George Gurdjieff

When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.

Jesus of Nazareth

 

Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.

G.I. Gurdjieff

  

Gurdjieff was an conundrum , kind of like Pai Mei in Kill Bill 2, he beat the hell out of you to make you stronger, just like a good black smith does with a sword. My favorite story about Gurdjieff, at his institute in Paris, a new student comes up to him and asks, master what is it that I should do? To which Gurdjieff replied, go out back and dig a hole as deep as you are and then stand in it; the man went and dig the hole and stood in it. After getting tired of standing in it, he went back to Gurdjieff and asked, master what is it that I should do now? To which Gurdjieff replied, go fill the hole up. The man went and filled the hole up and returned to Gurdjieff again and asked the same question and got the same response. He dig the hole, stood in it and then filled it up. This went on 3 or 4 times before the man finally figured out that he was not supposed to be asking master what to do,instead he should be asking himself.

I told that story to a friend of mine and she replied, you know Gurdjieff just saved that man from a lifetime of servitude. Upon seeing this page she said that self-observation is only the path; self-change is the destination. I would add without change we are dead to the world anyway because life is change.

Gurdjieff 'methodology was self-observation to encourage self change. In a way he was the father to a great deal of 20^th Century Psychology as well as the 60’s ideals of independence and authority figure loathing; a set of clothing that fit me perfectly at the time. Gurdjieff was an odd sort of a fellow, a traveling hypnotist, in the Middle East. He stumbled upon an ancient occult mystery school in a small town in Bactria Afghanistan.  It is said to date to the time of Zarathustra, the first of the Prophets. The school had to become secret in the 6th century when Islam took over the area. Gurdjieff stayed with the school and learned the secrets of Zarathustra. Gurdjieff did many odd things. Synchronized movement and dance were all designed to awaken the soul to a higher level of awareness through group repetitiveness. Gurdjieff felt most humans are sleeping souls; stuck in their comfort zone; afraid to come out. His way of luring people out utilized shock; emotional shock to awaken the intellectual center to its ultimate responsibilities.

Gurdjieff referred to humans as 3 brained beings, with an intellectual center being the slowest of all; 1000 times faster is the emotional center and 1000 times faster than it is the instinctual center; interesting correlation to 3 again. Many people of renown studied at the Gurdjieff Ouspensky Center in Paris. Most notable IMO were P. D.Ouspensky and Maurice Nicoll. Their insights into the human personality are quite remarkable. Maurice Nicoll wrote a series of books on the teaching that I would recommend Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (6 volumes).
What interests me most about his 3 brained beings, I have been doing an OOP analysis (Objected Oriented Programming) on the human personality and I quickly came to the realization that my analysis had already been done a long ago; for my objects were appearing as Gurdjieff's teachings.My manuscript is meant to describe that analysis in computerese; a growing common language, now that everyone has a computer or two in their homes.

Ouspensky  wrote The 4th Way, a book on awakening. Knowing that the emotional center drivers every thought and emotion in most of humanity, the purpose is to awaken the intellectual center so as to no longer be a slave to our emotions or instincts, The 4th way was meant to awaken all 3 centers and have them cooperate on an equal basis. No longer would the intellectual center be in a client server / slave master relationship with our emotional self, it would now be in a peer-to-peer relationship. That is the purpose of self-observation and self-change.

I believe these insights come to us from a time long before Zarathustra; a time when they had greater understanding of the human enigma.This period was before the end of the last Ice Age; an age that brought us Astrology Yoga and a 12 base count and all the things the Roger Bacon told us about in the three books he wrote as requested by the Pope.This age was an age of inner reflection and led to this external age; a time of things and toys, a time lacking true inner joys, and a time that has given us lots of noise, but it is a time that has led us again towards internal poise.

The personal work of self-observation is for all one’s life.

We project onto others what we cannot see in ourselves.

Maurice Nicoll

Something that is evil at one level of evolution can be good at an earlier stage because it provides the essential stimulus for development. But you want to judge everything by your own standards. You have reached a comparatively high level and so you see what you fight against as evil. Just think of the others, those who are at an earlier stage of development. Do not bar them from the path toward progress and evolution.

When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.

Man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and, this being so he has no will and very little control of himself, if any at all. What we have to study, therefore, is not psychology, for that applies only to a developed man, but mechanics. Man is not only a machine but a machine which works very much below the standard it would be capable of maintaining if it were working properly.

P.D. Ospensky

The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable first restlessness then absence of pleasure. It appears like an illness, monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this without knowing it, they work in offices and they drive a car, they picnic with their families, they raise children. Then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song and it awakens them and saves them from death, some never awaken.

Anais Nin 1903-1977

The Diary of Anais Nim, published posthumously

A sleeping being is easy to spot, they are kind of like water settling to the lowest spot that gravity drags then to; they cling to emotional issues for emotion drives every aspect of their life. I ask what is emotion but the culmination of experience, held subconsciously; the information is so vast that the subconscious can only communicate it to a single threaded consciousness as a culmination of experience or emotion. It is a mechanical process that can be explained and objectified and then replicated by a machine or computer. But humans have a gift of an intellectual center, that if awakened can supersede this mechanical process, hopefully bringing and end to the emotional mess humans have made of this world.