"Man is an undeveloped creation. He is not really man, considered as a cosmically unique being whose intelligence and power of action mirror the energies of the source of life itself.
On the contrary, man as we encounter him is an automaton. His thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. He cannot do anything.
In and around him, everything happens without the participation of his own authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive influence of culture and education, which engrave in them the illusion of autonomous conscious selves.
The modern person has no conception of how self-deceptive a life can be that is lived in only one part of oneself. The head, the emotions, and the body each have their own perceptions and actions, and each, in itself, can live a simulacrum of human life.
In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic "I am" in his presence, but only an egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will.
Many factors reinforce this sleep. Each of the reactions that proceed in one’s presence is accompanied by a deceptive sense of I - man is many I’s, each imagining itself to be the whole, and each buffered off from awareness of the others.
Each of these many I’s represents a process whereby the subtle energy of consciousness is absorbed and degraded, a process that Gurdjieff termed “identification.” Man identifies—that is, squanders his conscious energy, with every passing thought, impulse, and sensation.
This state of affairs takes the form of a continuous self-deception and a continuous procession of egoistic emotions, such as anger, self-pity, sentimentality, and fear which are of such a pervasively painful nature that man is constantly driven to ameliorate this condition through the endless pursuit of social recognition, sensory pleasure, or the vague and unrealizable goal of “happiness.”
- Jacob Needleman
-----
“Man has no individual “I”. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small “i”s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible.
Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, “i”. And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”
– G.I. Gurdjieff
-----
What Gurdjieff and Needleman describe above is known and taught in all esoteric spiritual traditions.
The goal of esoteric & psycho-spiritual work is to establish and connect with the real “I,” your true self/essence hidden behind many layers and parts of the mechanical false personality you mistake for your true Self.
---> Learn more:
https://veilofreality.com/2024/06/27/sub-personalities-invisible-forces-spirit-attachments-and-an-alternative-perspective-on-mental-illness/Показать полностью ...
Sub-personalities, Invisible Forces, Spirit Attachments, And An Alternative Perspective On Mental Illness
The sense of an independent identity and persona, separate and impenetrable from everything else, is the greatest illusion and spell we've fallen under. We are transducers of cosmic, universal, and conscious forces.