Gurdjieff - Sleep and Awakening

[Music] the whole of the gorge if tradition is infused with the idea that we are asleep and that we need to wake up typically people don't really understand what these terms mean and you can read many books and still not be particularly well-informed on what those terms mean and in fact it's a fairly natural thing for us to fall into imagination about what those things mean so let's try and add some meat some reason to this situation so that we can understand what's being talked about now when were asleep in bed and dreaming we're in our own completely subjective world there's nothing in there that or very little in there that relates to reality and those dreams can be pleasant or they can be nightmares and if nine magus but enough then we tend to wake up into our normal state so that's the bottom rung if you like on the ladder and then in the tradition the gorge of tradition people talk about our waking sleep so our normal state of consciousness what is meant by this is essentially imagination and as the word implies imagination is concerned with images images that we create in our minds daydreams all kinds of things that we unconsciously do throughout the day get lost in our imagination an imagination doesn't just consist of images there's also a continual chattering that goes on in the mind at all conversations that we have with ourselves and these conversations can be interesting they can be awful they can be just pure flights of fancy they can be conversations that we've had in the past that we chew over and over and over again in our minds or imagine conversations that were going to have in the future now there's nothing wrong with the imagination as long as we know that we're in imagination so what's the alternative to being an imagination well the alternative is being in reality and being aware of your own body of how you are feeling or the thoughts that are going on in your mind of the reality outside of you what you can see the colors smells sounds you know it's fairly endless of course we can't or typically we don't live in reality we live in our imaginations probably 99.9% of the day now you may say why would someone want to wake up from that well if what was in our imaginations was wholly Pleasant we might be tempted to stay there but in reality what sits in our imaginations is very often painful and I include memory within imaginations memory is essentially a stored bank of images and associations that the imagination can call upon and the problem is that our imagination our memory are conditioned so let's say a child is conditioned by its parents that whenever the child visits someone or goes out with friends or whatever the child has to look absolutely immaculate immaculately dressed immaculately groomed immaculate manners so on and so forth total over training while that child is going to grow up into an adult who believes that they are only acceptable to other people if they put on a good show effectively there are plenty of people like this and the other side of this particular coin is that the person is always afraid that they are not giving the right impression because this is how they've been programmed that they are not acceptable and they are not adequate there are lots of these conditionings we get his children they're almost endless and so we grow up living in our own programmed world full of images and ideas and little conversations that we have with ourselves that are our own little hell you know there are some pleasant things in there of course you know we recall Pleasant times and so on but actually we're locked into a world that is static gorgeou famously said that most people are dead by the time they're 30 it's a fairly harsh thing to say but what he was saying was that they are fully programmed and that is what they will be for the rest of their lives and depending on the programming they will either be moderately happy maybe or possibly very unhappy now it's a lot of talking the go Jeff work of waking up makes it sound like it's something you have to do and to interpret waking up as something we have to do some effort we have to make he's a terrible travesty because it's not like that at all waking up comes when we stop doing there's always some kind of paradox involved in the truth and so you might immediately think well stopping doing is doing well no it isn't what waking up requires is that we simply observe what's going on in our lives how we feel so useful think a thing at any time to ask yourself how am I feeling right now and just to feel it you might be a little bit anxious you might be a little bit sad you might be feeling some kind of anticipation for some future event whatever it is you just feel it you don't try and change it you don't criticize it you don't judge it you just look at it and observation as you probably read within in search of the miraculous response gives a very good example of throwing consciousness upon things it's like switching the lights on seeing what's there and many of the more unpleasant things that reside within us cannot live in that environment of light so we look we don't try and change we do not do doing is what is causes unhappiness ceasing to do is what will liberate us from it if we try to do if you try to change things we just make the labyrinth deeper more complex more difficult to get out of because our imagination and memory is like a huge labyrinth and we crawl around in it and when we think we think in terms of words and when we imagine we imagine in in terms of pictures and these things are just literally adding to the collection of memories and images and ideas that we already have and not allowing us to be free so the stopping doing is actually all we need to do it's not really doing the stopping doing happens on its own all you have to do is observe I say all you have to do it takes a long time to get to the point where you can just look at how you are feeling and what you are thinking and just say oh yeah that's going on and just take note so I've been involved with a number of groups so them you know fairly close to the origin of all of this that I close to Georgia and you find all kinds of strange behavior and these things are not readily understood by many people I think you spend ski-doos stay somewhere that ultimately the act of enlightenment if we dare use that word is simply a letting go and of course our ego is like a clenched fist it's like a monkey with its clenched fist in the goodie jar just can't get its Fist out unless it lets go of the goodies and it will not let go the good is and in fact the more the ego tries to get free the more it is pulling against the neck of the jar with its handful of goodies it cannot let go the good is because the good is our what it is so in effect you don't need to do anything to wake up you need to be and you need to be before you can observe so you need to be a little bit separate from what you're observing it needs to be a little bit of space and that space will only come about through practice now there is you need to have effectively an internal barometer for this kind of practice if you find that you're getting effectively more uptight little bit more anxious if your self observation is bringing about those results then you're not observing correctly observations should be or should be associated with a sense of however small but a sense of liberation of seeing something that you didn't see before all we have to do is dig down into the trash can and look what is there we don't need to empty the trash can it cannot be emptied and we don't need to live in the trash can if we're observing it then we're not living in it and all of us has a trash can inside of us and the aim of this worked some extent is not to live in the trash can and in fact to use the trash can there's energy for growth and then we get into another word or what does growth mean well what you are is not something that you understand normally when people talk about growth they talk about things like learning in life and acquiring effectively there's the idea of acquiring experience or acquiring knowledge or acquiring growth real spiritual growth want to a better word ease or comes about through a letting go through letting go of all the things that we think we know letting go of our prejudices letting go of our anxieties letting go of the things that we hold dear I mean go Jeff said that all we are asked to sacrifice is our suffering yet we hang on to it for dear life we do hang on to it we don't know why we hang on to it but the weapon we have is observing so to summarize this particular video don't buy into the notion that waking up is some heroic act of attention or some kind of effort some kind of doing it isn't is the opposite of that it's an inner relaxation and a simple observation of what is happening I tend to call it the pain radar we should have a pain radar operating within us that we use every now and then we just effective just scan how am I feeling Oh feeling a bit anxious No yeah feeling a bit sad oh yeah I'm feeling okay whatever happens to be the case and this is the way we need to do this work I've seen the results of people believing that they need to do something intense and it effectively violent to themselves please don't do that and don't let anyone convince you that that is the way to do this work it is not it's a very gentle and it's a very it's very gentle and it's a very sword well it's nonviolent there's no violence involved that could bring the unti of topics like self discipline the wrong kind of self discipline is literally one part of yourself bullying another but yeah they would go on forever so self discipline might be topic of another video hopefully that's being useful [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

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Keywords: Gurdjieff, Freedom, Philosophy, psychology, self, Power, will, life, observing, consciousness, understanding, observation, work, practice, Martin Butler, philosopher, reason, intelligence, observe, attention, philosophy, self-knowledge, liberation, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, desire, Kant, transcendence, transcendental, Idealism, idealist, freedom

Id: S23BGsNZnek

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020