Self-Observation and Some Insights Gained From It
The Fourth Way. Part One. By Lars Adelskogh.
If a man begins to observe himself, he will soon have a couple of important insights. The first one is about “I”. We say “I am doing”, “I am sitting”, “I feel”, “I like”, “I dislike” and so on, and without thinking, automatically, we assume that we have only one “I”, which remains the same. This is our chief illusion, for we are not one. At one moment when I say “I”, one part of me is speaking, and at another moment when I say “I”, it is quite another “I” speaking. At one moment our attention is captivated by something definite and at the next moment by some other thing, and then we do not even remember what captivated us just a short while ago: a new “I” replaces or suppresses an old “I”, and all this process is going on all the time and makes up our inner life. At the one moment one “I” decides something. At the next moment some other “I” has already taken over and knows nothing of the decision of the previous “I” and of course is not prepared to carry it out. We sometimes complain about our absent-mindedness when, for instance, we have walked out of a room into another to fetch something there and being in the other room we have already forgotten what we were going to fetch. We do not see that this division is our normal state. In other words, we are split into hundreds and hundreds of different “I”s. The first insight to be gained by our self-observation can be summed up thus: “I” am not one; “I” am many.
The second insight is about the fact that it is very difficult to observe oneself. This difficulty lies in one single fact: very soon you forget to observe yourself.
Now I want you who are reading this to stop and to ponder the most important thing you have learnt so far, which is this: You can not, however firm a decision you make, observe yourself more than a few seconds. You quite simply forget about your decision to do so. You think of something else, and then of something else from that, and so it will go on for many minutes, perhaps even hours, before you suddenly wake up and remember: “Gosh, I was supposed to observe myself! And I forgot about it!”
The fact that we are not able to observe ourselves more than for brief moments is connected with the fact that we are not one, not a unitary “I”, but many small “I”s constantly replacing each other. One such “I” makes a decision about self-observation, but the next “I” soon appearing is up to something else and does not carry out that decision.
The fact that we are split into many “I”s implies that we largely lack will. If we were a unitary “I”, we would be able to observe ourselves however long; then it would just be a matter of doing it. But we cannot keep concentration and so we must admit that we lack will.
In Gurdjieff’s teaching, which is usually called the fourth way, self-observation has an important place. Two things are emphasized here: you must know what is the purpose of self-observation and you must, when observing yourself, know something of how man is divided. First we take the division of man, and then the purpose of self-observation.