Gurdjieff is the great world teacher of our time. In New York and San Francisco, in London and Paris, in Venezuela, Canada, and many other places on the planet we inhabit, groups of people are studying and struggling with his ideas. If there is any real hope for the future, it is with these ideas and these people. Gurdjieff has formulated the same great ideas for our time as have been explained by other teachers whose names later were attached to world religions: Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, Christ. He has made these ideas accessible for our age in a way no other teacher has ever done. He has explained the nature of man, the laws that govern the cosmos, and man's real relation to the universe. He has given us a practical technique by means of which, with the requisite help, it is possible for some to become that which Man should be.
It has been said over and over in different words that in our day the technical advancements of man have outdistanced what is usually called “moral” advancement. That is, the human material which is obliged to endure these achievements has itself not advanced. On the contrary, it has deteriorated with frightening rapidity. Our technology has outdistanced our being. We can see this very clearly, but because nowhere does there appear to be any sensible solution, our minds fall back. They cannot grapple with the problem.
So we blame someone else—our predecessors, or the neighbors, or God. We busy ourselves with fantastic or naive political ideologies. We fill our outer lives with useless and meaningless activities, with noise and movement, while our inner lives remain empty. We talk and talk, but so much of our talk is empty words with no reality of inner experience. Our idea of progress is based on an unfounded assumption that there is some kind of automatic progress, so that even without effort, we are better than all the generations which have gone before us. We seem convinced that all change is for the better, even though common sense tells us that all of our “progress” and “advancement” is leading us towards an ever more efficient means of self-destruction.
The world we live in is lunatic. Many of us are disturbed from time to time, but we try in every way to avoid facing the fact of our disturbance because it seems there is nothing sensible that we can do about it. We cultivate a weak optimism, hoping vaguely that everything will turn out well after all, or at any rate that nothing very bad will happen anytime soon.
It is true that there is nothing we can do about the way the world is going; it goes the way it has to go. The questions I must ask myself are: Am I obliged to go with it? Must I be swept along with the stream? Is there no help?
Gurdjieff speaks of man with a small “m,” referring to us such as we are, and Man with a capital “M,” Man as he could be. For us, these are new ideas. Try to listen as if you were listening to something new—not comparing other things you know or think you know.
Let’s begin with the idea that we do not know ourselves; man does not know himself. Man as he is, is an uncompleted being. Nature has brought us as far as she can; the rest we must do ourselves. We have many powers, many potentialities which we do not yet possess, do not know of, and do not even suspect. On the other hand, we attribute to ourselves many qualities and powers that we also do not yet possess, but simply imagine. There are many, many references to this fact in religious teachings, in fairy tales, and in mythologies, but the clue to understanding them has long been lost. We remain as we are because of these unfounded beliefs we have about ourselves.
The first of the qualities which we wrongly attribute to ourselves and which keeps us as we are, is unity or oneness. We think of ourselves as one, but each one of us is many. We call ourselves “I” and because we usually keep the same name all our lives and see much the same face in the mirror every day and because we have many deeply ingrained habits, tastes, and desires, we ascribe to ourselves unity or oneness. But there are hundreds, even thousands of little “i’s” in us. They change every moment. Now one “i” is on top, now another—and all is changed.
This is a fact which can easily be verified for oneself with only a little observation. If you cannot at first see it in yourself, you can easily see it in others. One very simple example is: I decide to get up early in the morning, but only one “i” or group of “i’s” has decided this. The “i” that actually has to get up is a different one and has no intention of getting up early, even knows nothing about it, and so it gets up at its usual time. Everything is like this. A man may have an uneasy feeling that he lacks integrity, but never does he attribute such a feeling to its correct cause.
We believe ourselves to be conscious, but we are fast asleep. We live our whole lives and die in a state of hypnotic sleep. What we think of as our clear consciousness is called by Gurdjieff “sleep-plus-waking.” He tells us that there are four states of consciousness possible for man:
Ordinary sleep — Sleep-plus-waking — Self-consciousness —Objective consciousness
When we sleep in our beds our minds are full of dreams. There is no control; thoughts, emotions, and sensations come and go at random. What we do not realize is that this dream state persists when we are awake, just as the stars are in the sky in the daytime, though the light prevents us from seeing them. These dreams influence our actions to an unbelievable extent. Christ speaks many times of the need for awakening and He refers just to the need for awakening from this hypnotic sleep. We walk about and talk earnestly, write books and make wars, go to church and get drunk, all in a state of sleep.
The third state, self-consciousness, is the state that could be ours. What does it mean, self-consciousness? In the first place, we must realize that we do not and cannot remember ourselves. People do not believe this, but it is quickly verified when I try to work.
You may ask, why should one remember oneself? It has to do with this question of awakening. We can never awaken unless we wish to do so, and such a wish cannot arise in us unless we know we are asleep. Another quality we ascribe wrongly to ourselves is that we can “do.” Man as he is can do nothing. Everything happens; everything is an accident. This is very hard for people to accept. Even when we accept it with our minds, it is so deeply ingrained in us to believe that we can do, that we go on as before. This applies to so-called leaders as much as to the rest of us, even more. Ordinary man, man as he is, man as we are, can do nothing. We are under many influences of which we are quite unaware, from the planets, from the moon, from all the circumstances of life, from our heredity. Everything influences us. Every action we perform, every thought we think, every feeling, every sensation is initiated from sources outside ourselves. It happens.
Let us go back to the idea that man as he is, is an uncompleted being. What does it mean, that word “being”? As we are, we exist; “ex” (outer) and “ist” (isness). Our lives are exterior. We are empty inside. We have only the potentiality of our own being. We cannot develop any further without help and without a great deal of effort on our own part.
Nature has brought us to the point where we are. We have a certain time when there is a possibility for development and if there is no change, no development, then such as we are, we are destroyed forever. This is a terrifying situation to be in, but we do not see it. Nature does everything to excess. For the great bulk of humanity there is not and never will be any chance to be other than they are—to be born, to live out their trifling lives, and to die, destroyed forever. Gurdjieff calls this “manure for the moon.” At the same time, a certain number of the human race must make the necessary efforts to develop. By so doing, the contribution made by our planet to the cosmic harmony is brought closer to what it should be.
Gurdjieff describes the church as being a “hearth of comfort in our desolate existence.” For many people it is so and, of course, for many people that is enough. But for the man who searches, who feels that somewhere there is a clear and precise explanation of the end and aim of life, who is dissatisfied with what he is and who seeks a means to a more becoming state of existence, the man who is hungry and cannot be fed with pious platitudes, the man who is, in a special sense, disappointed with life—this man may be able to hear something in what is being said here. Gurdjieff said, “Such can perhaps smell something.”
From remote antiquity schools have existed on this planet which can be called Schools of Psychology. Look at the word psychology: psyche, the self or the soul, and ology, study: the study of the self, or more accurately, myself. Many great works which have come down to us from ancient times are psychological studies; the pyramids, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, mythologies, fairy tales, the music of the Troubadours, and many other things. Most of these things were intentionally made in the past with immense labor by possessors of great knowledge, in order that their knowledge might not die with them but be passed on to posterity. There is a great deal to be understood from these things. There is nothing vague or cloudy about the information contained in these works. Such works are as precise and exact as mathematical formulas, if we could read them and measure not only the knowledge they contain but also our own level of being. Our being is commensurate with our understanding.