a certain period, and during this time a person very slowly gets to know himself or herself and realizes that he or she is utterly different from what they imagined.
The internal side of a person can only grow through what is true. It cannot grow through what is false. The external side, however, can quite easily grow through what is unreal and false. It is therefore of great importance to notice one’s attitude to the Work and those connected with it and also to notice what one is using the work for. For example, to use the Work to increase the Personality and its ambitions is to have a wrong attitude. That should be clear enough to anyone who has any power of sincerity and does not justify everything.
The first description of Man in Genesis is of mechanical or dead Man— in verse 2. In the Work mechanical humanity is said to be asleep and sometimes to be dead, as when it is said that many people walking about are long ago dead. Likewise in the New Testament, Christ refers to “the dead burying their dead.”
shock, at point 6. This person is described in Genesis as following on the “dead” man. Let us consider the “dead” man first. It is impossible to describe him briefly. He is the man of the senses, without an inner life, the man who ascribes his powers to himself, the man of self-esteem, for whom everything real lies in the outer world, the man who has not begun to think or feel beyond himself. This man is called in Genesis “waste and void”.
(Three levels of man: dead, image of God, living soul)
Let us understand simply that 3 kinds of men are spoken of in these two opening chapters of Genesis—dead Man, Man in the image of God and Man who has actually become a living soul. By way of commentary I wish to connect these 3 men with the 3 shocks shewn in the triangle of the Enneagram.
He is said to be a man whose knowledge and being are both at their highest level and so equal, so that all his resultant understanding is practical. This means, for one
thing, that there is nothing that he knows that he cannot do. This unity of knowledge, being and understanding belongs only to No. 7 Man and in consequence it is said that all that class of Man belonging to category No. 7 understand one another and speak a common language.
Our world lives in the Circle of Babel, in confusion of tongues—not merely literal language but the confusion of our misunderstandings at our level. Here, in this Work, we are attempting to learn a common language as a first step, so that we can understand each other a little better and be able to talk in some sort of real way to one another. You will not agree, however, that this step has been attained but you may agree that it is a possible and understandable step.
(Self-observation as the second shock; the conscious act that increases inner light)
To observe oneself, to notice what is going on in oneself, to separate oneself from useless states and begin to see one’s pictures, to remember one’s aims, to struggle against being identified with every mood and thought—and so on—all this belongs to the second shock, whose object is to increase the light of consciousness so that we become conscious of ourselves to start with.
To be created a self-developing organism you must learn that you have in you by creation a higher possible state of yourself. For example an egg is born with a possibility of becoming a bird. It therefore has an earth and a heaven contained in its beginning.
since esotericism deals with Man and his possibilities, when it says that “in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” it refers to Man, it refers to this egg, this acorn, this seed, which is created with the possibility of reaching a higher level of development. The lower level is called earth, the higher level is called heaven. An acorn taken by itself is at the level of earth, but when by successive stages it dies to itself and eventually becomes an oak, it attains heaven—i.e. the higher development of itself.
From the standpoint of esotericism a man is not simply his physical body, his strength, his violence, his primitive instincts: a man is his understanding,
Superman is not a gigantic replica of an ordinary man: superman is an utterly different kind of man. An ordinary mechanical man—i.e. a man more or less as we all are still—is given the first shock, but the beginning of a new kind of man starts from the point where—to quote Genesis—“the spirit of God moves on the face of the waters.”
Always to go your own way is to remain asleep, to remain mechanical, to remain a machine.
You all understand that you must re-interpret life and see it in the light of the Work. But as long as you are completely in life ‘I’s and completely absorbed in the cares, anxieties, frictions and ambitions of life how can you expect to interpret life differently?
Now I wish to return to the early definition of Self-Remembering as the realization of one’s own mechanicalness. When we find ourselves talking in some typical way we realize that we are talking from some attitude connected with which are one or two gramophone records.
Think for a moment and you will see that we really do not know. We are given very complicated machines called bodies and live in another very complicated machine called the world. When you realize all this emotionally you lift yourself off the ordinary level on which you take everything, and this is a degree of the First Conscious Shock. By meditating on the inexplicability of everything, including yourself, you can reach a state of understanding quite different from your ordinary everyday understanding.
Personality moves us to and fro and takes charge of us at every moment we begin to get glimpses of what it means to realize our mechanicalness. We begin to understand that this is why such a realization is defined as a form of Self-Remembering. You see that you cannot get beyond yourself if you take all yourself as “yourself”. How will you cross the stream with all your belongings? How will you get out of prison if you insist on taking everything with you? You have to avoid yourself. You have to be patient with yourself until all the noise that Personality is making has quietened down and you can at last be with “yourself”.
(The prison of mechanicalness; escape requires those who escaped before)
“All of you,” he said, “are in prison, and all you can wish for, if you are sensible people, is to escape. No one, however, can escape from prison without the help of those who have escaped before. Only they can teach you in what way escape is possible.”
we do not realize our mechanicalness we imagine we are free. We imagine that we do everything from ourselves, by our free will.
Now let me give you an example in regard to a person who has begun to realize mechanicalness. Mechanicalness means reacting— reacting as you always do to everything. I think you should reflect on this personal observation of what it means to be mechanical.
Essence is the indestructible part of us. We know that inner growth means a new growth of Essence, and we know that Essence cannot grow unless Personality is made-passive—particularly certain parts of Personality, certain pictures.
This is why a man should work on himself. If he will sacrifice certain sides of his Personality, if he will withdraw force from them, it may be that Essence can begin to grow. If Essence grows, when it is re-born it will not attract the same life. Change of Being necessarily means a change in the life because one’s Being attracts one’s life. If there is a development of Essence there will not only be a change in the life but also there will be memory. A person may remember what to do at some difficult moment: he may remember that he made some mistake.
By Self-Remembering we may get on to a wire higher up. By taking everything as heavily as possible we travel along the lowest (the worst) wire, so to speak. By non-identifying and remembering ourselves we get on to a higher (a better) wire.
We must remember the moments of understanding that we have had. We must remember that we are in the Work. We must remember our aim. And we must remember ourselves.
There is a chance that some change may take place if one does not identify so much and so continually. By remembering to observe identifying in oneself and to practise non-identifying, one comes under new influences. The object is to reach these influences, which can heal us and give new life. If there were no other influences, if visible life on Earth were all that exists, if there were no Ray of Creation, there would be no Work, and no Esoteric Teaching, and everything would be without hope. Everything would be fixed and mechanical. No one could change himself.
(Essence remembers; what we do genuinely is recorded beyond death)
This is the Book of our Life which is opened at death. We have memory in Essence. Personality is destroyed at death but Essence returns. We have therefore a chance of remembering when we recur only if Essence records anything. Whatever we do genuinely touches Essence and Essence will remember it on its return.
THE ENNEAGRAM X—THE BEGINNING OF SHOCK AT POINT 6 Observation of and Separation from “Oneself” Birdlip, Easter, April 9, 1944
(You and yourself are not the same; the work of separating from acquired personality)
To see what you take as yourself, to see the machine of responses, the machine of behaviour, the machine of thoughts, of prejudices, of feelings—this is the idea behind selfobservation. You will agree with me that a person cannot change unless he or she sees themselves. But people make the most fantastic and ineffectual attempts to see themselves. They usually think they should smoke or eat less or get up earlier or work harder at their moneymaking jobs and so on. Now this Work does not start with anything of that kind. It starts with one’s psychological side. One must observe this side first. This is where what you take as you is. First the change in mind must come, the change in your regard for yourself, the change in your very feeling of yourself. As you know, everyone is identified with himself, with herself. And they expect to start from themselves as they are. The Work is about making this “yourself”—this “oneself”—more passive. Who are you? What are you? You are a built-up thing of no use or of little use to you. But you are a slave to this thing you take for granted—this “yourself”, this “oneself”. The Work is to change this —this basis you rest on, this blind acceptance, this thing in you that you have never questioned and so never seen.
The Work is about ceasing to identify with this oneself formed by the action of life and lying in the laid-down personality. Certainly this is a very difficult matter and not for fools. To become orientated in a new way is not an easy matter. One must get under this “oneself”. The Work can do nothing for you if you start from this “oneself”— or “yourself”—that is, from personality. And here so many go wrong and cannot see the meaning of the Work. Everyone has a consecrated feeling about themselves, just as they are. But it is in the wrong place —in personality.
You remember perhaps, some of you, how in the Holy Grail legends, the young knight riding out to find the mystical school or castle must not obey his mother. This is capable of the crudest inter pretations. But what does it mean? The “mother” is the source of your actions and feelings and thoughts. One must disobey the personality. In this Work, what is it that we have to observe? This thing we take for granted and to which all day we say ‘I’. But it is not ‘I’. It is not Real ‘I’. It is many acquired ‘I’s. It is a machine, a machine of acquired ‘I’s. One goes about fastened tight to it. One obeys it at every point. It says this—and you think you say it. It does that—and you think you do it. It feels this—and you think you feel it. It thinks that—and you believe you think it. It is a pattern found in the vast associative or silent areas of the brain. It is your pattern, your registrations, your attempts to form yourself. It is a small set of electrical connections, out of billions, owing to which you must always ring up the same places and get the same numbers.
This is the supreme object of the Work—to get rid of one’s acquired mechanical way of taking everything according to one pattern, one set of associations, one idea of what is right or wrong. The subject of this Work is oneself. You and yourself are not the same but you take them as the same. People identify with themselves. You identify with yourself and so yourself becomes you. You, however, are far older than yourself.
The subject of this Work is oneself. You and yourself are not the same but you take them as the same. People identify with themselves. You identify with yourself and so yourself becomes you. You, however, are far older than yourself. But since we do not know ourselves, we do not know that there is anything different in us from ourselves and the outer yourself becomes fused to the inner you and there is no separation.
The first step in the Work is to begin to free oneself from oneself. This Work is not adding something to oneself but taking away from oneself and it is only what is useless to one’s development that the Work seeks to take away.
Do you notice that the general tendency is to expand an unpleasing event, an event unpleasing to oneself, and contract everything else? You cannot forget, can you, how somebody treated you in a cavalier way, just as if you were of no importance? This is an event. It is an event that can happen to everyone. It is a definite event called: “No one treats me rightly.”
Understand that this beginning of a new octave is not given by nature. It must be created. It is extra. It can only be created by giving oneself a shock in the mental part of oneself. Since this shock is not given by nature but must be given by Man to himself, it is called a conscious shock. It has many sides, many forms. In this respect it is different from the mechanical shock of breathing which nature gives to the Food Octave. It is very important to understand all this as clearly as possible. The above diagram is one shewing a man working on himself, remembering himself, creating a new Hydrogen 24 and a new Hydrogen 12 as a result. This begins to change his Being.
The Work teaches that a human being is not merely a function of the world he is born in or a slave to it. The apparatus of the Universe is, so far as our Ray of Creation is concerned, for the purpose of Evolution. It is a vast distilling machine, to extract the finer from the coarser.
He can realize he cannot do, but he must realize also that Greater Mind exists, otherwise he will be in confusion. If he does not admit that anything bigger than he is exists, or if in some way he thinks he made himself, he cannot be acted upon and so cannot evolve. But if he does become passive— that is, capable of hearing and then of accepting—he must not expect to get beyond his own next stage to begin with. He cannot equal the Work. It would be a mistake to think so. He cannot equal the forces that are transforming him. If you reflect, you will see there must always be something higher than any man, whatever his stage, if evolution is possible, and so there must be a highest that is unattainable.
One of the most interesting things in self-observation is to begin to realize that you are always touching life in a certain ingrained way—through attitudes and buffers, etc. It is an extraordinary experience to become even a little freer from this acquired way of taking life and taking others: Everyone, tightly wrapped up in his or her acquired Personality, takes things just as he or she does every day. However, with insight into oneself it is possible to take things in a new way. This is one of the ideas of the Work. Must you always take things and people in the same way?
We are accustomed to our own smells. Now as long as we live comfortably in the thick and nauseating atmosphere of ourselves, taking everything for granted, including ourselves, we cannot awaken. Why is this so? It is because we have never begun to ask ourselves any questions as to what we are or what anything means. We simply eat and sleep, fight and quarrel, talk and hear, see and touch, move and feel. We take it all for granted, not having the slightest idea that it is extraordinary. We are easily satisfied in this respect. We move about on the surface of things and like and dislike or love and hate, and so on, and it is all, as far as we are concerned, taken for granted. There is no sense of the strangeness of the whole business. If this is so, then certainly we are asleep and it will take a good deal of pain and unpleasantness, a good deal of startling experience, many heavy shocks, to awaken us to the beginning of our real thinking. Life contains many natural shocks of which one is death. Being confronted with death can sometimes make us begin to think in a real way. But the torrent of the senses, and the screaming note of modern life, dulls and deafens this thinking-point, so that it rarely emerges and becomes felt.
(Pictures of self as concrete obstructions; real being makes no statements)
Of all the casting out of devils mentioned in the Gospels, the casting out of pictures of oneself must surely come first, for pictures hinder every new experience and every line of inner development. We all have pictures of ourselves. Wherever they lie, there they stop development in a more real sense than a ton of concrete will prevent anything from growing beneath it. We think of the imagination as a light airy nothingness. But the imagination is very powerful—very real—like concrete. Pictures are formed out of imagination, controlled by vanity.
Then we begin to have traces of real suffering—interspersed with all sorts of attempts at self-justifying and excuses and reactions—until we become, by inner taste, sick of self-justifying and excuses and so on.
Then it either begins to penetrate into the understanding or not. If it does, and you wish it, the Work enters oneself. Then it begins, as it were, to judge you, to point out this or that, very mildly at first, more distinctly afterwards. One tries to avoid it, of course. But, once it has penetrated oneself, by trying to avoid it one only increases one’s inner difficulties, realizing that one cannot do without it and that to be deprived of its mild current of new meaning is worse than death. One realizes then what it means to be dead in the sense of the Work. This stage is easily imitated and often is. Then one talks a lot of one’s difficulties, etc. Later one becomes more silent.
Then you argue about everything. But its ideas are spermatic—that is, capable of penetrating and fertilizing the mind and feeling—otherwise it would not be Work—real teaching. It corresponds to something we have forgotten, something waiting in us, something to which we have gone to sleep long ago, something covered over by continual life. That is why this ancient teaching can awaken us. All awakening is unpleasant. One can always avoid unpleasantness by means of all the apparatus of the False Personality—by ingenious or even stupid arguing, by insincerity, by buffers, by self-justifying, by negative attitudes, by lying, by not trying to think, by resorting to pictures, by resorting to all kinds of things to keep one’s sleep intact. But if the Work penetrates, this becomes more and more difficult. One begins to become aware that the Work is really saying something hard to catch and that perhaps it is quite true.
Of course all this will sound very strange to those who come to meetings expecting that the Work will cure their rheumatism or improve their business or help them to have a jollier time or tell them exactly what to eat and drink. I do not see how such a level of regarding the Work can lead anywhere. The whole conception is too small, too selfish, too self-centred. A deeper sense of life is necessary—one that can eventually grasp the three lines of Work—work for and on oneself, work with and for others, and work in and for the Work itself. There is a saying in this Work that it is to transmute “lead” into “gold”.
I must say here once more that Self-Remembering is the most important thing of all and has many degrees and stages. Everyone can, to a limited degree, begin to practise and understand Self-Remembering. Full Self-Remembering is one thing, but many degrees exist in the approach to
In the Work, everything can become useful—once the Work has begun to penetrate into one’s mind and will and being, and no longer merely lies in the memory. Then “all life becomes your teacher,” as G. once said.
You can have a picture of yourself as a good democrat, or a Tory, or a gentleman, or a revolutionary Republican, or a tough guy, or an aristocrat, and so on. They are all pictures: they are all imagination. Behind all these pictures the real person stands, but the real person never stands in his or her pictures. A question was once asked: “Are pictures of oneself not sometimes real, true?” The answer was: “No—never.” If you have a picture of yourself as a tough guy you are not one, and vice versa. I have often thought about this and I advise you to do so. What is genuine and what is imaginary can never meet. They are two different orders of experience on different planes —and how long we take even to begin to see what depth of meaning lies here. The imaginary man and the real man are as different as the imaginary woman and the real woman.
Only being conscious can alter mechanicalness. The destruction of pictures is not possible unless something else has begun to form itself behind them that we can hold on to. This comes from long and conscious self-observation which on one side is debunking oneself or ‘seeing through’ oneself into something rather odd and strange lying behind. I fancy pictures may change a little according to one’s age, but their power remains. Now people often say, and sometimes emphatically, “Well, granted I have pictures of myself, what ought I to be?” This is certainly a question that shews a wrong approach. If you can begin to see a picture, if you become conscious of it, if you begin to dislike it, if you try to get away from it, to separate from its hypnotic power, if you begin to see you are not at all like that picture but invented, then the change that results will be exactly what you need. You will fit into what has always been waiting for you, and what you went out of long ago as a child. Let me remind you that so much of the Work consists in getting rid of things, of stopping things, of not-doing.
Real Being makes no statements about itself. It is. To be is not to imagine. It is what it is. However, having no Real I we have to make shift first and to keep up some pictures—such as that we are ideally happy and so on. Unfortunately we never see these pictures. They make us behave as we do. They act us. We do not act them. This is not a misfortune as long as we are not dissatisfied with Ourselves
and begin to desire some definite knowledge that can make our existence more real. People are satisfied by their pictures of themselves. A thick dark dull atmosphere is produced as a result but a very ordinary one.
Naturally, one cannot change if one clings to what one is. However this is what we do for many years—until at last we know that a turning-point has been reached.
(The horse, carriage and driver; visualization as directed imagination)
THE PARABLE OF THE HORSE, CARRIAGE AND DRIVER Birdlip, July 1, 1944 TOC
As I said, I am not talking of such people, for it is quite obvious that as long as a man or a woman thinks that there is
nothing wrong with himself or herself and that they are going to take this Work as something added to themselves as they are, they will remain drunk in the public house. Of course, they will never think they are in a public house in a drunken condition. On the contrary they will have wonderful ideas of themselves, namely, that they have Will, that they can do, that they are efficient, that they know best, that they have a real permanent ‘I’ and all the rest of it. Unless they have wakened up from these profound illusions and have begun to feel their own helplessness and nothingness, they will never be able to climb on the box.
Now why does a parable exist? Why is the teaching in the Gospels in the form of parables? It is visual imagery. The horse understands visual language, the driver words, and the parable connects the two.
You know when a cat rubs himself against your leg he is caressing not you but himself. Visualization is directed imagination, not a self-pleasurable imagination.
One can feel very startled when one realizes that it is always this thing called oneself that is being comforted, exalted, titivated, soothed, flattered, satisfied, and that when it is not, it begins to whimper, like a baby.
(merged from re-import stub “Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky2”, 2026-06-23) “This situation is intolerable.” The event has got you. You are incapable either of observing yourself in relation to the particular event, or of remembering yourself in its presence – that is, not identifying with it. Birdlip, June 10, 1944 STAGES OF AWAKENING IN THE WORK We simply eat and sleep, fight and quarrel, talk and hear, see and touch, move and feel. We take it all for granted, not having the slightest idea that it is extraordinary. Life contains many natural shocks of which one is death. Being confronted with death can sometimes make us begin to think in a real way. But the torrent of the senses, and the screaming note of modern life, dulls and deafens this thinking-point, so that it rarely emerges and becomes felt. However, this takes a long time, and nothing is worse than to pretend we know already. A person who pretends to have or to know what he or she does not have or know – such a person has a picture of himself or herself. This stops everything real in every direction of development.