George Gurdjieff - Ideas

Ideas

Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep."

"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies." As a result of this condition, each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that one can "wake up" and become a different sort of human being altogether.

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Famous quotes containing the word ideas:

    “The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.”
    —Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

    “If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness.... So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale.”
    —Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

    “My ideas are a curse.
    They spring from a radical discontent
    with the awful order of things.
    I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse.
    I play witch.”
    —Anne Sexton (1928–1974)