The Reality of Being

Foreword

GEORGE IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF (1866–1949) regarded knowledge of reality—what he called true “knowledge of being”—as a stream flowing from remote antiquity, passed on from age to age, from people to people, from race to race. He viewed this knowledge as the indispensable means to achieve inner freedom, liberation. For those who seek to understand the meaning of human life in the universe, he said, the aim of the search is to break through to this stream, to find it. Then there remains only “to know” in order “to be.” But in order to know, he taught, it is necessary to find out “how to know.”

In order to open to reality, to unity with everything in the universe, Gurdjieff called for living the wholeness of “Presence” in the experience of “I Am.”

In the introduction that follows, Mme. de Salzmann reveals how she saw Gurdjieff as a spiritual “master” in the traditional sense—not as a teacher of doctrine but as one who by his very presence awakens and helps others in their search for consciousness.

She returned again and again to the practice necessary to have a new perception of reality and a more stable Presence as an independent life within the body. To live the teaching would be to awake, to die to identification with one’s ordinary level of functioning, and to be reborn to the experience of another dimension, another world.

Introduction

He had an expression I had never seen, and an intelligence, a force, that was different, not the usual intelligence of the thinking mind but a vision that could see everything. He was, at the same time, both kind and very, very demanding. You felt he would see you and show you what you were in a way you would never forget in your whole life.

This behavior seemed to be more spontaneous, more “free.” But was it really freer, or did it only seem so because he intended to appear like that? You might think you knew Gurdjieff very well, but then he would act quite differently and you would see that you did not really know him. He was like an irresistible force, not dependent on any one form but continually giving birth to forms.

Gurdjieff knew how to make use of every life circumstance to have people feel the truth. I saw him at work, attentive to the possibilities of understanding in his different groups and also to the subjective difficulties of each pupil. I saw him deliberately putting the accent on a particular aspect of knowing, then on another aspect, according to a very definite plan. He worked at times with a thought that stimulated the intellect and opened up an entirely new vision, at times with a feeling that required giving up all artifice in favor of an immediate and complete sincerity, at times with the awakening and putting in motion of a body that responded freely to whatever it was asked to serve.

He worked at times with a thought that stimulated the intellect and opened up an entirely new vision, at times with a feeling that required giving up all artifice in favor of an immediate and complete sincerity, at times with the awakening and putting in motion of a body that responded freely to whatever it was asked to serve.

In Gurdjieff’s own Presence, and because of his Presence, one knew a moment of truth and was capable of sacrificing everything for it. This was like a miracle. It was a miracle. It was a miracle—something of a force from a dimension above what we know.

Here was the grandeur of Gurdjieff. The first way, work on our essence, was outside life, wholly concentrated on inner action. The second, work on our functions, was in life itself and through life. With one hand he called us; with the other he beat us, showing us our slavery to our functions. Very few people had the chance to experience both sides. Yet it is impossible to understand Gurdjieff’s methods or behavior without having received material of both these aspects of his work.

We cannot come to anything alone. Our way is to live these ideas in order to understand them, and to pass on the teaching to others if and to the extent we are able to live it with them. Sowing ideas without living them is sowing ideas that are empty.

What is necessary, in us and around us, is the creation of a certain level of energy, an attention that resists surrounding influences and does not let itself deteriorate. Then it has to receive a force that is more active, that will allow it not only to resist but to have an action and find a stable place between two currents of different levels. This possibility of equilibrium is the continuing challenge, the interval to be faced at every moment in the work for consciousness.

A Call To Consciousness

I Am Asleep

1.  A nostalgia for Being

Man remains a mystery to himself. He has a nostalgia for Being, a longing for duration, for permanence, for absoluteness—a longing to be. Yet everything that constitutes his life is temporary, ephemeral, limited. He aspires to another order, another life, a world that is beyond him. He senses that he is meant to participate in it. He searches for an idea, an inspiration, that could move him in this direction. It arises as a question: “Who am I—who am I in this world?” If this question becomes sufficiently alive, it could direct the course of his life. He cannot answer. He has nothing with which to answer—no knowledge of himself to face this question, no knowledge of his own. But he feels he must welcome it. He asks himself what he is. This is the first step on the way. He wants to open his eyes. He wants to wake up, to awaken.

But he feels he must welcome it. He asks himself what he is. This is the first step on the way. He wants to open his eyes. He wants to wake up, to awaken.

2.  The life force

We wish to live, to be in life.

There is no act, however small, that is not an affirmation. If I speak to someone or write a letter, I affirm this force, I affirm my intelligence. Even if I merely look at someone, it is this force. If I hang up my coat, it is this force. Behind this unbridled affirmation, there is surely something true. This force in me is irrepressible. At the same time, I do not know what the affirmation is based on. I believe I am affirming myself. I identify with this force. Yet even though it is in me, this force is not mine.

We need to see our childishness in relating to the life force, always wishing to have more. The child wants to have, the adult wants to be. The constant desire for “having” creates fear and a need to be reassured.

There is only one source of energy. As soon as my energy is called in one direction or another, a force appears. Force is energy in movement. There are different directions, but the source is the same. The life force, the force of manifestation, is always in movement. It has to flow. And I am entirely taken by it, I am swept along. I begin to suspect that I will always be taken if I do not also turn toward another, unknown part of myself.

3.  I do not know myself

In fact, I do not know myself. I do not know what I am. I know neither my possibilities nor my limitations. I exist, yet I do not know how I am existing. I believe my actions are affirming my own existence. Yet I am always responding to life with only one part of myself. I react either emotionally or intellectually or physically. And it is never really “I” who responds. I also believe I am moving in the direction I want to go and that I can “do.” But in fact I am acted upon, moved by forces that I know nothing about. Everything in me takes place, everything happens. The strings are pulled without my knowing. I do not see that I am like a puppet, a machine set in motion by influences from outside.

At the same time, I sense my life passing as if it were the life of another person. I vaguely see myself being agitated, hoping, regretting, afraid, bored… all without feeling that I am taking part. Most of the time I act without knowing it and realize only afterward that I said this or did that.

My functions—my thoughts, feelings and movements—work without direction, subject to random shocks and habits. It is the lowest state of being for man. I live in my own narrow, limited world commanded by associations from all my subjective impressions. This is a prison to which I always return—my prison.

The search for myself begins with questioning where “I” am. I have to feel the absence, the habitual absence, of “I.” I must know the feeling of emptiness and see the lie in always affirming an image of myself, the false “I.” We are all the time saying “I,” though we do not really believe in it.

My effort to awaken cannot be forced. We are afraid of emptiness, afraid to be nothing, and so we make an effort to be otherwise. But who makes this effort? I must see that this too comes from my ordinary “I.” All forcing comes from the ego. I must no longer be fooled by an image or an ideal that is imposed by the mind. I need to accept

emptiness, accept to be nothing, accept “what is.” In this state, the possibility of a new perception of myself appears.

4.  “I” am not…

Real “I” comes from essence. Its development depends on the wish of essence—a wish to be and then a…

Ordinarily impressions are received in a mechanical way. They are received by our personality, which reacts with automatic thoughts and feelings that depend on its conditioning. We do not assimilate impressions because personality itself cannot be alive—it is dead. In order to be assimilated and transformed, impressions have to be received by essence. This requires a conscious effort at the moment of the impression. And it requires a definite feeling, a feeling of love for being, for being present. We must respond to impressions no…

The first necessity is to have an impression of myself. This begins with a shock when the question “Who am I?” arises. For an instant there is a stop, an interval that allows my energy, my attention, to change direction. It turns back toward me, and the question now touches me. This energy brings a vibration, a note that did not sound until now. It is subtle, very fine, but nevertheless communicates. I feel it. It is an impression I receive, an impression of a life in me. All my…

In thinking, in reacting, in interposing my ordinary “I” in the reception of this impression, I close myself. I am imagining what “I” am. I do not know the reality. I am the prisoner of this imagination…

forcing, but it does not work. I can and must learn to awake by opening consciously to the impression of myself and…

receive. It requires a freedom to be in movement, not to…

In order to wish to be present, I must see that I am asleep. “I” am not here. I am enclosed in a circle of petty interests and avidity in which my “I” is lost. And it will remain…

Without this condition there can be no work. I must remember there is another life and at the same time experience the life that I am leading. This is…

To Remember…

5.  Where our…

I wish to be conscious of myself. Yet, as I am at this moment, can I know myself, can I be conscious of myself? I cannot. I am too scattered. I feel nothing. But I see that I am asleep, and I see the symptoms of this sleep. I have forgotten the sense of my existence, I have forgotten myself. And at this moment I receive a shock: I am awaking, I want to wake up. Then, having scarcely felt the shock, I feel myself taken again, held back by the elements of my…

We do not realize how passive we are, always pulled along by events, people and things. We begin an activity with great interest, fully aware of our aim. But after a certain time the impulse weakens, overcome by inertia. Our understanding diminishes, and we feel the need for something new that will restore the interest, the life. Our inner work progresses like this in stages, and always depends on new forces. It is determined by laws. We must get rid of the idea that progress is continuous in a straight…

The passive “man” in us, the only one we know, is the one we trust. But as long as we remain passive, nothing new can appear. We must become active in relation to our inertia, the passive work of our functions. If we wish to change, we…

We must see where our attention is. Where is our attention when we remember ourselves? Where is our attention in life? Order can be born in us only if we enter into direct contact with disorder. We are not in the disorder. We are the state of disorder. If I look at what I really am, I see the disorder. And where there is a direct contact, there is an immediate action. I begin to realize that my Presence is where my attention is.

6. The first initiation

Behind all my manifestations, there is a wish to know myself, to know that I exist and how I exist. But in my contacts with the world, an image of “I” is formed at the same time as the contact. I am attached to this image because I take it as being me. I try to affirm and protect it. I am the slave of this image. Being so attached and taken in these reactions, I have no attention left to know that I am also something else.

must be clever in order to catch myself without changing anything, without changing my wish to manifest. I need to see myself as a machine driven by the processes that appear—thoughts, desires, movements. I need to know myself as a machine—to be present while I function as a machine. Who am I in life? I must experience it, have a more conscious impression of it.

We struggle not against something, we struggle for something.

7.  Can we become conscious?

The work to be present is in the direction of consciousness—that is, a special kind of perception independent of the activity of the intellectual mind, a perception of oneself: who one is, where one is and then what one knows and does not know. In the moment of consciousness there is the immediate impression of a direct perception. This is quite different from what we usually call “consciousness,” which operates

more like a reflection faithfully accompanying what I experience and representing it in my mind.

need to recognize that I can understand nothing if I cannot remember myself.

To remember myself also means to be present to my situation—to the place, the conditions, the way I am taken by life. There is no room for dreaming.

Perhaps I will not come to a state that is satisfying. It does not matter. What is important is the effort to be present. We cannot always find a better state that brings a feeling of something new. We feel unable and conclude that there is nothing permanent in us on which we can rely. But it is not true. There is something. In a better state, we can see that we have in us all the elements necessary to come to it. The elements are already here. This means the possibilities are always here in us.

What is too often missing is knowing what I want. And it is this that undermines my will to work. Without knowing what I want, I will not make any effort. I will sleep. Without wishing for a different quality in myself, to turn toward my higher possibilities, I will have nothing to lean on, nothing to support work. I must always, again and again, come back to this question: What do I wish? It must become the most important question of my life. Yet this wish for a different quality has no force

at all if it comes from my ordinary “I.” It must be related to something completely different from my ordinary “I” and free from the desire for a result. I must not forget why I wish. This must be for me really a question of life or death—I wish to be, to live in a certain way.

8.  The watchman

Who is present—who is seeing? And whom? The whole problem is here.

We must learn to distinguish between the real “I,” which is nowhere to be seen, and the personality, which takes over and believes it is the only one who exists.

It makes me see that I do not remember myself, that I do not see my state of sleep. I am fragmented, my attention is dispersed, and there is no force that is available to see. When I awaken, I make an effort to disengage enough attention to oppose this dispersion, and to see it.

Self-observation by my usual thought, with its separation between the observer and what is observed, will only strengthen the illusion of my ordinary “I.”

We are neither one nor the other—neither God nor animal. We participate in life with both a divine nature and an animal nature. Man is double; he is not one. And, as such, he is only a promise of man until he can live with both natures present in himself and not withdraw into one or the other. If he withdraws into the higher part, he is distant from his manifestations and can no longer evaluate them; he no longer knows or experiences his animal nature. If he slides into the other nature, he forgets everything that is not animal, and there is nothing to resist it; he is animal… not man. The animal always refuses the angel. The angel turns away from the animal. A conscious man is one who is always vigilant, always watchful, who remembers himself in both directions and has his two natures always confronted.

The Need To Know

Gurdjieff brought a teaching of the Fourth Way that calls for conscious work rather than obedience. A fundamental idea is that in our ordinary state everything takes place in sleep. And in sleep we can see nothing. We cannot direct our lives by our own will. We are entirely dependent on influences from outside and enslaved by the automatic reactions of our functioning. It is complete slavery. There is no higher principle, no conscious principle.

9.  New knowledge is necessary

Negative emotions are a negation on a very low level. If our reactions are on a low level, what we receive is on a low level. We need to learn to obey the law governing higher forces, consciously to submit our will to the higher. The moment of consciousness is a moment of will.

The science underlying the Fourth Way is ancient, although it has been forgotten. It is a science that studies man not just as he is but as he can become. It regards man as having a possibility of evolving, and studies the facts, the principles and the laws of this evolution. This is an evolution of certain qualities that cannot develop by themselves. It cannot be mechanical. This evolution calls for conscious effort and for seeing.

10. Self-observation

I wish to experience each thought and each feeling in myself, but my attention always wanders. No thought is ever completed, no feeling is ever concluded. The feeling swings from one thing to another, ordered here and there like a slave. With this continual movement, I cannot discover the profound meaning of these thoughts or these feelings. My reactions have to slow down. But how? This cannot be imposed. It would create conflict and undermine the effort. Yet, when I concentrate in order to see, by itself this act slows down the speed of the reaction. If the attention is free of any image or word, free of knowledge, my feeling slows down.

Gurdjieff taught the necessity of self-observation, but this practice has been mostly misunderstood. Usually when I try to observe, there is a point from which the observation is made, and my mind projects the idea of observing, of an observer separate from the object observed. But the idea of observing is not the observing. Seeing is not an idea. It is an act, the act of seeing. Here the object is me, a living being that needs to be recognized in order to live a certain life. This observation is not that of a fixed observer looking at an object. It is one complete act, an experience that can take place only if there is no separation between what sees and what is seen, no point from which the observation is made. Then there is a feeling of a special kind, a wish to know. It is an affection that embraces everything that I see and is indifferent to nothing. I need to see. When I begin to see, I begin to love what I see. No longer separate, I am in contact with it, intensely, completely. I know, and this knowing is the result of this new condition. I wake up to what I am and touch the source of true love, a quality of being.

There can be no contradiction, however small, in myself. Otherwise, I cannot see. A contradiction means on one side the need to know what I am, and on the other a head that functions for itself alone, an emotion that feels for itself alone, and tensions that cut me off from sensation.

To observe without contradiction is like following a fast current, a torrent, anticipating the rushing water with one’s look, seeing the movement of each little wave. There is no time to formulate, to name or to judge. There is no more thinking. My mind becomes quiet and sensitive—very alive but quiet. It sees without distortion. Silent observation gives birth to understanding, but this truth must be seen.

11.  Conscious effort

12.  The sacred manifests as inner consciousness

We are seeking to approach the unknown, to open the door to what is hidden in us and pass beyond. It is necessary to submit entirely to an inner voice, to a feeling of the divine, of the sacred in us, but we can do it only in part. The sacred manifests as inner consciousness. The divine, God, must be found within. Truth, the only truth, is in consciousness.

Everything that exists is constituted of three forces. They can be represented as the Father, the active force; the Son, the passive force; and the Holy Spirit, the neutralizing force. The Father creates the Son. The Son returns to the Father. The…

We can ask for help, to come to this in ourselves. The only help is this. Our aim is this, to contain, to unite these…

Ii Opening To…

The moment of receiving an impression is the moment of becoming conscious. Consciousness is always consciousness of self. I need to feel that this Presence forms itself in me. It is only by working to be present that my attention will develop. In each event of life there is a double movement of involution and evolution. The effort I can make with my ordinary means, the only effort that is incumbent on me, is one of voluntary…

In A Passive…

13.  My functions are…

Whatever the state in which I find myself at this moment, whatever the sense of the force I manifest, the highest possibilities are here, hidden by the thick screen of my passivity in believing in my self-sufficiency. My destiny begins when I feel the call of another force in me and respond to it voluntarily. This is my first voluntary act, becoming available to a reality that changes my purpose for living. I am here in order to hear this force, not to expect something…

As I am today, I feel empty, living without meaning, without a real aim, without purpose. I am here simply because I have been created. And I feel my life go by without any sense of direction, all the while suggestible, subject to what I hope, what I expect, what I have to do, what all this means. My functions are passive, under the influence and at the mercy of everything that touches them. My thinking hears words it believes it understands, and immediately has associations. My feeling, on the lookout for what pleases or displeases me, is curious or refuses. And my body is heavy, digesting or lounging in its torpor. I feel myself passive. When I have to manifest, to express myself, I simply react to the impression received according to the way my centers have been educated. I only see forms—things and persons—never forces. I never respond from vision, from an understanding of reality. That…

Can I have a thinking that is more active and not continually occupied in drawing from its memory? Such thinking would hold itself in front of a fact, sensitive and receptive, without making any judgment or suggestion, without any thoughts. It would hold itself simply by an urgency to…

My wishing to know and understand takes precedence over everything. It is not just an idea in my head, or a particular sensation or emotion. It asks everything of me all at once. Can I learn to listen to it?

14.  I need impressions of myself

My impressions are superficial. They just produce associations at the surface, which leave no memory and change nothing, transform nothing. Gurdjieff spoke of impressions as food, but we do not understand what it means to feed ourselves or its significance for our being.

I must be “impressed” by it so strongly that I will at this moment know it with all of myself, my whole being, not merely think it with my head. If I do not have enough impressions, enough of this being-knowledge, I can have no conviction. Without this knowledge, without material, how will I value things? How will I work?

We think of impressions as lifeless, fixed like a photograph. But with every impression we receive a certain amount of energy, something alive that acts on us, that animates us. I can feel this when I have a new impression of myself, an impression entirely different from the way I usually experience myself. I suddenly know something real in myself in quite a new way, and I receive an energy by which I am animated. But then I lose it, I do not retain it. It goes as if taken by a thief. And when I need it most, when I wish to be present in front of my life, there is no support to help me and I lose myself. I begin to see that impressions of myself are food, that they bring an energy which must be received and must be retained.

My reaction cuts me off from the impression, as well as from the reality it represents. This is the barrier, the wall. In reacting, I close.

15.  Hypnotized by my mind

There is not a moment in the day when we stop judging, even when we are alone. It keeps us in ferocious slavery, enslaved by what we believe we know and what we believe ourselves to be. There is in me an essential energy that is the basis of all that exists. I do not feel it because my attention is occupied by everything contained in my memory—thoughts, images, desires, disappointments, physical impressions.

For example, I think about what I am feeling, and my thought responds in place of me. It answers with a knowledge that is not true, not an immediate knowing. My thoughts are merely the expression of what is stored in my memory, not revelations of something new. This thinking is enclosed in a narrow space within myself. Always preoccupied, it holds back my attention in this space, isolated from the rest of me, from my body and feeling. With my attention continually projected from one thought to another, from one image to another in a flowing current, I am hypnotized by my mind. These thoughts—and all my desires, affections, fears—are connected only by habits or attachments, which link each one to the next. My attention is caught in this current because I have never fully realized that it was given to me for another purpose.

Could my mind be silent in its perception? Could it perceive without recognizing and naming, that is, without separating to be someone who looks, judges and knows?

It is only when I exclude nothing that I am free to observe and understand myself. When my brain can be active, sensitive, alive in a state of attentive immobility, there is a movement of an extraordinary quality that does not belong just to the thinking, the sensation or the emotion. It is a wholly different movement that leads to truth, to what we cannot name.

I begin to see that real knowing is possible only in the moment when my attention is full, when consciousness fills everything. Then there are no distinctions—one thing is not more than another. There is pure existence. The creative act is the vision of what takes place. I learn to watch.

16.  What is up to me

One feels a greater wish to know oneself.

As I try to remember myself, I see where my wish comes from. It is from my ordinary “I.”

But I wish to keep this freedom, and the way I wish comes again from possessiveness. It is like finding freedom from the influence only to fall back under it again, as though following a movement inward toward the more real and then a movement outward away from the real. If I am able to observe and live this, I will see that these two movements are not separate. They are one and the same process. And I need to feel them like the ebb and flow of a tide, with a keen attention that does not let itself be carried away and that, by its vision, keeps a balance.

The three parts of me are engaged in the same aim, that is, to be present. But their relation is unstable. They do not know how to listen to each other or what it would mean to be attuned. What is most important today is to open to this new state that I cannot describe, to an experience of… Presence on which I can put no name.

I need to learn first to render each part passive so as to receive a more active force. Everything is a question of forces. Our existence, our Presence here below, is also a question of forces. Nothing belongs to us, nothing is ours. We are here either to transmit forces or to transform them if we understand how. It is necessary first to feel these forces in a distinct way, to feel each in itself, and then to feel them together in order to create a new force able to confront the others, able to last, able to be.

An Experience Of Presence

17.  The awareness of “being here”

In moments of greater attention, I have an awareness of “being here”—a look, a light, a consciousness that knows. Consciousness is here. I cannot doubt it. And yet I do not trust it, I do not feel it as “I,” as my essential nature. I believe I can look for consciousness, see consciousness, know it.

We can call the Self whatever we wish—the seat of consciousness, even God. The point is that it is the center, the very core of our being, without which there is nothing.

I begin to realize that what I am trying to approach is not only mine, not only in me, but immense and much more essential. In front of this, my tensions let go one after the other until the moment I feel, as a gift of unity, a collected Presence. This brings with it a question—a question of existence. It is in doubt at each moment, never certain, never assured, always so unknowable that it requires everything of me. Now I exist with a sense of a mysterious force that cannot be named, which has led me to this unity. To what influence am I opening?… I wish to know. I am here. I am not closed, imprisoned in one part of my being. I am conscious of being a whole.

18.  Conscious of inner being

wish to be whole, unified, one, what I essentially am. When I feel this wish, it is as though my whole orientation changes. In all the parts of myself, freely and without my doing anything, a movement takes place toward a certain Presence. For this movement to follow its course I have to obey and be wholly attuned. Its force depends entirely on the tranquillity of all my centers and on the freedom of my attention. I need to feel that this Presence forms itself in me.

I learn to purify my power of seeing, not by dismissing what is undesirable or turning away and settling on the agreeable. I learn to see everything without refusing the details. I learn to see clearly. I see that all things have the same importance, and I accept failure as good for me. I begin again a thousand times. Everything depends on this seeing.

I do not try to resist, nor to withdraw or distract myself. This is the way I am. I accept it. And in living it, I see it as it is, as if I see further, through it, becoming more and more free. I see my inattention. I realize that my being depends on this power of seeing, and that I am free not to take one part of myself for the whole, free not to be isolated in one part.

19.  An echo of “I”

There is a wish to move, a desire to create, to act. There is also a wish to be moved, to be drawn, to obey. These two forces are constantly here, in us. To confront them voluntarily at a given point can produce a concentration of energy that has its own independent life. It is in the friction between these forces that the quality which reunites them can appear.

Behind all the vicissitudes of life, behind all my cares, sorrows and joys, there is something that is greater, something I can feel that gives me meaning. I feel I exist in relation to this greatness. It is outside me, but also in me. And it is in me that I know it—this life, this vibration so fine that I feel its grandeur because I feel its purity. I feel it as an echo, as a feeling of “I” in the contact between my thought and my sensation. This relation reveals that I am a unity, a whole, and that I can exist as a whole.

This calls for a quality of attention that will allow it to go toward this vibration and sustain a contact with it. I need an energy of a very special kind, an intense energy that is active enough to remain alive in front of my thoughts and feelings. This energy does not let itself go down or be influenced by anything. My wish to be present to myself includes this activity.

I must place myself under a more active influence if I wish to be free. That is, I have to find in myself an energy of attention that is strong and sensitive enough to hold the movements of inertia under its look.

It is only by working to be present that my attention will develop. When it has a better quality, I struggle to keep it from weakening, I try to prevent its being taken. I try but cannot, and I try again. I begin to understand what this requires from me even if I cannot do it. In the struggle where I come back and then go again toward manifestation, I see that when my attention is completely taken, it is entirely lost to me. But if it does not go too far, it can be pulled back, as by a magnet.

the struggle where I come back and then go again toward manifestation, I see that when my attention is completely taken, it is entirely lost to me. But if it does not go too far, it can be pulled back, as by a magnet.

20.  Two currents

What we are in our essence—our highest possibilities—we do not know. What we are in our person—the implacable conditioning that defines us—we also do not know. We identify with our person, ignorant of the relation that should exist between it and our essence. Yet inner development begins with the capacity to know myself, to understand my entire self. I have to know that I have a double nature, that there are two forces in me: the descending force of manifestation and an ascending force returning to the source.

In each event in life—whether family, professional or inner life—there is a double movement of involution and evolution. The action is directed toward an aim, toward manifestation, but behind it is something that has no aim, that does not project itself but returns to the source. These two currents are indispensable to each other.

With my attention today I cannot be aware at the same time of two movements going in opposite directions. I am taken by one movement and ignore or oppose the other.

The struggle is in living the two together. I need to have a conscious impression of these two aspects of myself, at first independently of each other, then simultaneously.

It is I who is called to be here. I must see that if I am not present, I serve only my ordinary self and go toward the…

The ascending current has its source in the will to be—not “will” in the usual sense but in the sense of the “wish to be.” It is necessary above all to disengage this will, to make room for it. I must accept being passive, really passive in order that an active vibration can be perceived by my feeling. The effort I can make with my ordinary means,…

A Movement Of…

21.  A new way of…

The automatic functioning of my thought and feeling comes between the world as it is—what I really am—and the perception I have of it. The state in which I live is without order, vision or…

For understanding in the light of consciousness, the functions must all be attuned and united in a single movement of availability. If there is any distance between them, the common aim is lost and the blind function acts according to its habit. Thus the first thing to understand is this availability of my thought, my body and my feeling…

Thus the first thing to understand is this availability of my thought, my body and my feeling to receive together, at the same time, an impression that they cannot know in advance.

Then perhaps I will begin to understand why this teaching places such importance on the fact that our centers work without any relation with each other. So long as a relation is not made, I cannot go beyond my habitual state of consciousness. Can this relation be made? Do I feel as a fact, in a real way, that there is a lack of relation? Do I feel at this very moment my lack of intelligence to know my own truth and the truth of what is in front of me? Do I see that I am held back by words, ideas and emotions, full of doubt, belief and fear? I need to realize by experience what this disconnection of my…

I feel I am always too passive. So the need for an energy appears, an attention that will stay free and not become fixed on anything. It is an attention that will contain everything and refuse nothing, that will not take sides or demand anything. It will be without possessiveness, without avidity, but…

22.  Awakening to a…

I practice trying to be present, to awake. But every activity that I have not yet mastered provokes tension. I wish, and I am not capable. So I tense, and in this way create an obstacle to realizing my aim. I come up against this obstacle again and again until I become convinced of the falseness of my conception of effort—that is, as a movement…

And then I see that all these efforts are fruitless. I am trying to know, to see, with a passive energy, with a quality of attention that is not more active than what is perceived. It provides insufficient power to know. I am trying to know one center with another center, both of the same quality. This inevitably brings conflict.…

It appears only when I see that all the other impulses are useless and do not relate me with real fact, with what I am. I want to become conscious of the reality of life. There is in me something mysterious that nothing is able to grasp, something that no thought or feeling can help me know. It appears only when I am not caught in the web of…

In order to come to the total stillness in which I will be free to know, I must abandon both the pretension that I am able and my belief in what I know. I must see myself blindly believing, again and again, in what my thinking or my emotion tells me. I need to see myself always fooled until I feel the uselessness of it all, until I feel how poor I really am. Then a calm appears and perhaps I learn something new.…

I must see myself blindly believing, again and again, in what my thinking or my emotion tells me. I need to see myself always fooled until I feel the uselessness of it all, until I feel how poor I really am.

All I can do is leave it open. What will follow I cannot foresee.

Each plays its own role and functions in concert with the others for the same goal of being attuned with a more subtle Presence. This Presence needs to shine, to animate my body. It has an intelligence, a vision that is like a light in the darkness and thickness of my sleep.

23.  The attitude we take

At any moment we each have a particular posture, an attitude we cannot avoid.

The body has its repertoire of postures that imprison me. I have to find a position, inner and outer, that will free me from my attitudes and allow me to emerge from sleep, to open to another dimension, another world. In the work in the quiet, the position of the body is very important. It must be precise in order to allow a field of energy to be established. At the same time, I must feel an ease, a well-being, a kind of stability that allows my mind to come to a state of total availability, to empty itself in a natural way, to let go of the agitation of thoughts. With a right posture my centers come together and can be related. This requires close and continual cooperation between my thought, my feeling and my body. As soon as they separate, the posture is no longer held.

We are seeking stability. What is always essential is the position of the spine, which should be at the same time free and straight. When it is not straight, there cannot be a right relation between sensation and thought, or thought and feeling. Each part remains isolated without a real connection with the others. But if the spine is straight, we feel that the energy contained in the body has an action on the body. Its density changes. There is no longer a form and a Presence—they are one and the same.

My posture will be more stable if I am seated on the floor, on a cushion so that the knees are lower than the hips. One foot is placed, if possible, on the thigh or calf of the other leg. Crossing the legs checks the active impulse and allows the deepest level of quietude. The hands rest in the lap, the favored hand supporting the other, with palms up and thumbs touching. I sit absolutely straight, with the ears and shoulders in a vertical line. The eyes are slightly open or may be closed. If unable to sit on the floor, I can use a stool or chair provided I sit straight, with the knees lower than the hips. Maintaining the spine vertical frees pressure so that the upper part of the body feels no weight.

If my spine is vertical, like an axis, this also maintains my head in a right position. Then a letting go comes by itself. As tensions fall away, I feel a movement of energy toward the abdomen and, at the same time, a movement toward the higher. The rigor in my attitude comes exclusively from one imperative necessity—not to impede at any point the movement toward unity that is required for opening to the higher centers. This attitude is not easy to come to. It is not to be taken once and for all, but has to be renewed from moment to moment.

24.  Coming together

This intuition is the action on us of higher centers from which we are separated by our attachment to our functions. When this action is felt, it affects the body which then receives more subtle and alive sensations. It affects the thought, which becomes capable of holding under its look what is immediately present. It affects the emotions, giving rise to a new feeling.

At the beginning, in the Absolute, there are three forces that come together to know each other and form a whole. They remain united and never separate. It is in this coming together that something new can appear. From the Absolute, however, there is a projection that, without unity, creates mechanical movements and division. In man everything is separate, isolated. We exist as a machine. Nevertheless, we have the possibility to exist unified as a Presence. When a relative unity can be felt, it is possible to say “I—I am.” To maintain this unity, there must be a sustained movement, and it is this movement that I lose all the time.

Iii In A Common Direction

Am I convinced of the uselessness of everything I believe I know? Truth cannot be thought. Not knowing, discarding everything, is the highest form of thinking. Sensation is an instrument of knowledge, of contact with myself. I need to feel the presence of the spiritual in me. The spirit penetrates matter and transforms it. I need this act itself, to be spiritualized. Relation is contact, a direct contact on the same level with the same intensity. Feeling is the essential instrument of knowing.

A Free Thought

25.  The functioning of the mind

What does it mean to be present, to be here now? I have the sensation that I am present. I think it, I feel it. The three centers are present with the same force, with an intensity that comes from the same degree of activity. I feel an energy that circulates more freely between them, which is not held more in one place than another. This energy is nourished voluntarily by the three parts. There is a common direction, bringing the possibility of a conscious action in which the impulse comes from the three centers at the same time. I wish to know with all the parts of myself.

Yet continuity resides, not in the material that occupies the thought but in the energy itself. Believing in the material holds the energy imprisoned in the circle of thoughts. The energy loses all its mobility and acuity, and becomes more and more feeble; the thought becomes petty and narrow-minded. We notice this in the constant tensions in the head, face and neck.

A mind that is subject to the ordinary “I” cannot be still. But tranquillity, a quiet mind, will not come by turning away or struggling against the condition. This will not lead to liberation. Freeing myself from this conditioning can come only by seeing it, without ignoring or denying it, thereby creating a new conditioning. I need to see and to understand the functioning of the mind. The mind is the source and center of my ordinary “I,” the ego. This “I” seeks security. It is afraid and identifies in order to find security. This is a perpetual battle. My usual consciousness consists entirely in judging—in accepting or refusing. This is not real consciousness. Indeed, in this state, without a quiet mind, nothing real can be revealed to me.

26.  Not…

To see myself as I am would be to perceive what is real, a direct perception that is possible only in a state free of all conditioning. I believe that I search. But I do not see that my very search is paralyzed by what motivates it. I am seeking a way not to be confined by the conditioning of my thought, of my memory, of what I believe I know. I seek to go beyond it. I try: I make efforts to work, to be present. But in this I am taken—I am taken all along, during the entire course of my effort. The first thought that impedes me is that “I work.” I do not see who is working, I do not see that the mind is an obstacle. I put a word or idea on what I am seeking, and so I project an image and set out…

Truth simply cannot be thought. It cannot be looked for by the thinking alone, or by the wish to acquire or to become. Truth does not become—it is. I need to see that my thought is held back by the stubbornness of an idea or the attachment to a form. In the very moment I see this, the mind is freed from the idea or form, and a new perception can take place. To have a direct…

Why is it that my mind never discovers anything new? I am a prisoner of all the impressions deposited in me. I am conditioned by the reservoir of my memory, the result engraved in me of the influences that have touched me. It is all that I have to answer with in life. Little by little, I unconsciously accept this state of conditioning, and the energy of my mind deteriorates. My mind is sapped in its vitality and strength. It simply accumulates more and more information. I can discipline my mind, polish my knowledge. It can even…

I need to be free enough to discard everything and to question without expecting an answer. I understand that not knowing, discarding everything, is the highest form of thinking, and that if an answer comes, it will be false. I have to stay without answering and…

We must give our complete attention to the question in front of us. The attention will not be total if we seek an answer. Total…

If I recognize with all of myself that “I do not know,” I am no longer relying on my memory to find an answer. At this moment, and only at this moment, I become free of my conditioning, the prison of my memory,…

27.  A new…

Our thoughts and emotions constitute a subjective world, a world that enslaves us. Like cowards, we accept being dominated by the currents of low quality in which we bathe. And it will be like this so…

I must understand that I am not my thinking and that I do not have to welcome whatever thought arises in me…

At the same time, my mind must not turn away, because wishing to turn away creates fear; not facing the fact creates fear. My mind needs to see itself, to see its functioning and not be taken by words. This requires an extraordinary precision of thought, an attention that does not deviate. When the words have disappeared, what remains? One comes to the door of perception. The mind understands that it is alone. Then it approaches the meaning, the importance of a word—whether a word creates feeling. In seeing the word as a fact, the mind will be free of its influence.

It is difficult for the thought to remain on what is, because it is based on memory and is constantly visualizing the possibility of becoming. How to resist the desire to become in favor of simply what is? It is difficult for my thought to stay in front of the unknown. This means abandoning belief in everything it knows, even the trace of the preceding moment.

To stay in front of the unknown, my mind must be profoundly silent. This is a silence that is not obtained by suppressing or by sacrifice. I do not make the silence. It appears, when the mind sees that by itself, alone, it cannot be in contact with something it cannot measure, something higher. Then the mind no longer seeks, it does not try to become.

I no longer seek the known. I no longer seek security or to become. I feel myself freer, more open. The thought becomes free, moment after moment, and there is then an understanding of truth at each moment. This is the only way to know. True thinking has no conclusion. It always begins anew.

28.  Beyond our usual consciousness

We seek something that is beyond the world of our usual consciousness, our usual thoughts and feelings. We think of truth, of reality, as if it were fixed, a point that we should find a way to approach. But reality is not fixed. It is alive. It cannot be measured by anything we know. It can be approached only by a thought that is entirely free—free of everything, every expectation, every fear—a thought without movement, completely silent, a thought that knows only itself.

It can be approached only by a thought that is entirely free—free of everything, every expectation, every fear—a thought without movement, completely silent, a thought that knows only itself.

Here we discover the source of thinking. We see that the division between the observer and the observed is at the origin of our thought. The observer is grounded in memory, that which knows from past experience. It looks, thinks and acts from memory. This separation into observer and observed does not touch reality, it consolidates the ego. But when the observer is the observed—when the thinking is the experience—then there is no more thought.

But when the observer is the observed—when the thinking is the experience—then there is no more thought.

What is important is to see this division between observer and observed, to see the thought creating the separation. It is in seeing this that I become free of its authority and open to another reality.

In the silence, the mind can be conscious of

each movement of the thinking. This perception is free from reaction, and the energy that results is not mechanical, not the product of thought. It is the energy that spiritual seekers have been looking for throughout the ages.

This perception is free from reaction, and the energy that results is not mechanical, not the product of thought. It is the energy that spiritual seekers have been looking for throughout the ages.

An Inner Sensation

29.  An instrument of contact

When I do turn my attention toward myself, I find I am never aware, never awake. I do not know that I exist or how I exist. I just forget about it.

Yet this thought alone is insufficient, it is not an experience. Only my thought is present. In order to remember my existing, I also have to wish. But I have no wish, I do not care. I have no interest in the fact that I exist. If I really see this, it is a shock. I begin to understand that my feeling does not obey me. I have absolutely no power over it.

Through sensation I need to feel a connection with my body so deep it becomes like a communion. We will see later that there are sensations and sensations. But for now I need to recognize that sensation is an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of contact with myself.

30.  Obeying the attraction of the earth

Our attention can never have an action if there is a tense resistance in the body. It is retained on the surface, unable to penetrate deeper levels in ourselves.

This is why Gurdjieff had us say, “Lord, have mercy,” which opens us to a feeling of our nothingness and awakens a deeper energy.

Then I may experience a descending movement, a letting go of the force held in my tensions. Once in movement, this force by itself submits to the attraction of the earth and obeys. At the same time, I feel an ascending force appear that allows all the centers to be integrated in a whole Presence. The possibility of receiving a more subtle vibration arises only at the moment when I know my incapacity and my refusal. Because I know it, there is an opening to vibrations of a different density, as if passing a threshold. By an action that comes from an immediate understanding of being insufficient, the body as a whole lets go in order to be attuned to this Presence. I begin to see that there are infinite degrees of sensation which represent an unknown world. I need stillness and great sensitivity to have a sensation of a Presence in my body. This sensation comes not from tension but from a contact that is revealed to me. My body is centered, not tensing in any direction. It does not tend upward; this is not its nature. It does not draw me. I do not draw it. There is no tension. I feel free. My totality is no longer threatened. I see that sensation is like an act of obedience to this Presence. The need to open is what we call prayer.

31.  A global sensation

For this I must agree to have no tension. I must be able to remain without judging, without expecting anything, without hoping, entirely in the awareness of what is. I will then perhaps come to the perception of a living Presence in me, a global sensation of the life of the whole.

Seeking a balance between tension and relaxation opens me to the struggle with the ordinary “I.” When I am relaxed and have a sensation of all of myself, I am not separated from my inner being. I am one. In my true being, already I am, and I am free. I can live this as long as I keep a right attitude, a right inner posture, a balance of tension and relaxation.

They are always here, my mind drawn toward an aim and my body tensed toward what the mind imposes upon me. Even when I have no pressing aim, there are tensions crystallized in me. And in each tension, the whole of me is engaged.

32.  To be spiritualized

These are vibrations of inertia. The energy put in movement is little charged with will, with a “will to be,” and is incapable of transmitting this will. A call from the depths of oneself is always here. It becomes more and more insistent, as if a different energy were wanting to be heard, seeking a relation. In a state of immobility, in stillness, the relation can be better established, but this requires opening to a different inner density, to another quality of vibration. Sensation is the perception of this new quality. I need to feel the Presence of the spiritual in me. The spirit penetrates matter and transforms it. I need this act itself, to be spiritualized.

My force is of another kind. If this is not true for me—if I do not sincerely know it at the moment I work—I will not be able to liberate myself. I need to recognize a higher force, a master, and feel its authority. This recognition comes when the ordinary “I,” the ego, ceases to create its own movements. Then an energy of a very special quality appears, which is irresistible, all-powerful, as long as it is recognized and obeyed. It is this energy to which, along with all the traditions, we could give the name “love” if we knew what love meant. Conscious sensation is the first step toward this force.

To maintain this state of passivity is my first power over the body. It indicates that a new energy participates in my Presence. I no longer let myself be taken by any tension—any contraction, thought or feeling. I have only one aim in which all my centers participate: to perceive the fine vibrations to the extent I am able to discern their quality.

We penetrate the world of vibrations, of fine substances. Here is my body and here is energy, a life that is in me. Yet I feel them as one and the same. Is it possible? In front of this question, I can neither deny nor affirm, and there arises a feeling of truth, of the real.

A New Feeling

33.  I blindly trust my feelings

In facing life, I am driven by the force of my ordinary “I,” whose very possibility of existing depends on the world that surrounds it. This “I” has a deep fear of being nothing and is afraid of not having security, power, possessions. It is thin-skinned and easily wounded, always eager to be recognized, easily discouraged, rebellious against others, full of self-pity. There is almost constant fear—not a particular but a general fear—of being insecure or incapable, or some other vulnerability. And there is always avidity. I want to obtain, I want to change, I want to become.

34.  Feeling allows relation

All the possibilities are in me, but I can pass my life without any real change. The highest energy, which gives birth to all others, is in me. It is part of me. The question is not to make it appear but to allow it to appear, to submit to its action. The more I try, the more the way is restricted… nothing gets through. I must learn to submit voluntarily to its influence.

The liberated energy finds its own movement, and my body submits in order to find a right relation toward it. This feeling for what I am brings together what is seen and what sees. There is no longer an object and an observer. I am both the one who sees and the one who is seen. When I open entirely to my Presence, when “I Am,” I enter a different world where neither time nor space exists. I am one, a whole. Thoughts cease and reason disappears. I feel the “I.” Feeling is the essential instrument of knowing.

35.  I feel “I am”

Gurdjieff gave us the exercise “I am” to work on feeling. In a collected state I come to the feeling “I.” I direct it into my right arm—“I”—and then have a sensation in my right leg—“am.” Thereafter, I have a feeling, right leg; sensing, left leg; feeling, left leg; sensing, left arm; feeling, left arm; sensing, right arm. I do this three times, each time feeling “I” and sensing “am.” Then when I have done it three times, I feel the whole body—“I”—and sense the whole body—“am.”I experience “I” always as feeling, “am” as sensing. Feeling is a more intense quality of sensing. This exercise can also be practiced beginning successively with the right leg, left leg and so on. The words “I am” can be replaced by the words “Lord… have mercy.”

36.  Love of being

The only force that could change something appears when the need becomes conscious. I am dissatisfied, I have nothing in myself that knows. It is not an anxiety but a fact that I see: the lack of accord between my centers. I am touched by this fact. I have a new feeling, a sense of urgency, a caring, a love of being.

To be conscious of self is to be conscious of the impression that is received. In the moment of this consciousness, that which sees and that which is seen blend into a single entity. The whole being is changed. A pure feeling is born, an uncontaminated energy that is absolutely necessary for me to go further. Without it I will never know what is true, never enter a world entirely new.

Iv The Work To Be Present

37.  A way of understanding

What is the effort that we call “working”? What are we trying to obtain? What do I understand today, and what do I need to understand? We always wish to change something in ourselves because we do not like it. This is not the right starting point. It is not based on understanding. It does not come from understanding and cannot be trusted. I am able to commit myself only to the extent of my understanding. Understanding is based on conscious impressions and depends on my state of being, on my state of Presence. What I know in a moment of awareness is what I understand.

38.  Each day

In order to concentrate, my thought engages solely with the question of “I,” and all my parts are attentive to knowing my existence. Only one thing counts: “I exist.” I know I exist. I can exist, I wish to exist. Nothing else matters. Because I know I exist, I know that everything around me exists. Everything rises and falls, appears and disappears. Yet behind these movements something remains still, unchanging. I must become conscious of it, not staying on the surface but concentrating as deeply as possible at a level I can hardly penetrate, much less remain. I wish for this knowledge, I have a wish for what I can know here. It is stronger than everything else. It is a conscious wish to hear the sound that is “I,” to hear it resonate in myself.

This is a state of deep letting go where the functions are maintained in passivity. I let my functions come into my Presence. I do not go into them; they come into me. Only the attention is active, an attention coming from all the centers. I need to find this Presence again and again until I know it as a reality that I cannot doubt. This certain reality will become the foundation on which I can base my work. If I return each day to something absolutely sure, which I understand and of which I am convinced, I will see the way, the direction that will allow me to know how I am living.

The principal obstacle to consciousness is the wandering mind. Everything that distracts from my concentration is my enemy. Yet I do not have to fight the distractions. I need to ignore them and not nourish them with my energy, my attention. My thinking is too unstable, moved by every shock because I naively expect something from it.

Thus the mind can be the cause of my slavery or a factor for liberation.

The larger muscles are supple and without tension, ready to be animated by the other current necessary for manifestation. Regulating the balance between tension and relaxation, the overall “tonus,” affects the arising of thoughts, the rhythm, and as a result can bring a kind of mastery over the associations. I feel a stillness, an inner sense of reality.

40.  An exercise is a temporary aid

As I experience the difference between the sensation of tension and of letting go, I see that only in a very relaxed body can a sensation of another Presence appear. It is as though this Presence needs to establish its order in the body. I have to understand this new order and see that I am a part of it, that I wish for it, and that in it I am more essentially myself.

It can be a help only at the moment when I need it and understand its sense. Otherwise, an exercise will in no way help and, on the contrary, may prevent further understanding. This is why it is important never to experiment blindly with an exercise or do an exercise that was given for others. In undertaking an exercise, I must first ask myself why I am doing it and if I really want to do it. Otherwise, the exercise will be done passively and, because passivity never brings understanding, it will not help me. In doing the exercise, I pay special

attention to work always with three centers. If I see that I am working only with one or two, I can be sure that the effort is mechanical or merely half-conscious.

In doing an exercise, I try not to get carried away by the experience. It is a serious moment. I feel the gravity of it. My work depends on what I am going to know now. If each part maintains the initiative, the taste of truth is reinforced and the experience “I am” has a support, a vibration that comes from this conscious effort. But this will more or less quickly disappear. In order for it to remain longer, a certain voluntary thought is necessary. In the quiet state at the end of the exercise, I resolve to myself that something will remain with me until the next time, and that the next time it will be more.

In The Activity Of Life

41.  Only in everyday life

My automatism is a prison. So long as I believe myself free, I will not get out. In order to make the necessary effort, I must understand that I am imprisoned. I have to see myself being a machine, to know myself as a machine, and to be here while functioning as a machine. My aim is to experience being mechanical and never forget it.

We have to come back to this essential source, to see that it is behind each of our masks. It is really our own force that is stolen from us by the affirmation

of our individual self. We say “I” all day long.

We are constantly striving to be something we are not, because we are afraid of being nothing.

42.  The source of manifestation

There is a hunger for activity, a kind of avidity, which will always be here. How do I participate in it? What is my relation to it? Here is the root of the problem—I do not see the ego behind all my manifestations, I do not know it. I do not see the impulse that provokes this avidity in myself—this thought “I,” “I,” “I,” which arises with all my emotions, all my movements… this constant thought “I.” This impulse is a part of me, I cannot deny it. But I do not know my relation to it, what place it should have.

43.  A measure from above

One part of it remains aware of my reality, the other is directed toward life with all the risks of identification. There is a conscious effort to be related at the same time with both higher forces and lower forces. I am in the middle, between two worlds. My attention is entirely mobilized in two directions at the same time, and remains active in order not to allow myself either to be carried away or to withdraw from the action. I see the fluctuations of my level of being.

44.  The way down

After withdrawing to find something real in myself, I learn to go more consciously toward manifestation, to open to reality amid the activity of life.

45.  To “know myself”

Two kinds of movement share my Presence: a movement toward the source and a movement toward life. I need to see and remember that I belong to two levels.

We need to know what we are—either an unconscious slave or a conscious servant.

Our attention has no center of gravity. It is not magnetized by a force that has some authority, some power over it, and continues to run wherever it is called. Perhaps here I see that I am not available because my attention is not available. I am unable to be more collected in myself, more inside, and at the same time to be more outside. So, what is required? The inner reality is the source of my life, but I have also an absolute need to project myself outside. If I can see this inner reality as acting like a magnet, I will see the outside as an opposing attraction, another magnet. Then maybe I will understand what attention means. It is an energy that connects me both with the source and with the outside world, and permits me to receive knowledge, that is, to know.

46.  Only contact, only relation

There is something too passive in the way I try to be present to myself. I forget that my effort is to become conscious of how the forces sharing my Presence are related to each other, and to find my place in this relation.

This relation of forces, this constant awareness of forces, is the very sense of my effort of consciousness. But I forget this and believe it is sufficient to consider one force alone, for example, when I impose relaxation on my body and inwardly fall asleep. The form of the effort becomes the aim, as though to relax is to be present. I need to realize and guard against this constant danger. The sense of my search lies in questioning from moment to moment. The question “Who am I?” is always here—who am I in the middle of these forces that share my Presence?

This comes about at the moment when, incapable of understanding, of receiving, I stop. And in this stop the attention, which was engaged, captive, unconscious of itself, suddenly becomes free. Once free, it is able to stay in front, conscious of itself. This opening to another level puts in question what I am.

47.  The struggle for being

Where am I when I am not present? I need to see my complete submission to suggestions, my willing slavery. I like to obey, I accept being cowardly. I cannot even understand what it would mean to wish to free myself. I have never thought that the sense of an independent existence is to be found in the struggle to know my slavery. I have never tried to stay present in life by struggling not to give in so quickly.

We need to remember that the struggle is for and not against something, particularly in relation to what we call “desire”—the wish for pleasure or some other satisfaction. The illusion of desire arises from images recorded in the memory with pleasure or pain. Although the desire leads to fragmentation, it is not getting satisfaction that is bad but the fact that I am absent, unable really to satisfy or not to satisfy it. At one moment, for example, I may experience a wish to indulge a pleasure like smoking or eating. Either I immediately give in to the idea and have no contact with the desire, or I refuse and create conflict, again without contact because I have dismissed the desire. And everything that arises in me proceeds like this. The desire is life itself in me, extraordinarily beautiful, but because I do not know it and do not understand it, I experience frustration, a certain pain, in giving in or in repressing it. So, the struggle is to live with the desire, not refusing it or losing myself in it, until the mechanism of the thinking no longer has an action on me, and the attention is free.

In this struggle, everything is in the attention. A single moment of inattention and all is lost. I must find in myself something real. It is always here. I need to put my trust in it. Without this, there is no support when I have to manifest. So inevitably I will be taken, I will be lost. This is why I have to return to this reality which I recognize in myself—which I belong to.

At the same time, I have to expect setbacks. The search for “I” is a lifelong journey. I take a step, I fall. I take two steps, I fall. In falling I come to know the obstacles, and when I begin again I am forewarned. I know one obstacle, then a second. We would like to ascend without falling but do not see the danger. It would be terrible if we were to reach the very next-to-last step, fall back to the bottom, and have no more time to climb again. So, we have to accept discontinuity. In evolution each step or note in the octave contains the obstacles of the one that preceded it.

48.  Playing a role

The key to staying here is service, provided this “I” can serve our ideal. This is what Gurdjieff meant by “playing a role,” a practice so often misunderstood. Inside we have to recognize our own nothingness and identify with nothing, and outside we play a role. One supports the other. If we do not outwardly play a role, it is impossible not to be identified. Without being strong inside, it is not possible to be strong outside. Without being strong outside, we cannot be strong inside. The aim is to obtain inner freedom by doing not what we like but what the other person likes. If he likes me to sit on his right, I do it. If at another moment he prefers the opposite, I do that. In this way I get used to carrying out obligations, a potential attribute of a free man. We have to submit to the forces we wish to serve and at the same time exercise will in our functions.

V With Others

A SPECIAL CURRENT     49.  We say we are “in the Work”

Each person joining the chain has to find his place, a place that is determined by his usefulness. Then, by his attitude and actions, he either maintains and vivifies the chain at the place where he is the link, or he falls away and no longer participates in it. The force of life is always here with its continuous action on me. The higher force is also here, but I am not ready to receive it. It is difficult by myself to sustain the effort needed to have the required intensity in the different centers. This is the reason a group is necessary. A common work is necessary in order to come to a greater intensity together. A concentration toward a higher level by a certain number of beings produces a common vibration. The life that comes from this vibration can be a center of attraction, a powerful magnet, which draws others to its movement. This is the force of monasteries and churches, temples and holy places. The more the concentration is conscious, the greater the force of attraction.

If we cannot come to relate ourselves consciously, there will be no Work, none at all. Each step we take now, however small, will either strengthen our relation or take us in the opposite direction. Until today we have received the fruits of the efforts and energy of those who came before. Now the life of the Work depends on us. The Work will not live without us, without our sharing in the responsibility. This requires a total engagement, with all our intelligence, all our willingness.

50.  Why together?

Why do we come to work together? We feel that if we do not participate in certain conditions, we will be taken by habits and life circumstances in which we will be lost. Perhaps here, together, it will be possible to experience conditions in which a higher energy can appear in us and around us. We will then become responsible together to serve it.

So long as I am what I am—that is, think as I think and feel as I feel—I will know nothing true, nothing real. I need to become conscious of my way of thinking and feeling, which conditions all my actions. Only the perception of truth unites.

Each of us is alone and in our self must be alone—alone in front of our understanding, in front of the call of the divine and the fact of our human person. I become linked with others when I begin to recognize my original nature and see that we all have the same difficulty realizing it with the whole of ourselves. This brings a special energy, which allows the action of a finer, more subtle nature. The energy has the power to call and to irresistibly attract. This represents the true help that we can bring to each other. It is the only help, the only true relation. Every other relation disappoints. But this relation has to be accepted and maintained. It requires sincerity and rigor at every moment. Everyone is dependent on one another, responsible for one another.

The way toward inner rebirth requires vigilance, first of all to counteract the lie in the affirmation of ourselves. It is a decisive test. There must be no compromise with truth.

51.  To organize

Our work needs to be organized. Efforts that are accidental and anarchical will lead to nothing. My efforts need to be disciplined and subject to rules, to laws of another order above the ordinary level. So long as I do not see the imperative necessity of submitting to this order, I believe in my ordinary “I” and do not really work,

What each of us understands depends on his level of being. I must learn to know my own limitations and to recognize when others understand more.

Liberation is not to be found in judging the “bad” or the “good.” It is in the disappearance of the ego and the union with everything and everyone. The only bad is ignorance, the only good, awakening.

52.  A school of the Fourth Way

And I try not to be taken by them. I measure myself constantly. Because of this, because I am always in question, I do not judge the others. I learn to see, to understand without judging. There is no “me” and “you.” There is only manifestation. I learn to see the laws of the world in which we are living, the laws of manifestation. A basic principle of this school is always to do more than what ordinarily we can do. Only this will lead to change. If we do merely what is possible, we stay as we are. It is necessary to do the impossible. This is the difference from ordinary life, in which one only does what is possible. Another principle is that we intentionally do not rely on a precise form given in advance, so that an active and more conscious search can take place.

When a form of work is brought, we first receive it as new but afterward repeat it as given. In this repetition we have less and less understanding of the principles that are behind the form. For a form to remain alive, we need always to return to the source, to the truth. Below the Absolute, at all levels, there is remembering and a thirst to turn toward the greater, toward what is. But, as we descend the ladder of involution, forgetting appears and becomes deeper and deeper.

This Work is a school for developing a new center of gravity. Until now the center of gravity around which our life has turned—whether we accept it or not—has been our ordinary “I.”

Our aim in a school of the Fourth Way is to become different, to change our being from the level of man number one, two, three to that of man number four with a new center of gravity, and from the level of man number four to that of man number five with an indivisible “I.”

Exchange In A Group

53.  A special condition for exchange

But the appearance of this form has to be recognized, not imposed. We have to feel the need for coming together, to be present with others to share a relation of reciprocal attention.

54.  I need to speak

We always begin far away from the essential. Even if we repeat and repeat, we have to think of the meaning of what we are doing, of the meaning of our work and our Presence. It should never be forgotten, but we all the time forget. We lose the meaning and have to come back. We must not pretend and take for granted that the meaning is understood. It is not true. Each time we meet together, the meaning has to be again renewed for oneself. Each time has to be a moment of acute questioning. If I don’t know for myself now what I am doing, what is at stake, what is in question—if I don’t know it each time—something different will happen that goes in the opposite direction. My effort has to be clear, what I am looking for has to be clear. Everyone, together, has to make this Presence appear in himself at the same time. This Presence must become a reality, our common connection above the personal, a reality that we serve and obey. The life of a group depends on our state and on our questions. We ask whatever we wish about our own work. What are my difficulties now? What do I need to understand, what do I wish to know? What seems important to speak about in my work? When we come together, I must be prepared to speak. I must constantly reflect on my

work and not come in a passive state. If I come without being prepared, it has not much sense. If I have no definite aim, we have nothing to speak about. How can we have an exchange? It is impossible.

55.  Real exchange

A false attitude develops in the groups between those who put questions and those who respond. This in effect becomes questions with-answers or answers-to-questions, not a moment of presence together in pursuit of a new understanding, a new way of thinking and feeling. Here questioner and listener are relying on some knowledge, and there is an event that does not take place. This is not because nothing could take place—the elements are here—but because what is put forward is not the right material.

We need to exchange what we have received in order that this material remain alive in us. If it is not exchanged, it will not live. But an exchange cannot be unilateral. At the moment of exchange, I need to be in question myself, open to my inquiry, truly living it, sensitive to all my own reactions and to those of the others sharing my experience. In this moment, thirsting to be free enough to obey the law of the highest force and aware of my incessant reactions, I know what I am. I know my weakness.

56.  This form

We make efforts alone—we struggle alone, suffer alone, respond alone. But a moment comes when exchange is indispensable, when we need to nourish one another with the fruits of our efforts. And without this exchange, we cannot go further. The more we value our existence, the more the question of relation appears.

As we go further, the need for conscious exchange becomes more urgent. We may work separately, each making efforts alone. Yet at certain moments it is imperative to come together to verify and exchange, and in order, by a certain common effort, for truth to emerge more strongly.

There is a time for everything. I speak of the form that our work today has taken, of groups, and of the possibility that has been created. If this possibility is not sufficiently realized, this form will degenerate by itself and will never give birth to a new, more inner form, with a new possibility. Forms do not invent themselves. They arise from the need to work together that certain elements feel is necessary to preserve their existence.

Work In Movements

57.  A double aim

In man, as in the universe, everything is in movement. Nothing stays still or remains the same. Nothing lasts forever or ends completely. All that lives evolves or declines in an endless movement of energy. The laws underlying this universal process were known to ancient science, which assigned man his proper place in the cosmic order. According to Gurdjieff, sacred dances, handed down over the centuries, embodied the principles of this knowledge, allowing it to be approached in a dynamic and direct way.

All the manifestations of life in man are expressed in forms by movements and attitudes, that is, postures. From the most ordinary to the highest level, each possible manifestation has its own movement and its own attitude. A thought has a movement and a form that is proper to it.

We believe that we are conscious and that our movements are free. We do not see that each movement is a response, a response to the shock of an impression. Scarcely has the impression reached us than the answering movement is set off, usually long before we are aware of it. The awareness comes afterward.

Whatever the answering movement may be, wherever it comes from, it has inevitably been conditioned by the automatism of our associations, by all the habits and clichés engraved in our memory. We have nothing else with which to respond. So our life is an endless repetition of accumulated memories. But as we remain unaware of this, our movements appear to us to be free.

In fact, we are prisoners of our attitudes of thinking, feeling and moving, as though caught in a magic circle from which we cannot escape. In order to get out, I would need to be able to take a new attitude—to think otherwise, to feel otherwise, to act otherwise, all at the same time.

The Gurdjieff Movements represent notes of an octave on a different level than that on which we live automatically. They lead the energy of our functions in an ascending direction, to a quality of vibrations of equal intensity in all the centers.

58.  Why Movements?

There is an energy that comes from a higher part of the mind. But we are not open to it. It is a conscious force. The attention is a part of this force that must be developed. Without this force I am taken, and my movements are automatic. The head may understand but not the body. Yet it is the body that must feel this force. Then it will obey, tensions will fall away, and the movements can be free. I will not be taken and the movements will not be merely automatic. Consciousness of movement requires total attention. The quality of this attention calls us to experience a whole Presence. This perfect attention is a possibility given by Nature. At the moment of a particular movement we no longer think of the movement past or the movement to come. We are not trying to express the form of a movement, an attitude that we make ourselves assume. We are entirely attentive to an energy that needs to be free to remain contained in the body in a certain way. One can know it only in subjecting oneself to it. The Movements can show us how to be in life, how to experience Presence and at the same time have a freer movement in manifestation. Instead of endless reactions—the conditioned responses of our automatism—there is the possibility of action coming from vision, from a conscious force that is higher.

It has another quality, another force, and a consciousness that ordinarily we do not have. This energy comes from my mind, from a higher part of my mind where there is an intelligence, a capacity of seeing. I need to be in relation with this part of my mind. Then I will have a vision that is absolutely clear. I see myself. I see other people. I see what is, very clearly, without reaction. I see myself as I am.

59.  Part of the teaching

They call for the participation of my whole Presence. I must open to an energy that could have its own life in me. Then it is the body of energy, the Presence, that is in movement. Unless this Presence is here, the Movements are done automatically. Even if we think they are done well, they express nothing and are meaningless. This kind of practice is a total distortion and has nothing to do with the Movements as they were created.

In fact, we have a very limited understanding of both the teaching and the language of the Movements. It will require years in order to develop the necessary attention. Then, what would be a right attitude today if we wish to serve the Work? What is required to bring a Movement to others? First, we ourselves need to have done the Movement and we need to know both its structure—the succession of attitudes—and its rhythm, its life. Then we demand, of ourselves and others, correct attitudes and a clear vision of their succession. The positions must be exact. Without precision our work is superficial. Finally, we have to see in ourselves what the attitudes correspond to and find the right tempo to make the Movement alive.

60.  Only with a stable Presence

This energy is more important than anything else. I am in movement, but the energy remains the same and is stronger than the movement. In order to stay related to this energy, I need to be in a rhythm of a certain intensity and strength. I am “in a rhythm”—what does it mean? Not that one part is in one rhythm and another in another, nor that I do one position in the rhythm but not the next. The energy is everywhere the same. We do not accept that there is no relation between the thought and the body. The thought turns around and goes its own way. The body does not care and waits for something to be asked of it. For a relation to appear, there needs to be a movement from one toward the other. The relation creates a new energy, which needs to become a Presence that is stable, like a second body. The work has different stages.

To Be Centered

We have to find a way toward unity. Our aim is to be centered in the sense of a concentration of our energies and of finding the center of our being. In order to become whole, a unity, I must be centered. For my being to emerge, there must be a quality in my sensation that is equal everywhere, a unity of vibrations, so that a state without waves appears. The center of gravity is the seat of unity. I participate in life through breathing. The perceptible breath is not the true breath, that is, the current which animates inhalation and exhalation.

A Sense Of The Whole

61.  The aim of my effort

We are divided between a movement inward of coming back to ourselves, to our essential nature, and a movement toward the outside. We are engaged sometimes with one, sometimes with the other, and do not succeed in living the two simultaneously. This becomes a kind of opposition, a contradiction, and we spend our lives seeking a way of living in which this tension could be resolved.

We have to find a way toward unity. This would include all the centers and functions at the service of the one life force. It would mean that on both sides something is undertaken, something is recognized. These two movements are indispensable to each other. The life force cannot act without me, but I have to give up all pretense of being anything whatsoever by myself, of being able to act independently without it.

Our lives always revolve around a force that strives to be actualized. Yet the force and what is actualized have a different meaning depending on the “I” that is involved. In facing life, I am driven by the force of my ego. I take my life as a web of relations viewed from a center. I feel this center—it is me. I call this center “I,” and it is from here that I think and feel. The notion of “I” takes up all the room, and comes back even in my better moments of work. In this it is always a single part of me that takes over—sometimes my thought, sometimes my emotion, perhaps my body. They never act together. There is no sense of the whole. To be centered means to abdicate, for each part has to renounce the pretense that it is the whole, that it sees and directs the whole. It is as though I submit to an order that is greater, an order on a cosmic scale, and all my parts accept to serve it, to remain voluntarily passive in front of it. My body, my feeling and my head let go. I feel a finer energy in me that moves downward toward its source, as if needing to concentrate again before going back up to nourish the other centers. It is a movement of circulation, of constant balance and relation.

By the force of my attention actively turned inward, the movement of energy changes. Instead of going outside, it concentrates within until it forms the center of gravity of my Presence. My whole effort, my whole work, is to maintain this direction—to maintain a body so relaxed that the energy does not leave, a thinking turned toward myself so vigilant that its very presence sustains the stillness of my body, and a feeling of what wants to be recognized, of what is here, a feeling of “I.” It is an effort of attention coming from all the parts of myself—to purify the attention in order to concentrate on “I.” In this effort I discover a way of functioning that is no longer passive, a work in which the functions are called to obey the movement of attention.

62.  The first feeling of unity

Gurdjieff taught that within the physical body there are finer substances that interpenetrate one another and, under certain conditions, can form an independent second or even third body. The physical body works with these substances, but they do not belong to it and do not crystallize in it.

When there are other bodies, the control emanates from the higher body, from the consciousness of the higher body. There is an indivisible and permanent “I,” an individuality that dominates the physical body and triumphs over its resistances. And there is consciousness instead of mechanical thinking, with will as a power issuing from consciousness. As I am, I am defenseless against influences acting on the ordinary level because I am not centered in myself. Being passive, my different centers are necessarily at the mercy of whatever ordinary shock makes them vibrate. But when there is a center of gravity for my functions, an axis, I can receive shocks from another level. So long as my attention remains consciously fixed on this center of gravity, I am invulnerable to the pull of the ordinary level. The shocks from outside do not affect me because their vibration is slower than that of my concentration. At the same time, a vivifying shock from another level communicates to my centers a quicker vibration, which has the effect of cohesion and unification.

It is difficult to attune myself to its resonance, to attune the slow and incoherent vibrations that are moving me. But I listen, and am sensitive to these different qualities. And the more I listen and am sensitive, the more the resonance appears like an underlying sound, a fundamental sound as if in the background, which becomes irresistible. The other vibrations undergo a change, as though the discordant notes attune themselves and the movement quickens by itself. Here, nothing will take place unconsciously. I can only consent and wish consciously—will consciously—to be the site of this metamorphosis. This is what I serve, the purpose of my life.

The effort is to realize the relation between

the functions and the higher parts of the centers, which brings me the first feeling of unity, of being a whole. It requires a voluntary attention concentrated at the point of division of the forces, and held there. This depends on my feeling of “I,” my feeling of Presence. I need to know myself as a whole and to express myself as a whole, that is, to be a whole.

63.  Centered through consciousness

I begin to see that I live torn between two realities. On the one hand, there is the reality of my existence on the earth, which limits me in time and space, with all its threats and opportunities for satisfaction. On the other hand, there is a reality of being that is beyond this existence, a reality for which I have a nostalgia. It calls to our consciousness, across all the disappointments and misfortunes, to lead us to serve Being, to serve the “divine” in ourselves. If my life is lived only to subsist, the essential being is veiled, obscured. Even if I subsist in an intelligent, reasonable way, I do not see the true sense of my life—I have no direction. I am entirely drawn toward outer existence and thus prevented from becoming conscious of my authentic being. On the other hand, if I feel another reality, under the force of this impression I forget my life and withdraw into isolation. Thus the world claims me without caring about inner life, and my being calls me without caring about the demands of worldly existence.

more open and obedient to an essential force in me, and at the same time able to express this force and let it do its work in the world.

If I consider my state right now, I see that I have no real center of gravity, no real “I.” I have a habit of calling my body and my other functions “I” or “me.” But I do not have an “I” that is true and always the same, that does not change, an “I” that could will—not desire, not hope, but will. The different parts of me are not related to each other. My feeling does not experience what my head thinks, and my head does not think what my body senses. Their intensity is different, and they do not have a common aim. They are occupied personally, each for itself with its own desire.

And as soon as I feel this, letting go takes place in me, a liberation. It is as though a space opens, and in this space the energy comes together to form a whole. Suddenly I feel myself as another being. This moment of unity is a complete change in my consciousness of myself. Nothing remains of my usual way of thinking and feeling.

An Inner Center Of Gravity

64.  Our vital center

To awake to myself, to what I am, would mean to find the center of gravity and source of my energies, the root of my being. I always forget my origin. And because of this, all my notions of what I am are distorted. The first necessity is to see that I am always losing contact with this source. So long as my essential need is other than to know and to love this source more than anything else, it is my ego that is directing my life and my force. It does this without my even noticing, and all my endeavors, whatever they may be, are conditioned by its appetites, even what I call my “work.”

This requires a vigilance that can be maintained only if all the centers work with the same intensity. He must sense, think and feel at the same time, with no one center having dominance. If the balance is broken, the effort toward consciousness stops. Man number four is one who struggles to be able to establish a link between his essence and his functions.

When I am centered, it is possible to have a contact with the source of my life that is constantly renewed. I do not have to make this contact. I have to allow it to be revealed to me, with an attitude that is never sure of itself and that always makes room for the inner being. I make room in experiencing a sense of emptiness, of occupying another space.

65.  Situating the center of gravity

We need to find a balance between tension and letting go. I do not succeed in knowing myself because I try to know myself as immobile, static. But I am energy that is constantly moving, either toward the inside or toward the outside. The movements come from my different centers. When the movements go toward the outside, the relation with the inside is broken and there is no inner support, no center of gravity. There is tension that seems like a wall. When the movements go toward the inside, the tension disappears but makes room for a slackness that very often ends up in passivity. I do not know how to engage outside, and I do not know how to live inside. I do not know the laws of life. The engagement and return of my energy—the tensing and letting go—take place without sense, order or verification. There is no balance between them and no aim.

definite. It is as if I make room for something essential, or rather an essential Presence makes itself felt in my whole body. I see that I have a constant tendency to interfere, to fix and hold on to this sensation, which hardens it and takes away its life. So I must return to a level, a depth in myself where, without interfering, the balance between the sensation and the letting go is really possible.

Gurdjieff always pointed to this place as the center of gravity of the being, the point where the second body is attached to the first. I let my energy flow toward this center of gravity, which is a support for the entire upper part of the body. It is also the support for my thought and feeling. As soon as I am centered, I feel my thought is free, my feeling is free.

My Presence is as total as it can be. The usual “I” no longer judges and evaluates. I am no longer directed by it. Another “I” appears that is capable of opening progressively to a sense of the higher centers. I feel more stable. In order to experience truly this Presence, I need to adopt a precise inner and outer posture, an attitude that allows a contact with the very source of life from which I come.

66.  Becoming second nature

This is a struggle to free a space so that the impression of this force can remain and allow me not to be subject to forces from outside. In practicing, I develop a faculty to recognize wrong attitudes and to correct them. This must become an ever-present part of my daily life. It is my submission to life. The most difficult thing to attain is submission of the mind. Voluntary passivity always brings suffering for the ego, which can accept it only for very short moments. As soon as I approach the void, a thought or emotion comes from my self-centered “I” and cuts the state. The waves break and invade everything.

There is always a certain tension, a tendency to displace upward. From being relaxed and soft, I become tense and hard. My will to do, my ego, has again taken over. I no longer trust the living force I experience in this center of gravity. I again trust only “me.” Even if I begin to feel the reality of this life emerging, I have no control over either my tension or my letting go. And I cannot consider them simultaneously. Either I tense or I relax. Yet there is one complete movement. These two are the movement of life in me. Tension is not opposed to relaxation, and relaxation is not opposed to tension.

Nevertheless, true letting go will appear when I am able to feel the secret source of energy in myself, the source from which my “I” will grow without my intervention. It will hold me in a new form, very different from that of my habitual tensions, an inner form in which all the parts of myself are integrated. It will give me a sense of myself, of my true individuality.

67.  My true form

I must be seated not only in a different posture, I must be seated as a different person. When I am situated in my center of gravity, there is no ego that imprisons me. What is necessary to understand, above all, is a movement downward to become immersed again in the source, the wellspring of my life. I need constantly to return and submit to the force of life, the one true life, of which I am a part. I need to let the reality of Being emerge, to let the unity of what I am be created in me.

I see that for my being to emerge, there must be a quality in my sensation that is equal everywhere, a unity of vibrations so that a state without waves can appear. Then I feel raised up, liberated from the form of my habitual tensions, which express the “I.” I am beyond it, aware of my inner and outer attitude as my true form, my personal form through which circulates my essence. I feel the force of life, free of all fear. I am no longer afraid of losing myself. I am. This force is irresistible. It is not my force, but I am in it. The force and I are one, provided I obey its law. This means a transformation in all my inner and outer attitudes.

The body is the seat, the base of my life, inseparable from the whole. It must be perceived from within. I wish to trust life, trust this irresistible power centered in my abdomen. I seek an attitude, a way of being, in which my center of gravity is imperturbable.

I do not try anxiously to do these things one after the other. I try to feel the unity in this attitude, and to appreciate this sensation of unity. Then all distinctions between subjective and objective, inner and outer, are left behind.

Breathing

68.  An imperceptible current

I learn to distinguish two currents of vibration. One comes from thoughts and emotions, and holds me on a lower level. The other is a more subtle current which can awaken and animate other zones of thinking and feeling. I cannot come to a new understanding so long as I have not experienced over a long time the difference between these two currents and their influence on my being.

69.  Stages of breathing

The first stage is to become conscious of the physical breathing and to let it be. The respiration goes on by itself. If it is tight and originates in the chest rather than the diaphragm, this shows that I am tense and confined in my ordinary “I.” I do not allow the breathing to come and go freely.

The second stage in breathing is to exercise not only the body but oneself. I no longer place emphasis on exhaling completely, but instead let myself go with the exhalation. I relax not only my shoulders and chest, I relax the whole of myself. I see that my usual respiration reflects a false attitude of my “I.” It is not my body but “I” who is not breathing in a right way. In working, I discover that all my manifestations and mental attitudes block the flow of the breath. It is like a resistance to the fundamental rhythm of life, a fear of losing myself, a lack of trust in life.

The third stage will be to experience that it is not I but “It,” the universal Being, which is breathing, and to see that breathing is a fundamental movement of a living whole.

We must let all our images and preconceived ideas dissolve in order to become aware of its source. We have to let consciousness emerge and play the principal role. Then one can live according to one’s Being. This active recognition of the life within brings a sense of obligation to listen to “consciousness,” to change and live according to what we understand.

Finally, a man comes to submission and trust in life and the Self. He gives himself up to the cosmic movement of ebb and flow, understanding with his whole being that all forms are created in the void, in silence, and are reabsorbed once they have fulfilled their role. He understands that he finds himself in losing himself. He becomes free from certain subjective limits, but realizes that his Self is a responsible participant in the great life of the universe. He participates in the Whole.

70.  I live in my breathing

I remain aware of something that cannot be taken. This is directly dependent on experiencing my center of gravity, to which I must always return. These movements of tension and letting go are my response to life, and they affect my breathing.

I submit to this movement, in which form is created and immediately swept away as soon as it appears. I live in my breathing.

71.  Without fear of losing myself

VII WHO AM I?

I always believe that I exist and that my imagination of myself, what we call personality, does not. This ferocious egotism is me, and I have to become conscious of its action. What I must explore is not beyond the self, but the very basis from which I think and feel. I do not know who I am. I do not know whence I came. I do not know where I will go. The wish to be conscious is the wish to be. It can only be understood in silence. The self belongs to the Absolute. I cannot exist outside the Absolute, outside the Self of the Absolute. The true self is like space—unattached, pure, infinite. My true nature is consciousness. To know the Self is to be the Self.

Ego And Illusion

72.  The imagination of myself

In order to know who I am, I need to see what is real in me. The biggest obstacle is illusion. I accept imagination in the place of consciousness, an idea of myself instead of a feeling of “I.”

I need to learn to recognize and separate the real “I” from the imagination of myself. This is an arduous task because my imagined “I” defends itself. It is opposed to the real “I,” and is exactly what “I” am not. In thinking of myself, I always believe that I exist and that my imagination of myself, what we call personality, does not. I have no idea of this imagination. So long as I do not know it, I cannot know what I am.

We are so preoccupied with what we would ideally like to be that we do not see what we actually are now, right now in the present moment. Perhaps behind the formation of this idea of “I” there is the echo of a very deep wish, the wish to be, the wish to be entirely what I am. But today the controlling influence is the idea of myself, and this imagined “I” desires, fights, compares and judges all the time. It wants to be the first, it wants to be recognized, admired and respected, and make its force and power felt. This complex entity has been formed over centuries by the psychological structure of society.

Can I be aware of my wish to be “someone” and my way of always comparing myself to another? If I see it, I can experience the wish to liberate myself from it, and also see why I wish to liberate myself. So long as I have not understood that this is the essence of my search, that here is the first step toward knowledge of myself, I will continue to be fooled and all my efforts, all the ways I try to change, will lead only to disappointment.

I must honestly accept that I really do not know this. Only in accepting this as a fact will I become interested and truly wish to know it. Then my thoughts, feelings and actions will no longer be objects for me to look at with indifference. They are me, expressions of my self, which I alone am here to understand. If I wish to understand them, I must live with them, not as a spectator but with affection, and without judging or excusing them. It is necessary to live with my thoughts, feelings and actions, to suffer them, from moment to moment.

73.  Ferocious egotism

It is what I am, and I cannot be otherwise. This ferocious egotism is me, and I have to become conscious of its action. To see this violence, I have to enter into an intimate and real contact with myself, to observe myself without any image. Why do we have a compelling need to prove ourselves, to actualize ourselves? A profound impulse is at play: the deep fear of being nothing, the fear of total isolation, of emptiness, of solitude. We have created this solitude with our minds, with self-protecting and egocentric thoughts like “me” and “mine,” my name, my family, my position, my qualities. Deep down, we feel empty and alone, living lives that are narrow and superficial, emotionally starved and intellectually repetitious. Because our petty “I” is a source of suffering, we wish—consciously or unconsciously—to lose ourselves in individual or collective stimulation or in some form of sensation. Everything in our lives—entertainment, games, books, food, drink, sex—encourages stimulation on different levels. We revel in this and seek to find a state of “happiness,” to maintain a pleasure in which we can forget the “I.” All the time our minds are busy in evasion, constantly seeking, in one way or another, to be entirely absorbed in something outside ourselves, to be captivated by some belief, love or work. The evasion has become more important than the truth we cannot face.

When we have real passion in the depths of ourselves, we feel strongly and are extremely sensitive to life—to suffering, to beauty, to nature… to everything. We care about life, its possibilities in work together and in relation.

As soon as passion has a motive or preference, it becomes pleasure or pain. The passion we need is the passion to be.

Centered in our ordinary “I,” most of us do not love and are not loved. We have very little love in our hearts, which is why we beg for it and seek it in substitutes. Our usual emotional state is negative, all our feelings are reactions.

If I do not know myself totally, my mind and my heart, my pain and my avidity, I cannot live in the present. What I must explore is not beyond the self, but the very basis from which I think and feel. My thought craves continuity, permanence, and its wish gives rise to my ordinary “I.”

74.  Free of fear and illusion

Is it possible to have a mind with a quality that is always fresh, always new, with a thinking that creates no habits and clings to no belief? For this we must understand the total consciousness with which we live.

Only a mind that is empty can come to a state of not knowing and discover what is true.

Indeed, so long as our total consciousness has not been liberated from fear, we will not be able to go very far, to penetrate deeply in ourselves.

What is important is to live with this void in which the self is abandoned. With this abandonment arises the passion to be, a wish beyond thought and feeling, a flame which destroys all that is false. This energy allows the mind to penetrate the unknown. No movement from the periphery toward the center will ever reach the center. A surface movement trying to become deeper will never be more than of the surface. In order to understand itself, the mind has to be completely still, without illusion. Then with lucidity we can see the insignificance of “me” dissolve in an immensity beyond all measure. There is no time, only the present moment.

Toward The Unknown

75.  I do not know

I do not know who I am, and all that I know cannot be an answer. The unknown, the mysterious, cannot be discerned by the known. On the contrary, what I know, what I have learned, prevents me from discovering what is. The whole process of my thinking, the conditioning of the known, encloses me in the field of my thought and prevents me from going further. I find pleasure in this conditioning and security, and unconsciously cling to it.

The very act of listening is a liberation. It is an action that does not flee the present, and when I know the present as it is, there is transformation. I go toward the unknown until I come to a moment when no thought moves my mind, when there is nothing outside myself.

76.  The resonance of “I am”

When I feel deep anxiety and dissatisfaction, as we all do at different times, it is because I am not listening to the finer, more subtle vibrations of my Presence. I do not let them animate me. I am not available. I am always, again and again, moved entirely by the vibrations of inertia of my functions.

77.  Silence

I have a preconceived idea that a state of silence, of peace, is deprived of energy and of life, a state where there is a stop, the suspension of everything that generally moves me. In fact, silence is a moment of the greatest energy, a state so intense that everything else seems quiet.

me. In fact, silence is a moment of the greatest energy, a state so intense that everything else seems quiet.

I begin to understand that silence does not come because I seek to become silent. It comes when the mind sees the process of thought and its conditioning by the known. For this it must observe as one watches a beloved child, without comparing or condemning.

78.  Inner solitude

when I am with close friends or my family, I am alone. I do not know my relation with them, what actually connects us. This feeling of solitude and isolation is created by my self-centered thought—my name, my family, my position. I need to live with this solitude and, passing through it like a door, come to something much greater: a deeper state of total “abandonment,” a state of “individuation.”

When the mind is without provocation or response, there is “abandonment.” Only in this state can we find the real.

My True Nature

79.  A veil over my reality

The knowing is an experience of being because at this moment I know my state of being.

82.  My true nature is consciousness

I must never forget what gives life to the form. The form alone does not exist. That which “is” in the form, that which has taken form, is the essence of what is questioning in me.

There is no object to know. The Self is always the Self, and to know the Self is to be the Self. When the true nature is known, there is Being without beginning or end—immortal consciousness.

Viii Toward A New Being

83.  Can being change?

Ordinary life is under the law of the circle of mechanical influences. The way of development of being is opposed to everyday life. It is based on other principles, subject to other laws. This is the secret of its power and its meaning. Without the help of a way, of an influence of another order, no change of being is possible.

Studying general themes is one thing, but following steps on another way is very different, especially experimenting with practices of other teachings. If we truly enter this way, the experience engages the energy in certain channels to produce results that depend on understanding. In this case, to approach another teaching is a serious matter, especially if one submits to a practice or discipline that produces a shock on the mind. If the result does not come from understanding, it can bring an attitude, even a crystallization, that leaves no freedom to go further.

84.  The intensity must increase

Everything in the universe declines or evolves in an endless movement of energy. According to Gurdjieff, the laws underlying this universal process were known to ancient science, which assigned man his proper place in the cosmic order.

We believe we can work without intensity, but this will not lead to real change. To allow a contact with the higher centers, the intensity of the lower centers must increase. These centers, each of which vibrates at a different frequency, must come to the same speed. We have to proceed, as in an octave, from level to level, learning to see the distance between energies and recognizing that they can come together only through intensification.

85.  Degrees of the octave

With a second conscious shock, it is possible that consciousness opens and we see reality. This is an emotional understanding of truth. At this moment I realize that my emotion is no longer the same. There is no closing, no negation. I do not refuse. I do not accept. With this vigilance, which does not choose, a new feeling appears and a new understanding, not born from opposites. This is a feeling that embraces everything, a feeling of unity, of being. I am transformed, and in this new state I feel a new order appear.

A Collected State

87.  Repeat, repeat

The relation between my mind and my body is not strong enough. The ego is always here. I am not animated by an energy of such intensity that it could completely transform me. Today, this is not possible. I need to pass through different stages in which the relation between the mind and the body becomes stronger and stronger until I no longer feel them as separate but as a single Presence. For this I need to keep a certain intensity in myself that nothing can make me lose. When I see myself dispersed, not collected, I do not try to bring myself back. This would be forcing. I remain in front of this dispersion. Then there is a spontaneous movement of letting go. I become conscious of what it means to be.

88.  My thought does not wander

All the time I need to return and deepen what Gurdjieff called the “collected state” so that it becomes indispensable to me. This is a state in which my centers try to be attuned in order to know this being, the being that I am. When all the centers are engaged in the same question, they awaken and come closer. When they are truly together, I can be, and I can do something consciously. But only when they are together.

Our mind is our instrument for search—so long as it is not influenced by ready-made answers. Can the mind be in a state of not knowing? Can it be so in a way that is true, simply a fact, not an affirmation? If the mind can remain in front of this, accept it as true, feel poor in knowledge, the mind can really be in a state that is the highest form of thinking. Then the mind is acute, profound, clear, without limits, and can receive something new. I am here, very still, without knowing what I am, without making efforts to know. I see that knowledge cannot be grasped. My mind has become quiet, without movement, related to the sensation of this stillness and to a feeling of this state of being. There is stillness, but it is not empty. In this collected state, a reality begins to work in me. It is not I who apprehends, who knows this reality. It makes itself known. I have to let its action work. I feel the need for a letting go, and I relax naturally. All my centers are more sensitive, more acute, more perceptive. There are layers of myself that I have never penetrated. To see this frees me.

89.  I feel, I sense, I watch

From Another Level

I begin to see what I habitually call “I” and to recognize that by myself I am nothing. At the heart of this humility there is a feeling that comes from the higher parts of myself and appears like a light, an intelligence, and with it confidence. Then I see I wanted to change something that was not mine to change. Now I can serve. I no longer intervene, and a silence comes by itself. In this silence an unknown energy is revealed and acts on me. Consciousness is here. It does not need to have an object.

I do not realize at the outset that my wish to be is a cosmic wish and that my being needs to situate itself and find its place in a world of forces.

What we have learned—all our words and memories—gives the impression of continuity, the illusion of my ordinary “I.”

Vision, inner vision, is the liberation of an energy that is beyond thinking. It is a total awareness of life because to see is to embrace totality at the very moment. We cannot see part by part, little by little, over time. We have to see the whole. It is an act of perception of what is true without interpreting what is seen. If I am distracted by anything whatsoever, my conditioning is such that I cannot see freely. My thoughts are mechanical.

In order for me to have a real perception, an act of knowing, I need an attention that is as total and as even as possible, an impartial all-embracing look that does not take one side or the other.

Then the position itself can allow the mind to come to a state of total availability, naturally becoming empty of agitated thoughts. In the right posture, all my centers come together and are related. I find a balance, an order in which my ordinary “I” is no longer the master but finds its place. The thought is freer and also my feeling, which now is purer, less avid. It respects something. As I let myself open to this energy, there is absorption without judgment, without conclusion, and my attention maintains itself patiently without effort and silently penetrates beyond what I know. This is like an inner expansion. I feel a greater unity between my body and what animates it. A center of gravity, my vital center of energy, has formed by itself. There is no more contradiction in me, no more refusal. I have found in myself this primordial center of energy, and have passed beyond the struggle, the duality between my body and my psyche. The more I experience this state, the more my essence is touched. But as soon as I lose contact with this center of gravity, the energy surges back toward the head or the solar plexus, and the false notion of “I” returns.

My intelligence has to understand the meaning of my tensions, and something in me needs to leave more and more space—not out of obligation but from necessity, a necessity of my being. I seek to understand this state-without-tension which brings me closer to the void, to my essence.

Voluntary Attention

103.  The feeling of lack

X A Presence With Its Own Life

A PURE ENERGY     106.  A particle of the highest

When I see this useless expenditure, I feel the need for greater tranquillity, for a state of stillness in which I awaken to a pure, free energy in me. I need to come to a different inner density, a different quality of vibrations.

This is, in fact, a spiritualization in which the spirit penetrates matter and transforms it. I must have a strong and deep experience of passing from one materiality to another. My sensation becomes more and more subtle as the attention purifies and concentrates, penetrating the body and permeating everything that surrounds me. There is no other way. For this I learn to come to solitude in which this internalizing, this concentration, is possible.

Knowledge of what is true appears by inclusion. My thinking remains free in order to penetrate, not reacting or choosing, without clinging to security. In front of the necessity to see, my ego ceases to affirm at all costs its identity, its form. It gives way to the feeling of essence, to the will to be what I am, which depends on neither form nor time.

This energy has to fill the whole of my body. And I must have the impression that it is from this energy that I move. Everything has to be subordinated to it. I must let it take over. In opening to this new energy, I experience an inner order in which this Presence, experienced as a whole, can see all the parts. It can act through them, provided my attention remains active with the same intensity everywhere. This inner order requires a total attention. The new current of energy, which all the rest must obey, needs to take on force and become permanent.

108.  From a higher part of the mind

am too tense and I still want to act myself. At the same time, there is a wish to pass beyond the limits of my ordinary “I,” to know myself animated by the life force in me. For this all my centers of energy must have no other aim than to become a single whole, united with this current coming from the higher centers. All the energy in me is then contained as in a closed circuit, not by an effort of constraint but through the relation of my different parts. I need first to become a vessel and later to know the channels by which this life passes in me.

111.  A mass of energy I wish to become conscious of my existence. If my attention is as usual, dispersed, I feel myself as a form, as matter, a person. When my attention becomes finer and my perception keener, I feel myself as a mass of energy in movement, a body of energy. Currents of moving particles pass through me, whose movement does not stop. I sense myself no longer as matter with a solid form, but as energy animated by vibrations that never cease. I feel this energy as if it were magnetized, drawn toward unknown ends.

My centers react to the least shock from the disordered vibrations invading my Presence. Without a relation with a more conscious force, the centers are prey to all the large and small shocks that shake them. If I am not related to an energy of a higher level, I am bound to be taken. The magnetization changes poles.

This Presence is as though independent of my body, but for now seems attached to it. Nothing in me—not my body, not my thought or my feeling—as yet recognizes it.

112.  An exercise for opening

There is an exercise that Gurdjieff considered

most important for opening to a different state of being. It is an exercise one cannot undertake without being prepared. And I am prepared only when I truly feel the necessity for it. I like my body and will do everything to save it, to make it comfortable, to give it food, to anticipate its desires. I have not yet measured the strength of my attachment to it.

This exercise begins with the consciousness that I am here. I say to myself, “Lord, have mercy,” each time with a sensation in the four limbs, successively—right arm, right leg, left leg, left arm. I do this three times, and rest for one or two breaths. Then I breathe consciously, saying “I Am”: with “I,” I take in the active elements of the air and mix them with the result obtained in the four limbs, and with “Am,” I exhale and distribute this into the sexual region. I repeat this second step three times. I then recover the result from the sexual region and send it to the spine, exhaling with “Am.” I begin again the filling of the four limbs, remix with the active elements of air, recharge the sexual region, recover from the sexual region and send it to fill the solar plexus. And I do the same to fill the head. Then I feel the whole Presence “I Am” throughout the body. I nourish this Presence by taking the active elements from inhaling and sending them into the legs and the abdomen, then in succession the chest, the right arm, the left arm and the head. I make an inner act of engagement, saying to myself, “I wish to be. I wish and I can be. I will do everything to make this last for a specific time. I will take all necessary measures to crystallize in myself this result for being. I will do everything to be.”

113.  The substance of “I”

need to see what I serve… not think about it, believe it or desire it, but see it from moment to moment. For this I first need to establish a relation between my body and the material that Gurdjieff calls the “substance of ‘I.’” This substance is scattered in the body. I practice recapturing it through the mind in order to let it melt and be dissolved in the whole organism, so that it is not fixed anywhere. I say “I” to myself, and it is as though I breathe in this material as I see it melt. Then I say “me,” letting this more subtle substance spread evenly in the whole organism, so that a second body can be formed. I repeat this a number of times. In order to see that all the material is distributed evenly, I experience a look from above, a sense of “I” above the head. My body then seems a small thing among everything else, like a drop of water in a glass. I see especially that the “I” is really the intelligence, the master of “me,” which is content to be under its look. To have two bodies is the greatest luxury.

The work has different stages. At this point, the formation of this new body, the astral body, is the basis for our work. After it has been formed, there will be another.

My centers feel this energy, feel my attitude. I leave room, I allow a movement toward a unity that has its own balance, its own form.

But I know only its fluctuations because, even when I have an intimation of this reality and am touched by it, I do not truly appreciate it. I do not truly wish for this reality. I do not love it.

115.  I must live the insufficiency

In order to have a contact with the higher centers, it is necessary to increase the intensity of the lower centers. Their vibrations have to intensify through seeing and suffering the lack, a conscious suffering. “Yes,” we think to ourselves, “I know. My mind and my body must be together.” But what does it mean? Do I feel, do I have a sensation of the energy that is in my mind, the energy that is in my body, the energy that is in my feeling?

each moment there is negation of whatever is affirmed, sometimes with violence. Yet without this negation we might not have the possibility to evolve.

And instead of helping to make the sensation stronger or more alive, the energy passes to the emotional and intellectual centers, which then vibrate in a coarse and brutal way. Without being transformed, the energy is projected in outer movements, in talk or actions that leave us weakened.

For that I have to be present at the moment of friction. I have to live this without taking sides in order for a finer energy to be produced.

I suffer from my lack, my incapacity. I am closed, the passage is not free. I suffer this, that is, I stay in front, accepting the friction between the “yes” and the “no.” I see the resistance, the passivity, and I see myself give up, abdicate my wish to be, in order to go toward sleep. I struggle to stay in front, not to prevail but to observe the constant changes in myself. With this staying, an energy of a higher quality develops, a more conscious attention.

A new feeling appears when the conditions of suffering are accepted, even wished for. I accept my powerlessness and I suffer.

116. Conscious struggle

This requires an attitude, consciously maintained, in which the largest part of my attention is held within,

engaged in this desired penetration. This practice, which conserves energy, is an act of creation. The vision of what takes place in us is the most important thing. The result comes from this seeing and from the friction between opening to the unknown and the response of our functions. This is the beginning of a “crystallization,” the formation of something indivisible, individual and permanent—will, consciousness, “I.” I awake in order to be whole, to become conscious with a will to be.

The second body has as its substance a finer intelligence, a sensitivity. Like the physical body it requires food for its development. A struggle, a conscious confrontation, is necessary to call an energy that would not otherwise appear.