The “Sleep of the Mind”

In George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1927), he uses the phrase “the sleep of the mind”, asserting that people generally live their lives “asleep”.  Gurdjieff was a wanderer, an outsider in society, and like all “outsiders”, struggled to accommodate society’s desire to push everyone into defined boxes, to limit and control humans like machines.

Accordingly, like other wanderers of his era such as Hesse, TE Lawrence, and Rasputin, he decided the way to answer the questions that troubled him was to get on the road and seek out the truth through other people who had knowledge. He called these people “the seekers of truth”, and the knowledge he acquired through his wanderings was discussed in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men.

The essence of Gurdjieff’s writing can best be described by Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase “how to become what one is” (Nietzsche was another contemporary of Gurdjieff who was equally troubled by the limitation placed on the human personality by society).

For truth seekers who wish to  discover “who we really are”, it requires that they turn away from security and everyday routine and comfort. As Gurdjieff discovered, the mere act of wandering releases such people from the prison of their old personality, and detaches them from the chains of society.

Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, written around the time that Gurdjieff was wandering, stated that people prefer slavery to freedom, because the “burden of freedom is too heavy”. They prefer to stay asleep. To get beyond our avatar, (our container we wear for a lifetime in which we are dominated by the body’s nervous system that we are plugged into), and discover our true selves, we need to stand back and look at the wider picture.

The “essence” of ourselves that we are trying to rediscover is gathered by stripping away the features of the individual which are driven by everyday living. The inevitable petty mistakes, idiosyncracies, irrelevant habits and temptations we succumb to from time to time are just part of the journey and should never define, reduce a person or be taken too seriously.

Moral development doesn’t always keep pace with the opening of the doors of perception (the mystic Rasputin’s life is an example of that, as Colin Wilson pointed out in his 1964 short biography Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs), but the material world should never distract us, or become an attachment that limits us. It is simply part of the journey. The wanderer, the outsider, knows this instinctively.

Gurdjieff’s “fight against sleep” is linked to understanding that we are more than our physical bodies. Rudolf Steiner would sometimes examine a person he met by “seeing a person’s spiritual instead of his merely physical picture”. Phineas Quimby and (later) Mary Baker Eddy could see that a person’s physical sickness was a reflection of a sick mind.

By remaining detached from the relentless programming and conditioning of our physical world, and understanding that we are merely pilgrims passing through, negativity, ill-luck, sickness, and so on does not attach to us. We are awake.

In any event, we can break through the barriers of perception at any time. As HG Wells said in The History of Mr Polly:

But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a great discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change it.

It really is as simple as that. There is no need to limit ourselves. We can change our life at any time.

30 March 2024

[Book review: George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff – “Meetings with Remarkable Men”]