"Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine"

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (13 January 1866 – 29 October 1949) was an Armenian philosopher, spiritual teacher and writer. Gurdjieff developed a method for working towards a unified and higher state of consciousness and achieving full human potential. He called this "The Work" and its teachings are called the "Fourth Way". He said that the teachings he brought to the West came from his own experiences and were influenced by Sufi, Zen and Yoga mystics he met in his early travels. At different times in his life, Gurdjieff started and closed various schools around the world to teach the work.

I personally think that Gurdjieff was a special kind of genius. Not a genius in the usual sense of intellectual virtuosity, but a genius in the sense of a powerful ability to recognise profound “truth”. His intuition of primordial laws from which the universe is formed was profound. I don’t know here these insights came from. He claimed they came from wisdom shared with him by Sufi brotherhoods and other sources. Possibly he said this to lend what he thought would add mystery and authority to them, or maybe he just gleamed them himself. Either way he recognised them as profound and spent his life sharing and serving them.

Waking sleep

Gurdjieff taught that most people live their entire lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep":

"Speaking frankly... contemporary man as we know him is nothing more than merely a clockwork mechanism, though of a very complex construction"

"A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies".

Gurdjieff said that people hold a number of beliefs that he questioned;

1. they are conscious,
2. that they possess a constant selfhood,
3. that they can act intentionally (they have a will)
4. and in some cases that they are in possession of an immortal soul.

He challenges these beliefs saying that people are trapped by their Habituality and faulty identification.

Gurdjieff‘s primary psychological assertion is that ―we do not remember ourselves. This is because we are absorbed in or identified with what we are doing, or, more precisely, what is happening to us. We are asleep, in a state of “waking dreaming” and we pass through our lives only partially aware of our existence.