Gurdjieff and our “sleeping” society
Posted on 11/17/2012
I didn’t know about Gurdjieff until recently as result of a casual conversation with a very intellectual friend.
Researching a little came out that:
- Gurdjieff was a spiritual Armenian teacher (died in 1949)
- He thought that most people live their whole lives in a kind of hypnotic state (described in Gurdjieff words as: “Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.”
- The man created a method or pathway to get out of that state (“The Work”) that emphasizes in minimizing daydreaming and being absent minded.
- He thought that the personal decision to change is the hardest obstacle to overcome.
- It’s said that he influenced many people but also had many critics.
I usually enjoy to explore ideas from different thinkers with the criteria that humanity tends to live in a kind of cyclical way based on automatic repetition (how we can’t escape from some loops of tradition because fear of change and the unknown, better defined by our desire to stay in the comfort zone). From a practical angle many of these philosophical views raise the existential question about if we live 365 days per year or repeat the same day 365 times (who does not do this to a certain degree?)
Some books about Gurdjieff are available in Amazon.