Osho Quotes on Gurdjieff

Osho Quotes on Gurdjieff

1. One of the great tantrics of this age, George Gurdjieff, says that identification is the only sin.
2. George Gurdjieff is right when he says that man is a machine, but by `man’ he means all those who are living unconsciously, who are not aware, who are not awake, who do not respond to reality but only react. Ninety-nine point nine percent of human beings come in the category of machines. With these machines, astrology is possible.
3. George Gurdjieff used to say, “My whole teaching can be condensed into one word, and that is disidentification.” He is right. Not only his teaching can be condensed into one word, all the teaching of all the masters can be condensed into one word: disidentification. Don’t be identified with the mind.
4. Gurdjieff follows the path of will. He says,’Bring tremendous effort — to the very climax, so that you can become crystallized. Struggle hard, make all the efforts that you can.’
5. Gurdjieff’s work is for a particular type, the will type — people who can work hard and very persistently, almost madly… because the whole thing depends on a very deep crystallisation of the ego. Once the ego is crystallised then further steps can be taken. But the whole Gurdjieffian system depends on you having a centre, a self. Ordinarily you don’t have a centre. In fact Gurdjieff says you don’t have a soul — that is only a possibility; you may die without attaining it. What he calls the soul is nothing but a crystallised self, and crystallised so much so that it takes the position of being sovereign, enthroned, in the crowd of your many selves. Ordinarily you have many egos, not one, and a conflict continuously going on. Sometimes one is in power, sometimes another is in power; a sort of democracy. A political head is not permanent, so much politics goes on within. So much politics and so much chaos goes on within that you never know where you are, who you are, what you are. Sometimes you have the feeling that you are this, but by the time you realise it that self is gone, is no more m power. When you have a permanent self then Gurdjieff’s system really starts functioning. To attain that permanent self, one has to do tremendous work, in fact absurd work. Just out of too much work crystallisation happens; the work functions out of a chemical opportunity.
6. Gurdjieff says that the only technique to become integrated is selfremembrance, and all the masters of the world have been insisting on being more and more conscious. The more conscious you become, the more a certain dryness happens inside. Literally, you become more and more dry, more and more aware, more and more conscious and alert. Because awareness is fire, that’s why you become more and more dry.
7. George Gurdjieff used to say that every man is not born with a soul. On the surface it appears not believable because for centuries you have been told by the priests that everybody is born with a soul and you believe in it. It is comfortable to believe that you have a soul. It feels very good, cozy, warm, that deep inside you, you have a soul, eternal, immortal. And Gurdjieff says you don’t have a soul at all! You are jut hollow within; there is nothing inside you — just habits and habits, a cluster of habits and at the very center there is nobody. The house is empty. The master has not yet come or is fast asleep. Gurdjieff is right: you are only potentially a human being. A possibility is there, but the possibility can be easily missed. And millions of people miss it because to become conscious, to become a soul, arduous effort is needed. It is an uphill task. To remain in your habits is cheap, easy, downhill. Gravitation is enough; it goes on pulling you. It is like when you are coming downhill in a car, you put the engine off. You don’t need any gas for coming downhill; the pull of gravitation is enough. But that cannot be done when you are moving uphill; then gas will be needed. You will need some integrity, some power. And only consciousness releases power. Consciousness is the key, the ignition key, that releases power in you, and you become capable of soaring high.
8. Gurdjieff used to say that man has no soul. He used to say that you have got no self, because self means self consciousness; otherwise, how can you be said to have a self? If you are not conscious, how can you be a self? How can you be an individual? So Gurdjieff’s teaching doesn’t believe that every man has got a soul. He says, “Every man has got a potentiality he can develop, he may not develop.” If you become self conscious, then you develop the individual; then you become the individual. If you are not self conscious then you are just one object among other objects, and there is nothing more. Gurdjieff’s teaching makes this central point the supreme point. He says, “Try to remember yourself without any object. Try to remember yourself without any object, without any relation to anything else. Remember yourself directly, simply.” It is very arduous; in a way it seems impossible. You cannot remember yourself without in any way relating to something else — Can you? Can you remember yourself? Can you feel yourself?
9. I know, and Gurdjieff knows that you are born with a soul — but the idea that we are born with a soul has not been helpful. It has made man more asleep: We are born with a soul, God is within you, the kingdom of God is within you, so what do you have to do? Things that are not within you, work hard to get them — money, power, respectability — because nobody says, “Every child is born with money, every child is born with political power, every child is born with respectability.” Nobody will say that. These things have to be earned. Freedom, consciousness, God, whatever you call it, has to be discovered. It is hidden, dormant; it has to be made dynamic, has to be made fully mature. It should be brought to flower and fruition. But to tell people, “You are born free — and equal in dignity and rights”…. People can go on lying so smoothly, with such beautiful words — destroying those words. Nobody is equal. This is a psychological truth. Neither in your body nor in your mind nor in your talents… nor among your geniuses — nobody is equal. A Sigmund Freud is a Sigmund Freud; a Bertrand Russell is a Bertrand Russell; a D.H. Lawrence is a D.H. Lawrence. There is not even one other D.H. Lawrence, and never will be. Each individual is unique. This idea of equality is so ugly, but it has become almost the religion of the contemporary man — `equality.’ I say to you, it is the most destructive idea that has penetrated into the human mind. You have to be reminded about your uniqueness.
10. What Gurdjieff was saying has been told by all the great masters of the world. “Awake,” Buddha says. It is the same; words differ. “Be watchful,” Jesus says. Be as watchful as if the master of the house has gone out and he has told the servants to remain alert because he may come any moment and he does not want them to be asleep — any moment he can come. They have to be alert, on guard, all the time. Jesus says to be alert. In alertness the first experience is that you have a personality which is false. Gurdjieff calls it the false will. And you have something else, something impersonal in you, which is the true will. Your appearance from the outside is false; what you experience from your innermost core is true. You are a mixture of the accidental and the essential, of the incidental and the intrinsic. You are the meeting point of time and eternity, a crossroads where matter and consciousness meet, where body and soul meet, where real and unreal shake hands. Yes, you are exactly a crossroads. And you have to be very alert not to choose the false — because the false is very appealing. The false makes all kinds of propaganda for itself; the false will try to convince you with all kinds of arguments. The truth remains silent. Unless YOU are ready to receive it, it will not even knock on your doors.
11. The East says: Just remain unidentified. Remember — that’s what Gurdjieff means when he says’self-remembering’. Remember that you are a witness! Be mindful! — that’s what Buddha says. Be alert that a cloud is passing by! Maybe the cloud comes from the past, but that is meaningless. It must have a certain past, it cannot come just out of the blue; it must be coming from a certain sequence of events — but that is irrelevant. Why be bothered about it? RIGHT NOW, this very moment, you can become detached from it, you can cut yourself away from it. The bridge can be broken right now — and it can be broken ONLY in the now. Going into the past won’t help. Thirty years before, the anger arose and you got identified with it that day. Now you cannot get unidentified from that past; it is no more there. But you can get unidentified this moment, this very moment. And then the WHOLE series of angers of your past is no more part of you.
12. Only if you do, if you work hard, if you try to transform yourself… And a thousand and one times you may fail, but if you go on and on, then success comes. It comes, certainly, because it has come to Jesus, it has come to a Buddha; it can come to everybody! It is everybody’s birthright. You can have it, but you cannot have it cheap. You will have to pay for it, and you will have to pay with your whole life. Less than that, and you will not attain it. That’s what Gurdjieff means when he says ‘work’.
13. Gurdjieff used to say: Man is a prisoner, and he has lived in the prison so long that he has completely forgotten that he is a prisoner. And the prison is so big that you cannot feel it, because you never see the boundary. The boundaries are very subtle — the walls ARE there but they are very subtle and transparent, made of pure glass, crystal glass. And you have lived in the prison so long that you think this is your home, this is your life. this is how life is supposed to be. Unless somebody comes from the outside and says ‘This is a prison, and I know what freedom is’ even the desire to be free will not arise in you. That is the chain. A master is one who is outside the prison, is one who is awake. He can create devices, occasions, for you to be awake. He can create some disturbance in your sleep. All these meditations that you are doing here are nothing but efforts to disturb your sleep — to shake you up, to shock you so deeply that it goes beyond your shock absorbers and reaches you. To shout — a master goes on shouting. Jesus said: Go on the housetops and shout as loudly as you can. A master is one who shouts loudly. There are many shock absorbers around your you have buffers which absorb anything that comes from the outside. The alarm won’t work if your ears are closed; if you are using ear-plugs the alarm won’t reach you. And. just to be safe, people have created many shock absorbers, many buffers around them. Otherwise life will be miserable, very miserable. There are so many shocks happening every moment that you cannot allow them to reach to you. To prevent the bad you have created the buffer — but it prevents the good too. To prevent the enemy you have closed the door and locked it and bolted it. But now it prevents the friend too. Unless some ray from the beyond enters your being, unless you taste something of the transcendental, even the desire to be liberated will not be there. A master does not give you liberation, he creates a passionate desire for liberation. He makes you aflame with an unknown passion that you have never known before, never felt t fore.
14. Gurdjieff says that unless you realize the first thing — that you are in prison, that you are the prison — then there is no hope for freedom. If you already believe that you are free, you are a hypnotized sheep which believes himself to be a lion — exceptional, there is no need to be afraid — which even believes he is a human being. He goes on seeing other sheep being killed, and still remains in a hypnotized state, never being aware of his actuality. To be free, if you already know that you are free, there is no problem.
15. About consciousness also, I have differences with George Gurdjieff. When he says ‘Be conscious’ he says ‘Be conscious that you ARE.’ He insists for self-remembering. Now, this has to be understood. Your consciousness has two polarities. One polarity is the content. For example, a cloud of anger is inside you — that is the content. And you are aware of the cloud of anger — that is consciousness, the witness, watchfulness, the observer. So your consciousness can be divided in two — the observer and the observed. Gurdjieff says: Go on remembering the observer — self-remembering. Buddha says: Forget the observer, just watch the observed. And if you have to choose between Buddha and Gurdjieff, I will suggest choose Buddha. Because there is a danger with Gurdjieff you may become too self-conscious — rather than becoming self-aware, you may become self-conscious. You may become an egoist. And that I have felt in many Gurdjieff disciples — they have become very very great egoists. Not that Gurdjieff was an egoist — he was one of the rarest enlightened men of this age. But the method has a danger in it: it is very difficult to make a distinction between self-consciousness and self-remembering. It is almost impossible to make the distinction, it is so subtle. And for the ignorant masses it is almost always self-consciousness that will take possession of them; it will not be self-remembering.
16. Gurdjieff says the one thing is: Be settled in the observer. Buddha says: Look at the observed. My own approach is different from both. My approach is that Gurdjieff’s method is more dangerous than Buddha’s method, but even in Buddha’s method there is bound to be some tension — the effort to watch. The very effort to watch will make you tense.
17. My own method is: You relax. Neither watch the watcher nor watch the watched. Just relax, be passive. If something floats and you cannot help seeing it, see it. But don’t make any effort to see it deliberately. If you are relaxed like a mirror, if some cloud passes by, it will be reflected. Be like a mirror — lucid, passive. Drop both — the Gurdjieffian method of self-remembering, and the Buddhist method of watching. But if you have to choose between Gurdjieff and Buddha, choose Buddha. If you have to choose between Buddha and me, choose me. Relax. And just see things. And there is nothing much — if you miss something, it is not of worth. You can miss, you are allowed to miss. Take life easy, take it easy.
18. Gurdjieff used a Sufi exercise. Sufis call it “halt”. For example, you are sitting here, and if you are practising the exercise of “halt” it means total halt. Whenever the teacher says “Stop!” or “Halt!” then you have to stop totally whatsoever you are doing. If your eyes are open, then stop them there and then. Now you cannot close them. If your hand is raised, let it be there. Whatsoever your position and gesture, just be frozen in it. No movements! Halt totally! Try this, and suddenly you will have an inner awakening — a feeling. Suddenly you will become aware of your own frozenness. The whole body is frozen, you have become a solid stone, you are like a statue. But if you go on deceiving yourself, then you have fallen into sleep. You can deceive yourself. You can say, “Who is seeing me? I can close my eyes. They are becoming painful.” You can deceive yourself — then you have fallen into sleep. No — deception is sleep. Don’t deceive yourself, because no one else is concerned. It is up to you. If you can be frozen for a single moment you will begin to see yourself as different, and your center will become aware of your frozen body.
19. First it must be understood what is meant by awareness. You are walking; you are aware of many things: of the shops, of people passing by you, of the traffic, of everything. You are aware of many things, only unaware of one thing: yourself. You are walking on the street: you are aware of many things; you are only not aware of yourself! This awareness of the self Gurdjieff has called “self-remembering”. Gurdjieff says, “Constantly, wherever you are, remember yourself.” For example, you are here. You are listening to me, but you are not aware of the listener. You may be aware of the speaker, but you are not aware of the listener. Be aware of the listener. Feel yourself here; you are here. For a moment a glimpse comes, and again you forget. Try!
20. Art out of madness, art out of neurosis, art out of pathology, is not real art. Gurdjieff used to divide art into two kinds. He used to call this kind of art subjective, and another kind — the Taj Mahal, or Khajuraho — objective, because when you have painted, your work is finished but the painting will live. If you have put in the painting a certain pattern of neurosis, whoever will see the painting and think about the painting and look at the painting will have the feeling of the same kind of illness arising in him — the same nausea, the same sickness. The painting will become a mandala; it will become a yantra. That’s how in the East we have used paintings: as yantras. A pattern can be created so that if you look at it, it gives silence. A pattern can be created so that if you look at it, it makes you tense. The objective art, Gurdjieff says, is the art which leads people towards silence, towards blissfulness, towards inner harmony, towards grace. And the art that leads people towards pathology, neurosis, perversion, is not really art. You can call it art, but that is a misnomer.
21. All human beliefs are conveniences, but dangerous. Because of them the possibility to evolve is nullified completely, negated completely. The prisoner can think that he is not a prisoner, but already a free man. This is convenient to believe because then there is no burden. But then this prisoner can never be free. So Gurdjieff says that the first necessary step towards freedom is to recognize the humiliating fact that you are a prisoner — only then does growth become possible.
22. An unawakened — sleeping — person is not a doer. Things are happening to him, but he thinks I am doing. The awakened person also is not a doer but thinks I am not the doer. This is the only difference. There is no difference in their actions but there is difference in their attitude — knowing — of their performance. The awakened also walks, the unawakened also walks. An individual full of awareness walks with the knowledge of, ‘I am not’, and a person without awareness walks full of ego — full of pride. This is the difference. The crystallization of an awakened person happens when an individual takes birth in such a person. Jung also says the same thing which Gurdjieff says, when a person is a awake within, his individuality becomes stronger. So, it is natural to raise a question whether the individualization of an awakened person becomes strong or dies out. Is it transformed into ego or does it go away? This is merely the difference in language, nothing more. I call that as the birth of void — emptiness which Gurdjieff calls crystallization. Really speaking ‘an individual is born for the first time by being ‘void’, because by becoming void, he achieved that virat — huge individual. By becoming void, by losing individuality, a person becomes ‘an individual’ for the first time, but this is difficult to understand.