"Christ disciples even slept when He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all there. But do men understand it?" - GurdjieffMystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, (b.1872, d.Oct.29, 1949) while traveling extensively in central asia, turkey, north africa such as egypt, middle east in search of sacred knowledge, met and received teachings from the sufis, specially the naqshbandi sufi order. Gurdjieff synthesized many of the essential teaching of sufi thoughts. How to awaken humanity through conscious remembrance of their essence, awareness of heart and remembrance is some of the teachings of the sufis which Gurdjieff taught to the west in the earlier parts of 1900, at a time when sufi ideas were totally unheard of.
I quote selectively from one of Gurdjieff's article, Awakened Consciousness:
"Let us take some event in the life of humanity. Both states of consciousness, sleep and the (false) waking state, are thus equally subjective. Only by beginning to remember himself does a man really awaken. All that men say and do, they say and do in sleep. All this can have no value whatsoever. Only awakening and what leads to awakening has a value in reality.
In order to understand what the difference between states of consciousness is, let us consider the state of sleep. This is an entirely subjective state of consciousness. A man is immersed in dreams, whether he remembers them or not, does not matter. Even if some real impression reach him, such as sounds, voices, warmth, cold, etc., they arouse in him only subjective images.
Then a man wakes up. At first glance, this is a completely new and different state of consciousness. He can move, talk with other people, he can make calculations ahead, he can see danger and avoid it, and so on. It stands to reason that he is now in a better position than when he was asleep. But if we go a little more deeply into things, if we take a look into his inner world, into his thoughts, into the causes of his actions, we shall see that he is almost in the same state as when he is asleep.
The real world is hidden from him by a thick wall of uncontrolled imagination. He lives in waking-sleep. He is asleep. What is called "clear consciousness" is actually sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed.
It is, however, the most difficult thing there can be because this sleep is induced by our so-called education and maintained by the whole surrounding society.
HOW CAN ONE AWAKEN? HOW CAN ONE ESCAPE THIS SLEEP?
There is nothing new in the idea of sleep. People have been told almost since creation of the world that they are asleep and that they must awaken.
Christ disciples even slept when He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all there. But do men understand it? Men take it simply as a form of speech, as an expression, as a metaphor.
They completely fail to understand that it must be taken literally. And again it is easy to understand why. In order to understand this idea literally it is necessary to awaken a little, or at least to try to awaken.
I have been asked why nothing is said about this kind of sleep in the Gospels. But it is there spoken of almost on every page. This simply shows that people read the Gospel in sleep.
It can be said still more precisely that a man cannot awaken by himself, except in exceptionally rare cases, and we are not talking about those cases.
But if, let's say, twenty people make an agreement that whoever of them awakens first shall wake the rest, they already have some chance. Even this, however, is insufficient, because all twenty can go to sleep at the same time and dream that they are waking up. Therefore, more still is necessary. They must be looked after by a man who is not asleep any more, or who does not fall asleep as easily as they do.
The twenty people must find such a man and hire him to wake them up and not allow them to fall asleep again. Without this, it is impossible to awaken. This is what must be understood. It is possible to think for a thousand years. It is possible to write whole libraries of books, to create theories by the million, but all this is in sleep, without any possibility of awakening.
Therefore a man who wants to awake must look for other people who also want to awake and work together with them. This, however, is easier said that done because to start such a work and to organize it requires a knowledge which a sleeping man cannot possess."
# Reference
. Awakened Consciousness
. G.I. Gurdjieff and the The Hidden History of the Sufis
. A short biography | Gurdjieff
. Shaykh `Abdullah al-Fa'iz ad-Daghestani
. The Eleven Principles of the Naqshbandi Path
. Finding Gurdjieff Through the Paranormal (pdf download)
. image credit: galerie Gurdjieff
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