Gurdjieff's Transformational Psychology: The Art of Compassionate Self-Study

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

My life has been a quest for truthful self-knowledge and to answer the question of why I exist. The search to find answers to these questions led me to the transformative psychological practices of George I. Gurdjieff and these are the focus of this book.

I arrived in Berkeley, California, in December 1964 to attend the University of California. The Free Speech Movement that signaled a major change in the consciousness of young people throughout the world was just beginning. Berkeley was the epicenter of that energy, an energy that involved drug experimentation, protests against the Vietnam War and more importantly a revolution in consciousness and spiritual awakening. My major at the university changed a number of times until I settled on psychology. I wanted to understand my own life and vaguely realized that psychology was the key. However, the study of psychology at the university level proved disappointing to me. It revolved around a set of theories perpetrated by old white men who were overly intellectual and emotionally undernourished.

By the time I finally received my undergraduate degree in psychology in 1970, I was so disappointed with what passed for the study of human psychology that I became a carpenter. The study of psychology at the university had been purely an intellectual pursuit. It was not experiential and I never felt I learned anything practical about my own inner workings. On the other hand, carpentry was an excellent choice for me. I developed real skills and had experiences that balanced out the lopsided over-development of my mind due to many years of formal education. I never gave up my study of psychology, but continued it through a process of self-study that I discovered during my last few years in college. When I finally felt I had enough life experience, self-knowledge, and practical skill, I returned to graduate school and became a psychologist.

During the last few years of college, I discovered the ideas and practices of Gurdjieff. His system for human development differed dramatically from the mainstream current of psychology. The methods were practical, experiential, and transformative. The study of psychology became for me the study of myself. The Work, as Gurdjieff’s system is called, emphasizes that the responsibility for real change in oneself— psychological transformation—lies with the individual, rather than mediated through someone else such as a therapist. The emphasis of psychotherapy focuses on a difficulty or dysfunction that has become so pronounced that the client seeks help with the problem, and it depends heavily on the therapist’s directing the client’s progress and helping him learn about himself.

GURDJIEFF

Whereas my formal education in psychology at college had left me confused, empty and provided no real understanding of myself, Gurdjieff’s presentation had just the opposite effect. When I came in touch with the Gurdjieff Work, it felt as if I had walked by a gigantic magnet and every part of me — my thoughts, emotions and my body — was magnetized and pulled towards it. I felt for the first time that I was being fed real ideas, concepts, practices, and everything was experiential and not just intellectual. I started to understand myself and what I was experiencing.

Whereas everything that I had learned in college felt purely subjective and liable to change at any moment, the Work was different. It illuminated and made understandable many experiences that I already had and I sensed that this knowledge and understanding came from a very high level — beyond Gurdjieff as an individual man — from a center of knowledge and understanding that existed outside of any particular time or culture. My reaction to what Gurdjieff presented created in me the need to know more and a craving for personal transformation.

The first step in the Gurdjieff Work was to learn how to find the truth about myself. Gurdjieff placed the responsibility of finding this truth squarely on my shoulders. It was not a matter of believing his ideas or following a guru, but depended on my own self-study and the knowledge gained through that study. Gurdjieff’s method, which actually consists of many practices, begins with learning to study and observe oneself objectively. Ultimately, this method promised to lead me to find the aim and purpose of my life.

Gurdjieff was a contemporary of Freud and Jung, but is rarely, if ever, mentioned in histories of psychology. He was born in approximately 1877 in Alexandropol (now Gyumri), Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire. A great many biographers have written about his childhood, his search, and his teachings.

By the time he was in his early twenties, Gurdjieff had decided to devote his life to answering the questions of the purpose of life on the earth and the aim of human existence, and the nearly unbridgeable gaps between the vastness of human potential and humanity’s limited development thus far. How was it that people’s great potential had failed to materialize? How did it happen that, time after time, people repeatedly engaged in destroying each other’s existence? War, throughout history, results in the wholesale decimation of all the advances of a particular civilization.

He could not find the answers from intellectual authorities, in the Church, or in books; and thus he was driven to his own practical research. His search took him to centers of esoteric learning in the Near and Far East. He found schools where the psychological history of the human species had been preserved, along with practices that could restore human beings to their essential humanity. What he learned seemed so crucial that he was compelled to bring these teachings to the West. In the early twentieth century, he began by establishing groups in Russia to disseminate what he had found. Today, his work has spread around the world.

Gurdjieff found answers to his questions about the human predicament. His answers were inner psychological answers, not external ones (economic, social, or biological). He found it was the inner psychological state of people, their state of consciousness, that determines the way people interact with one another and develop cultural behavior, including the periodic need to engage in war. He determined that people’s inner psychological state had become distorted, and in turn, their culture then perpetuated its own distortions, resulting in a unique dilemma. Humans had developed an ambiguous state of consciousness that was neither fully awake nor completely asleep, and they lived in this waking-sleeping state, believing they were fully awake. Gurdjieff created conditions to help people experience and understand the reasons for their abnormal state of consciousness and its terrible consequences. He developed methods to enable them to verify their inadequate state of consciousness and to improve it.

Gurdjieff’s Work was made difficult by two facts. First, from the time he began teaching, the world was in turmoil. It began with the Russian Revolution, spanned two World Wars, and the birth of the nuclear age in Hiroshima. Second, the very people he would depend on to disseminate his ideas and methods were themselves not fully awake, but were also in the state of waking-sleep.

His attempts to communicate also included the role of creative artist. In Russia he worked on a ballet which, though never completed, was the possible stimulus for his later compositions in music and dance. He collaborated with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann on hundreds of pieces for piano used for the unique form of sacred gymnastics, now known as the Movements. He let it be known that he would like to be called a teacher of dancing. He was also an author. His first book appeared in 1933, but he was displeased with it and it was soon withdrawn.

During the 1920s and 30s Gurdjieff worked on his magnum opus, All and Everything, ten books in three series. The first series was a mythical account of the history and malaise of human life entitled, Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. The second was a somewhat allegorical account of his friends and travels called Meetings with Remarkable Men. The third, a kind of confession, was Life is Real, then Only When I Am.

With the one exception of the book he withdrew, none of Gurdjieff’s writings were published during his lifetime. P.D. Ouspensky, a major pupil of Gurdjieff’s, published an account of the early groups in Russia under the title, In Search of the Miraculous (initially it had the much better title, Fragments of an Unknown Teaching) in 1949. Gurdjieff confirmed that this was an accurate account. In 1950, the year after his death, Gurdjieff’s first series, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson was in print. The two books are in stark contrast. Ouspensky was a journalist and wrote clearly and engagingly. Gurdjieff did almost the opposite, writing a complex, mythological, comic and strenuous critique of the whole of the modern world spanning thousands of years.

In this book I make considerable use of both In Search of the Miraculous and Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. A significant place is also given to the ideas of another of Gurdjieff’s leading pupils, A. R. Orage, whose ideas on psychological transformation were written up by C. Daly King in what he called The Oragean Version. And I use explanations from several of John G. Bennett’s books, another English pupil of Gurdjieff’s and by Rodney Collin, a pupil of Ouspensky’s.

Gurdjieff continually experimented with the transmission and application of his transformative practices. This constant evolution can be seen in the accounts of his early work and lectures, then his work at his institute at the Château le Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon, and finally in his later group work. His writings also show constant evolution. I surmise that the reasons for his changes in exposition and application were that he was searching to find and refine the most effective means to transmit the teachings he had assembled so that his followers could make correct use of them.

Gurdjieff had noticed that his teachings were often too narrowly interpreted. Different groups, sometimes in different countries, fixated on a particular aspect of the Work to the exclusion of other important parts. For example, a group might fixate on self-observation and make that aspect of Work the centerpiece of their efforts. This is a common fault we all share when we find one method useful and then repeat it while dismissing other methods that might be equally important and effective. This is especially significant if the aim of Gurdjieff’s legacy is the harmonious development of men and women.

PSYCHOLOGY

My background is in psychodynamic and somatic psychology. Psychodynamic work focuses on the intrapsychic and unconscious conflicts within an individual and their relationship to human experience and behavior. The overarching belief is that through increasing a person’s insight, psychological integration and healing can occur. Somatic psychology is an interdisciplinary field that involves the study of the body, somatic experience, and the embodied self. It includes therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body. Both these areas of psychology resonate with the processes of self-study that characterize Gurdjieff’s methods. In addition, I have practiced Gurdjieff’s methods, worked with groups, taught the Gurdjieff Movements, and been involved in the Work for over forty years. In exploring Gurdjieff’s methodology, I will bring in what I consider relevant and supportive psychological concepts and practices. This is an experiential book in that what I will present is meant to be worked with and not simply remain ideas written on a page.

If Gurdjieff focuses attention on the individual and their work on themselves, then I can also say that mainstream psychology primarily focuses on relational units, by which I mean, the dyad of therapist and client. The therapist-client dyad emphasizes the leadership of the therapist in healing a problem that the client brings in. The emphasis is to reduce the client’s suffering and increase his or her insight. The therapist is tasked with observing the client and guiding him toward health and out of suffering. This is a psychology of relieving suffering and helping the client to function better or at least attain their previous level of functioning.

Those familiar with the practice of mainstream psychology may notice that finding the aim and purpose of one’s life through self-study and self-observation is not its primary focus. Both in research and therapy, current psychology remains concerned with understanding and making adjustments in personal and interpersonal behavior, with the aim of better functioning. By contrast, Gurdjieff’s method aims for transformation of the inner life of a person rather than simply adjustment—it is a spiritual psychology concerned with actualizing inner potential.

Psychologists today often use the words soul and spirit. Perhaps they begin to recognize there is something more important in human psychology than adjustment or correction of behavior. Some psychologists may even recognize that a part of every man and woman—usually a part buried under their ordinary consciousness—cries out for greater connection, self-understanding and development.

An integral human capacity that connects Gurdjieffian psychology and mainstream psychology is the development of self-compassion. Both psychologies have inadvertently neglected the development of self-compassion — the root of empathy and understanding of oneself— alongside the development of consciousness and insight. When self- compassion is left out, we miss a vital catalyst in the transformation and creation of inner life. But, you may ask what is self-compassion?

Compassion is a word having two parts, com meaning together, plus pati meaning to suffer. The general definition comes from the Old French and implies a deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it. Every normal person has at moments felt compassion for another person or animal. And yet, we rarely experience this emotion in relation to ourselves. Self-compassion as used in this inquiry means the ability to observe and accept the truth of myself, allowing myself to be affected by what I find while maintaining an attitude of kindness and interest in understanding my behavior and experience. Self-compassion does not occur automatically, but has to be learned and practiced during the process of acquiring experience and knowledge of ourselves whether it is through psychotherapy, religion, a spiritual practice, or the Gurdjieff Work.

Without self-compassion, real emotional growth may be stymied. This is due to a little recognized psychological process that occurs when we try to evolve psychologically. Modern psychology alludes to this process when it refers to the shadow side of consciousness. As we gain more knowledge and understanding of ourselves, there is often the simultaneous growth of an interior psychological judge that offsets and resists inner evolution. This judge occurs in the shadows (we are unconscious of it) and can derail us. Such a shadow process can lead to the fundamentalist thinking so evident in many religions where the world is seen in extremely black and white terms. In this way, religions originally designed to expand human consciousness end up narrowing consciousness. In my practice as a psychologist and my experience working with Gurdjieff’s system, I have witnessed the negative effects of this inner judge on myself and others and how it curtails emotional growth. I have found an antidote to these negative effects in the practice of self-compassion.

WE BELIEVE WE ARE AWAKE

Periodically, in the many forms of therapy—cognitive behavioral, analytical, object relational, depth psychology, or Jungian psychology—the questioning of a patient’s beliefs becomes the focus of therapy. Beliefs determine our values, desires, behavior, vocations, relationships, etc. Psychologists become experts at dissecting, interpreting, and relating a client’s suffering to his or her beliefs. By gradually understanding belief structures, a client may be able understand the causes of their suffering. But what about the therapist’s beliefs?

Rarely, if ever, does the therapist look at his own beliefs and assumptions, particularly about whether the client in front of him is awake, and more importantly, whether he himself is awake. The unexamined belief of both therapist and client that they are awake is never examined. Is their belief correct? Are they awake? If we look carefully at certain terms used in psychological parlance, such as transference, countertransference, and projection, they are actually clues that unconscious mechanisms operate in the midst of this conscious therapy. It is possible that client and therapist are engaged in a waking-sleeping level of consciousness, one moment asleep and dreaming and the next moment awake. It is here that Gurdjieff’s understanding illuminates what is actually taking place in our lived experience and obligates us to examine what we believe to be our awake state of consciousness.

What does it mean to be awake? For the purposes of this inquiry we require a definition. It is not sufficient to say or believe that we are awake, nor can awake be defined as not asleep. The meaning of awake as used here is as follows: Being awake is a state of consciousness in which a person is aware of where he is, what he is doing, his inner and outer condition (including thoughts, emotions, movements, and sensations), and as he does something, or simply is, there is a part within him that is clearly experiencing his existence and aware of being alive in the present moment.

Gurdjieff developed practices that allow people to verify their waking-sleeping state, break free from their sleep and experience an actual awakened state. Although Gurdjieff could clearly see the connection between the destructive tendencies of civilizations and the waking-sleeping consciousness of their inhabitants, waking them up would prove to be very problematic.

To wish to wake up, one must notice that he or she might not be fully awake; for this to occur, one must see this sleeping aspect of their conscious state repeatedly. Becoming aware of the sleeping nature of one’s consciousness can only be accomplished through self-study—that is, through correctly conducted self-observation. When a person sees through the veil of sleep and gathers proof that he is asleep most of the time, then the wish to escape from this waking-sleeping state may take hold. The Work is a vehicle for helping people become fully alive, wake up out of their semi-sleep, gain their own independent knowledge, and find the purpose of their own and humanity’s existence.

Gurdjieff’s Work is not meditation. Although quiet inner exercises are a distinct group of practices within the Work, such inner exercises are more active than meditation and require our active participation. The practice of objective self-study is to be done in the midst of ordinary life because it is here that one must learn to wake up.

This book in many ways is a reference book of topics that I have found to be fundamental for the study of oneself and the process of acknowledging my sleep and beginning to awaken. The book is structured so that the ideas proceed from basic concepts and exercises to subjects that are more complex, with the most sophisticated subjects and practices at the end of the book. My purpose in covering such a wide range of topics is to encourage you, the reader, to become interested in your own self-study and to explore areas of personal interest that you may not have previously recognized. The Gurdjieff Work is not about following another person’s path. It requires that you become a researcher of yourself, seeking to understand how and why you are trapped in your own unique waking-sleeping state.

Bringing together Gurdjieff’s great legacy with its unique gifts for humanity and useful supporting material from current psychological practice is complex and will take some time. I ask you to bear with me as I explore ideas, practices and my own experiences to put flesh on the bones of these transformative practices.

Russell Schreiber

Sebastopol, California

July 2013

PART I

A PSYCHOLOGY OF TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER 1

ATTENTION

As you read this sentence, you are making use of an extremely important ability: your capacity to pay attention. Attention is an instinctive function that is indicative of our degree of health. Our capacity to pay attention is diminished when we are ill, tired, or feeling stressed. If we suffer a head injury or a stroke, our attention may be permanently affected. Our relationship to this wonderful human capacity of attention is similar to using a magnificent tool of which most of us have almost no understanding.

In this chapter, we are going to explore many aspects of attention. Primarily, we will explore attention as a capacity we use to gain self-knowledge. It is impossible to understand anything without using attention. But the degree of attention each of us has does not represent a finished product. As we shall find out, its functioning varies from moment to moment. Attention can also be improved, and at the end of this chapter we will look at some exercises to learn about attention and how to develop it.

LIFE’S JOURNEY

I am certain that I am not alone in imagining my life as a journey that began at my birth and will end at my death. However, modern life tends to shield us from experiencing the terror of our approaching death and realizing the time-limited nature of this journey. In many ways, the pace and demands of modern life anesthetize us to death’s inevitability by the infinite distractions it makes available. A single lifetime is actually very short, as most people over the age of fifty soon realize. Of course, these questions probably arose for us as early as our teenage years. We questioned why people acted the way they did and what the meaning of life was, but these questions were soon forgotten.

When we see that the purpose of our individual existence remains an enigma to us, we have to invent meaning. We learn to value making a living, having children, getting material things, enjoying ourselves; but, while doing so, we learn to ignore the other critical questions of life and also those facing humanity. Our many activities give us some relief from the gnawing fact of our approaching demise.

Most people are on this journey without any idea of where they are headed; they do not want to look up and out or wonder where all this is leading them. Our so-called consciousness, — that supposedly alert, cognitive state where we are aware of our situation and ourselves— remains preoccupied with interests we have accidentally found or have gravitated toward because of our subjectivities and personalities. The majority of people in Western society desire to have more: more money, more material goods, more happiness and security, more sexual satisfaction, more fulfilling jobs, and so on. These desires easily fill up our lives and become habitual, just as the ability to appreciate life in the present moment seems to be decreasing. Most of our aims are future-oriented. Our activities primarily revolve around providing safety and security for our bodies and our psyches. The need to be safe distracts us from living in the present moment. Activities as diverse as mountain climbing, hobbies, making money, addictions of every sort, TV, the Internet, etc., all can distract us from the present moment and the important questions of life.

The fact that we are asleep to our primary underlying motivation— the need to feel safe and secure—limits our understanding of ourselves. Our need for security is similar to the air we breathe or the ocean for sea creatures; it is so pervasive that unless our cocoon of safety is penetrated, we do not even notice how it pushes us around. Our inability to notice this constant, underlying need for safety is in the nature of our distracted consciousness—we cannot notice it because of our lack of self-awareness at any given moment. We remain in a semiconscious state, unaware of our motivations. It is important to realize that an understanding of our actual state of consciousness is fundamental to any real understanding of ourselves. Let us examine this more closely.

KNOW THYSELF

In the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were inscribed the words, gnothi seauton, know thyself. Gurdjieff bases the possibility of human evolution on this ancient idea: to know myself, to be aware of myself, to understand myself. The knowledge referred to here is not superficial knowledge, but rather self-knowledge that can elucidate the profound meaning of my life. This is a knowledge and understanding I have to find for myself. Teachers, friends, and therapists can help me, but the real—and invisible—work is done within me. This immediately raises a profound question: How can I know that what I find out about myself is trustworthy? How do I learn about myself objectively so that I can rely on the facts I find? What characterizes this objective knowledge and how is it different than the superficial knowledge that typifies my current knowledge?

For most of us, knowledge about ourselves is scanty and superficial. We may know, for example, that we were born to certain parents in a certain country. We went to a certain school. We had such and such friends. We like the way certain people look and act. We like a certain-shaped body in our sexual companions, and their faces must look a certain way. Why this is so, we have no idea, and for the most part, we remain uninterested. It is as if we are blind to our inner lives. We just want things to go well and to feel good. We don’t want to be depressed, scared, anxious, insecure, or frustrated. We live out our lives moving toward what we have come to like and away from what we dislike. What is beyond like and dislike? Almost always, we remain uninterested in what this might be.

This lack of interest in our psychological state presents a difficult problem for those who want to evolve. Our dilemma, as Gurdjieff found, is that most of us do not notice we are asleep and uninterested in our lives. I am referring to our ordinary state. Have you ever noticed that most of the time you cannot remember any details about what you did even three days ago? I am placing the emphasis here on the word details. Most of us can remember we were at work, at school, or traveling. But the details of our experience—the impression of ourselves doing something and realizing we were present—climbing into the car, having the feeling of air on our faces at a particular moment, knowing how hot it was, being conscious of how we felt, what we were thinking— all that is simply gone. It remains unremembered because although we experienced it, it was not recorded by us in a useful way. We were not present. There was no I there to record it, only the mechanism of ourselves going through the motions.

Of course, our lives are punctuated by events we enjoy, but other important experiences are lost to us. Furthermore, most parts of us are not interested in learning more about ourselves, about what sort of consciousness we usually have. This was Gurdjieff’s quandary. How can human beings be made aware of the fact that they are not conscious and might still become conscious, if they already believe they are conscious and thus remain uninterested in making any effort?

I have found the following analogy useful in understanding my condition. Imagine a young fish swimming in a foul, polluted area of a river near a factory that dumps chemicals into the water continuously. The water she swims in is not fresh, yet it is the only water she knows. Because of her limited experience, she is uninterested in finding fresher water, since most of her time is spent just looking for things to eat and trying to avoid predators. Such is the state of consciousness of most people. They are not aware of the precariousness of their situation and the limited nature of the consciousness they are swimming in. They will not be aware of it until they have glimpsed another state of consciousness. Then they must see how easily they drop back into their habitual patterns, back into the muck they are used to.

DEFINING ATTENTION

As human beings, we have a most important tool to help us in our journey toward self-knowledge and greater possibilities. However, for the most part, it has developed in a lopsided and haphazard manner. That tool is attention. What is attention, how is it useful, how did it develop and have we ever thought about it?

Attention may be defined as the state of mind wherein a person concentrates on some feature of his environment to the relative exclusion of the rest. If his attention is haphazard, yet the primary means he has of collecting facts about the world or self-knowledge, then the knowledge he receives will likewise be fragmentary and limited. Thus we have a very limited and rather eclectic array of self-knowledge that is stored in us as associative memories. These associative memories do not give us any kind of reliable self-knowledge. Nor do we have any method for learning to focus our attention more accurately.

Child rearing, education, and the environment to which a child is exposed as they mature influence the quality of their attention. As a therapist, I find that individuals imitate the type and quality of attention of those who were around them during their formative years. The first assaults on attention begin in childhood. Parents instruct the child, Pay attention to what you’re doing, Be careful not to spill things on the table, Watch carefully how you’re walking, Don’t hurt yourself, Don’t run, you’ll fall, etc. This type of so-called education and directing a child’s attention continues in school, where children sit for six hours each day trying to focus on what the teacher is saying when their bodies and minds want to move, create, or daydream. Their teachers, outside stimuli, hunger, and other bodily sensations haphazardly pull their attention around and gradually develop in them a lasting pattern of on and off attention, where one moment their attention is focused on something, and the next moment their attention is pulled toward any accidental impression that catches it.

The environment (impressions of people, surroundings, circumstances, and situations) binds a child’s attention and programs it quickly. By the time they reach kindergarten, most children have developed what I refer to as focused attention. If a child lacks the ability to focus his attention as well as others, he may be labeled as having attention deficit disorder (ADD). Focused attention is an important capacity to develop in order to lead an effective life. However, if we wish to acquire true self-knowledge, there is a subtler, yet deeper, attention we must cultivate.

It is important to recognize that we have at least two distinct types of thought in which our attention participates. The first type is simply associative thought. This is a relatively random process of thinking that is active whether we are awake or asleep and is perpetually animated by either external stimuli or our inner environment of memories, emotions and sensations—it is similar to the motor of a car that is left running which is going nowhere in particular. We have little control of our associative thought process. The other type of thought is directed thought where we direct attention and thought in solving a problem, directing our actions, etc. This type of thought makes use of focused attention. Ordinarily, our attention is pulled about haphazardly by associative thought. Associative thought often interferes with directed thinking and prevents us from using our attention to think clearly. Learning to apply attention through directed thinking is where the possibility of our evolution begins.

Jacques Lusseyran was blinded at the age of eight in a school accident. He says the following about attention in his masterpiece, Against the Pollution of the I:

Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, all men have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is not simply a virtue of intelligence or the result of education, and something one can do without. It is a state without which we shall never be able to perfect ourselves. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.¹

Lusseyran went on to lead a children’s resistance movement as part of the French underground during World War II. He was able to develop his attention to such a level that he memorized the details of each of his six hundred child accomplices, even though he couldn’t see them. He served as head of the children’s resistance until it merged with the main French Resistance. Lusseyran’s blindness had forced him to develop not only focused attention, but other possibilities of attention that remain dormant in most of us.

Just as we have different types of thinking, we have distinct types of attention. The first is unfocused associative attention, developed randomly by the process of reacting to our environment. The second type is directed or focused attention and requires some intentional effort on our part. The third type of attention is more subtle than the others and is utilized in the process of participation that will be explained in last part of this book.

Our ordinary process of attention is associative, subject to any incoming impression, developing in a kaleidoscopic environment that constantly distracts us. The environment pulls on our attention, using up psychological energy and causing neurological patterns to develop randomly. Within this randomly developed system we gradually learn to direct our attention or focus on something we choose. The ability to focus attention is developed by efforts demanded of us by caregivers, education and our culture. Thus, within our so-called conscious state, there is eventually developed an interior pattern of language, feeling, and sensation that either automatically and haphazardly pulls our attention about or which we are able to direct and focus to a limited degree. It is a testament to our organism that attention functions as well as it does, considering the poor education it has received.

Our attention almost always functions without our knowing or understanding it—except, perhaps, when we are sick or tired and we may notice a problem with paying attention. At times I notice a decrease in my cognitive awareness due to external impressions: If it is too noisy during a test, or when someone in a movie theater is wearing perfume or crinkling a bag, I might find I cannot sit next to that person and also pay attention to the test or the movie.

We may also notice an increase in the ability to pay attention after we have ingested certain chemicals or organic substances. For example, with coffee or a cigarette we might concentrate better. With methamphetamines, concentration temporarily soars to heights that delight, but soon wanes as the drug’s effects wear off. The difficulty with all these highs is that the increase in attention is automatic (that is, requires no effort on my part). My body and psyche have not yet developed to the point where they can produce such an experience without such artificial help. Thus, a mechanical increase in my attention without my own effort depletes me, leaving me feeling used up, believing I require more of the drug.

Focused attention is primarily developed and directed through our visual function. As such, attention becomes intimately tied to vision and the manner in which vision operates. Even though he was blind, Lusseyran realized that vision was about moving forward and manipulating objects.² Science has discovered that the visual faculty is actually an extension of our tactile function. Attention, then, becomes an extension of our hands through vision. It allows us to apprehend objects, people, and even scenes at a distance.

Because we do not usually make an intentional effort to direct our attention, and it becomes gradually more intimately connected with and primarily activated by vision, attention becomes more and more automatic and a new faculty replaces it: the faculty of correlation. Correlation is a learned cognitive function that labels objects, scenes, and experiences, which are then stored and linked in memory. Correlation allows us to use language to communicate about the physical world, and we use it to make the world understandable to ourselves. Unfortunately, correlation develops the words and labels into shorthand symbols, and these symbols gradually replace real attention and simply activate previously stored associations and memories.

Correlation, with its randomly stored patterns of associations and symbols pulls our attention about haphazardly, hampering our ability to think in depth or sustain an enquiry. In school, we develop this ability to correlate words, ideas, and situations in order to become thinkers. However, just developing this correlative ability does not teach us how to think deeply. Instead, we become shallow thinkers, easily manipulated by advertisers, teachers, our parents, the government, and others. The net effect is we do not think for ourselves. Therefore, we cannot act from our true selves. Gurdjieff says the following about the effect of so-called education on our ability to think:

… And [education] played a part because, based, as we have already said, chiefly on compelling the young to learn by rote as many words as possible differentiated one from the other only by the impression received from their consonance and not by the real pith of the meaning put into them, this system of education has resulted in the gradual loss in people of the capacity to ponder and reflect upon what they are talking about and upon what is being said to them.³

By the time we are adults, our heads are filled with such an assortment of associations that one association calls up another purely auto matically. We are walking around, and for some reason we hear a song running through our head, or a person’s face reminds us of Bill, and we suddenly remember how angry we are with him. This thought then reminds us further of the fact that he could never make a good living, but was very handsome, and so on. Such is the nature of our attention and thought. They remain undisciplined and shallow. Our inability to direct our attention becomes a problem when we begin to wish to know ourselves in a deeper way because there is a definite relationship between attention and self-knowledge.

Some years ago, ADD became a recognized psychological disorder, and soon many children had been diagnosed with it. These children were unable to focus their attention even for short periods, with very serious effects on their ability to learn. At the other end of life, Alzheimer’s disease affects millions throughout the world. While there is no scientific evidence that the type of attention we have developed may somehow predispose us to Alzheimer’s, loss of short-term memory and the inability to pay attention are symptoms of the disease. Of course, other factors may be involved in such disorders as ADD and Alzheimer’s—for example, genetics, nutrition, environmental conditions, drug usage in either the parents or the individuals, or other determinants.

Our capacity to focus our attention deliberately is constantly under attack. You can see this clearly by just watching television for an hour. Notice how advertisers manipulate your erratic attention. They rarely allow you to focus on one image for more than a second. This ploy seems both intentional and unconscious. The unconscious aspect may involve the advertiser’s inability to focus his own attention for more than a few seconds. The intentional aspect involves, of course, hooking the viewer. The ads, more often than not, include some pretty woman or handsome man using something (that is, driving a car or being admired for their looks). A great deal of advertising plays upon the fantasy that if you use their product, you will end up having more sexual satisfaction, or at least, avoid or alleviate some form of suffering, such as a headache, wrinkles, arthritis, etc. All of this passive television viewing is an assault on our ability to pay attention and establishes psychological patterns that become habitual.

As a psychologist, I have become increasingly interested in neurological patterning. If we do something more than a few times, our tendency to repeat that action is increased. Given a sufficient number of repetitions, it quickly becomes automatic, habitual. The benefits of this automatism may be useful for many endeavors, but it becomes problematic when it involves negative or useless tendencies, such as the inability to focus our attention. The more our attention remains unfocused, the more this lack of focus becomes a standard pattern for us. If our neurological habit pattern becomes one where our attention is pulled by any chance association, wouldn’t we expect this tendency to increase with age?

Alfred R. Orage, a student of Gurdjieff’s, addressed the question of habits. A brilliant writer and thinker, Orage worked extensively with Gurdjieff on the translation of Gurdjieff’s two major works, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and Meetings with Remarkable Men. When speaking about thought processes, Orage said:

Theoretically, of course, we can place ourselves in any of many circumstances tomorrow; we can theoretically place ourselves in circumstances which will require us to think. But it is a thousand to one that we shall choose tomorrow’s circumstances, not by their value to use as opportunities for developing thought, but merely in accordance with our already formed habits.⁴

Of course, the major instrumentality in forming these habits is our attention.

John G. Bennett, one of Gurdjieff’s leading pupils, once likened people’s attention to the assembly line in a peculiar sort of factory. In his analogy, the factory was very unusual, in that anyone could just throw anything he wished onto the assembly line. Attention would then only become the assembly line itself, acting as the glue that linked together all the diverse elements thrown onto it. We might surmise this factory would be terribly inefficient—one could not even be sure what the final product would be. In many ways we are similar to Bennett’s factory in that we also manufacture products—in our case, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions—and if attention is our assembly line, and we wish to produce self-knowledge, we need to know specifically what we want to place on the assembly line and how to place it there.

Without attention, we are unable to understand ourselves or anything at all. Here, it is important to point out that knowledge and understanding are two very different phenomena. For example, I can look at the tools on a workbench and know many things about them, their shape, their composition, and even their weight. However, that knowledge does not mean I understand how to use the tools or their purposes. We are all in this situation with regard to our attention. It is a tool we use automatically, but poorly, all the time. We rarely direct it, and we understand only poorly its characteristics and purpose.

DEVELOPING ATTENTION

If you wish to learn about yourself and the possibilities of your own evolution, you must learn to use your attention. At the end of this chapter, I list a few informal practices that may give you a taste of new possibilities for developing your attention.

After many years, I have come to believe that real education, in contrast to academic education, can be found in what I call the University of the Self. What I learn and understand about myself becomes immediately mine. You might notice that I used the words learn and understand. Learning about oneself through practice produces a different quality of knowing than reading some bit of information in a book. It is through learning how to study myself that I can begin to taste understanding.

Understanding itself can be of two different types. Simple understanding means you can relate ideas and concepts to aspects of your own experience. Everyone possesses this type of understanding. It is the result of living in society, and, to some extent, a result of one’s education. Deeper understanding actually begins with self-study. It is not a degree granted by a school or given by another person. True understanding comes from the invisible, inner university that resides within each of us. For most of us, because of our haphazard attention, it has become a rather dilapidated building, scarcely used. It needs restoration and funding! Attention is the tool we can use to restore and fund it.

Simone Weil, the mystic and philosopher, noticed that the children she taught displayed a very