G.I.Gurdjieff

Yet such a genius will have his mood spoiled for the whole day if he does not find his slippers by his bed when he wakes up in the morning.

Gradually our interest is attached to the new thing, eventually to such an extent that we sink into it from head to foot. Suddenly we are possessed, captivated by it. We have disappeared. And this propensity to be captivated, this infatuation, is a property of each one of us under many different guises. It binds us, taking away our strength and time, and leaving us no possibility to be objective and free—two essential qualities for anyone who would follow the way of self-knowledge.

Man is he who can “do,” but among ordinary people, as well as those who are considered extraordinary, there is no one who can “do.”

A person who sleeps cannot “do.” With him everything is done in sleep. Sleep is understood here not in the literal sense of organic sleep, but in the sense of a state of associative existence. First of all, we must awake. Having awakened, we will see that as we are, we cannot “do.” Then we will have to die voluntarily and be reborn. Once reborn, we must grow and learn. When we have grown and know, then we will be able to “do.”

Thus, from the positivist point of view, man differs from animals only by the greater complexity of his reactions to external impressions, and by a longer interval between the impression and the reaction.

But man, like animals, is incapable of independent action of his own, and what we call “will” in man is nothing but the resultant of his desires. Such is a clearly positivist view.

One of our greatest errors is our illusion in regard to our “I.” Man such as we know him—the “human machine” who cannot “do” and all of whose seeming actions simply are “done”—cannot have an invariable and unified “I.” Our “I” changes as frequently as our thoughts, feelings and moods, and we make a serious mistake in considering ourselves always the same person, when actually we are always someone else and never the same person as a moment ago. Man has no constant and invariable “I.” Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation says “I.” And, in each case, we assume that this “I” speaks for the Whole, the whole person, and that a thought, desire or aversion represents the expression of this Whole. In actual fact this assumption is entirely baseless. Each thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never actually expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only as a material entity in a physical body and as an abstract concept. In his psyche, man has no unified “I,” but rather hundreds of separate small “I’s” that are very often either entirely unknown and inaccessible to one another or, on the contrary, hostile to one another, that is, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, we are saying or thinking “I,” and each time, our “I” is different. First it is a thought, then a desire, then a sensation, then another thought and so on, ad infinitum. Man is a plurality; his name is Legion.

The alternation of “I’s,” their constant struggle for supremacy,
is directed by accidental external influences. Warmth, sunshine, nice weather—all these things immediately call up an entire group of “I’s.” Cold, fog, rain, call up another group, with different associations, feelings and actions.

The mind allows us to perceive one aspect of things and events, emotions another aspect and sensations a third. We can, however, have the fullest knowledge of something only if we examine it simultaneously with our mind, feeling and sensation.

The first principle is that nothing be taken on faith.