States of Consciousness

This Work begins by saying that we are not conscious. Right now you are looking at these words, and you are aware of yourself doing so. Yet this Work says that you are not conscious. It says that everyone in the world lives in a state that is referred to as "sleep." We are told that there are four levels of consciousness:

• The dream state experienced in bed.
• The state we are in now which the Work calls sleep.
• The third state is self-consciousness or consciousness of self which is what we try to reach through these efforts. Gurdjieff called it "le rappel de soi" or self-remembering.
• Then there is a level beyond that, objective consciousness, which very few know but which we can recognize in the great teachers who have come through this world.

So how can we be asleep when we are here aware of ourselves? The Work tells us that we are a stimulus-response mechanism—something happens in the external world and we respond to it. In our ordinary state, we are nothing but responses to outside stimuli. We imagine that we control our lives, that we make our own decisions, but with a little attention to the reality of life around us, we can gain a new perspective: everyone is just reacting to everything.

You can see it clearly in the work place. It is thematical. Something goes wrong and everyone gets mad and nobody is in control. That is one little facet of sleep. Another way to understand this idea as a state of consciousness is the fact that what we call thinking is nothing but a random flow of associations. I say the word "apple." One person tastes it, another remembers childhood memories, another sees it. One visual after another sends us along a certain path of thinking. What we assume is our own intentional reflection is most often an out of control process stimulated by the outside world. Another facet of sleep is seen in our ingrained attitudes. Surely we have enough honesty to know about that issue.

A common experience might be that of parenting. You find yourself talking like your parents did. You start pulling on that string and you find that most of your ways of being angry are the exact copy of your father or mother, right down to the way your jaw tightens. And you begin to see that so much of who you are is pure imitation, going way back into the unconscious days of childhood, and yet having total control of you. Even when you have completely rejected the source that you are imitating.

The irony is that as we begin to discover these realities, people close to us know a whole lot more about us than we do. They could have told us that years ago: "You're just like your dad!" But we can't handle that because we need our individuality, our sense of self and independence, and we are not prepared to see that the emperor has on no clothes.

Another example of this condition of sleep: a man wakes in the morning. He feels fine, the day is nice. He gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom and drops his toothbrush and this makes him mad. As he combs his hair, his comb breaks. This makes him mad again and he associates into thoughts like "you can't depend on products these days." He goes downstairs and the smell of coffee makes him feel better. But he spills his coffee on his lap and he is angry again. His newspaper is late and he feels impatient. When it finally appears, he reads it and responds. This is how we respond to the stimulus of life upon us.

Life is constant stimulus. There is something coming at us at every moment that we are awake. But our responses are all automatic, or as the Work says mechanical. They have been programmed in us since infancy. While we think we have consciousness, we really have very little choice in how we respond to any particular kind of stimulus. You may think you are in control, but if someone comes up and insults you, you are probably going to have a predictable response. This is another description of sleep. Being in that state where we respond to incoming life through our personality without having any control or any objective view of ourselves acting in our life. This is one of the sources of our massive unnecessary suffering. When we begin to examine the things that cause us unhappiness—with colleagues, with loved ones, with family—we discover how long the list is and why there is no inner peace.

It is our birthright to find that special inner sanctuary of peace, stability and harmony that makes us real contributors to the universe. This is the evolution that we are meant to reach. Imagine if every day of your life was lived in peace and contentment. People who have achieved this way of living often exhibit such a state of self-transcendent goodness that they can even face their mortality without despair, without fear, without bitterness. It is possible to reach a place in this life where the beauty and poetry and goodness of it all—which is spirituality and love—is at the center of our experience.

Other teachings try to help us along on that path, such as meditation and mindfulness. They may have tremendous value but most of them don't really teach us how to focus in on those details about ourselves that keep throwing us back into the turmoil. We all know people who have certain strong characteristics, quickness of temper for instance, and we accept that. We assume that's okay. But such persons are like a gerbil in a cage, never getting off the treadmill. Such people are unlikely to contribute to the beauty of the universe. From the perspective of spirituality, these persons are dead before physical death. They have missed the opportunity of their true potential.

That is the whole point of the ideas presented here: to evolve into our true selves, our higher selves, our real selves. It is an ongoing process. We don't get to the end. No matter how long we live, we must work at it every day. That is why it is known as "the Work." The Work says that we are not just asleep, but that we are also machines. A machine can be clicked on and off. The human ego doesn't like that idea at all. Most people are not interested in finding out how truly unimportant and insubstantial their egos are, how made-up they are, how trivial and selfish.

Finding one's true nature requires a leveling of the ground of all this distortion. That is the radical teaching of spirituality. "Seek not the honor of men" does not merely refer to awards, but points to what is truly valuable beyond humanity's ordinary set of priorities. These are utterly revolutionary ideas. No one lives by them except in the underground of spiritually-aware individuals. Why so few? Because each of us has plenty of pride, self-satisfaction and imagination about ourselves that we do not want to let go of in order to let something else come through.

The Work tells us that we live according to an imaginary picture of ourselves, built by literature, movies, parents, siblings. We can see these pictures manifested in how people walk and talk. If these pictures were taken away from most people, there would be nothing left. So this is a dangerous work. Gurdjieff said that if people saw themselves as they truly are, they would go insane. But there are safeguards in this work. It is a methodical system that provides knowledge to assist us in receiving new insights about ourselves. Without such information, we can get pretty serious vertigo when we experience new perspectives about ourselves. "Sell all you have and follow me" refers to the inner obstacles that keep us from authentic transformation. That transformation is also known as "awakening."

This Work is a method of awakening. "Seek first the kingdom of God" means seek first that state of being where the reality of God is palpable. That experiential dimension is the heart of all religion and spirituality. It deals with the experience of inner liberation from one's own agonies and weaknesses and entrance into that state of consciousness which is in touch with the powers of the cosmos. Quantum theories in physics are opening up the doors to the spiritual reality of which we are a part. Awakening takes continuous psychological effort, but at the same time, being in an awakened state is not ahead of us in chronological time. It is "above" us. So it is accessible now, but it takes a long time of doing this inner work to reach it.

The reason we can do this Work is because we have each had glimpses of these higher states in our lives. The trouble is that we may not have valued or recognized them for what they were because of our state of sleep. A moment on a beach, a sunset, where we are separate from the usual rush of life, offer us an expansion of inner peace and serenity which are the hallmark of higher consciousness. We see this in the great teachers of humanity, in their tranquility and acceptance. They accept all the unfortunate circumstances that come our way, including death, and live in that wisdom of acceptance and harmony which leads to self-evolution.

Human beings are an experiment in the universe: Can these little fragments, born out of supernovas and stardust, evolve into a higher quality of consciousness that can connect with the grand designs of the universe? People who have experienced these awakening moments offer us the following insights: "What you took as yourself begins to look like a little prison-house far away in the valley beneath you." (Maurice Nicoll)

Imagine a state of presence in the moment where you are so separated from your usual state of self that the part of yourself that is so full of confusion and ignorance no longer constitutes the parameters of your consciousness. Another quote from the teachers who have encountered higher consciousness: "It is no longer the old I but a wider, more comprehensive one. We do not lose ourselves in it, but on the contrary we truly find ourselves. A new breathing space, scope and sphere of action opens up and we realize only then how confined we had been before, how imprisoned and isolated." (Karlfried Graf Durckheim)

In this awakened state of consciousness we experience connection, and ultimately conscious love. All the great ideas that we admire about spiritual teachings are not abstract thoughts but expressions of human experience that are available to each one of us. But we must work on ourselves for them to bear fruit.