October 2008

Remember yourself always and everywhere.

Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff taught self-remembering as a fierce warrior fights in battle. He warred against sleep, and the system that he taught presented human beings as sleeping machines and the radical approach that was needed to awaken. He was a pioneer of self-remembering in the West, while he kept the origin of his teaching mysterious. Yet although his system included a cosmology of universal laws, he rated them below the practical effort of self-remembering. Even during his fascinating, idiosyncratic discussions with his students on man the machine and the earth as a pain factory, Gurdjieff would always remind his students that the Work was for awakening. In one meeting with his students, he pointed out that they had all missed something in their efforts at self-observation. When they could not discover what he meant, he told them, You did not remember yourselves.

Self-remembering is the central idea of the Fourth Way. In Gurdjieffs cosmology, the birthright of a human being is to be awake but the psychological condition of sleep prevents it. Because of this condition, humanity is uninterested in awakening, and if a human-being discovers they are asleep, they will find an excuse to forget or deny it. So Gurdjieff taught self-remembering as an experiment to demonstrate its value and as a way of life. He taught his students the difference between being asleep and being awake. He taught self-remembering as a continual, practical effort, bringing ones attention to ones Self at the same time as the activity that one is engaged in.

See the rest here:
Gurdjieff: Life is real only then, when 'I am' - Being ...