Being Defeated by the Same Thing Over and Over

Your awareness of this pattern should actually encourage you. It means you have become more focused on one of your biggest obstacles and drains of energy. Use your greatest weakness as your greatest strength by making an intention to observe yourself every time it emerges. This will help your work tremendously.

Confusing Transcendence with Control

The methods described here are about getting free of certain manifestations, not controlling them. If you work long and hard enough you’ll eventually see mechanical manifestations completely as “other” and not fall into being identified with them. The more this occurs, the less they will ever appear. With higher consciousness comes freedom, intuitive understanding, and spontaneity, something very different than a rigid control.

Pretending to Work When nothing is Changing

It’s important to remember that absolutely everything eventually becomes its own opposite. Keep this in mind while you observe your work, as your tendency will be to tell yourself you are making progress when really you are standing still. Every morning focus on your goals for the day. Every evening, evaluate your success or failure accomplishing your daily goals, and evaluate what you might change to do better. This problem also has to do with lies and unity. Only the I who wants to be conscious is the genuine one. The rest of them are lying.

Being Identified with Being Identified

This is a very common pitfall, and is related to the fact that with consciousness work everything seems to get worse before it gets better. This is an illusion. You become way more aware of your mechanicalness and negativity, and that awareness makes it seem like there is more of it than ever before. You can take heart by understanding that the fact it seems worse means you’ve made great progress. You stand to gain the most energy and consciousness at the very times you are most identified. If instead of despairing you immediately pull yourself back to self observing, you’ll keep going forward.

The Happy Face Syndrome

While it is true that there is no good use for negative emotions, it is not true that a person can realistically experience and express only happy thoughts and feelings all the time. Discomfort, hunger, and pain are ways your body tells you an adjustment needs to be made. Anger, repulsion, and fear are ways your instincts tell you to defend yourself against someone or something in your environment. These are just a few examples. One must discriminate to survive, and this is also true of emotions.

Analysis Paralysis

Don’t fall into the trap of making your work complicated. If anything, it’s too simple. A lot of times the best solution is to just turn it off whatever it is. Picture yourself walking up to a blaring television and just pushing the power button off. Click. It’s that simple.

Feeling Like You’ve Lost Your Personality

There may be some element of truth in this for a short while. Most human interaction is built on automatic parroted responses and lack of attention. When you take that away but have not yet achieved the spontaneity of higher consciousness, you could seem bland to yourself and others. You may feel a bit like the hole in the donut, like everything you observe in yourself is fake, or you may feel constant self observation is making you too serious. A remedy to this is to remember your goal and that with work you will reach it. Make sure you are still having fun, taking time for recreation and relaxation.

Going to Extremes

This kind of work takes a great deal of persistence and effort. You do have to stretch yourself and get out of your comfort zone, but going too far too long can lead to strain and exhaustion. That kind of work is counter productive. You have to know when to be easy on yourself, when to throw the dog a bone so your system can rest and replenish. If you are genuinely committed, you won’t confuse that with bailing out or being lazy.

Being Too Dependent on a Teacher

Have you done your homework? That’s the really important question. A teacher can give tips and encouragement. She can help clarify things when you get confused. It’s a useless weakness to look toward a teacher for any other sort of guidance. With consciousness work you have to motivate yourself, put in the work, and verify every single experience on your own. You have to question everything a teacher says until you have proved it to be valid by your own experience. Any other sort of attitude will lead to cult behavior.

Bad or Useless Groups

It’s all there somewhere on the Internet, so buyer beware. Groups related to higher consciousness or Fourth Way studies run the gamut from worthwhile to just a colossal waste of time to genuinely exploitive. There are groups obsessed with history that swear you’ll be led astray by anyone who is not the student of a student of a student of Gurdjieff. Some “Gurdjieff groups” spend hours in sit-still close-eyed meditation, the very thing Gurdjieff sought to escape from. You should be able to get a clear and coherent description from one of the group members exactly what he has gained from the group’s practices and exactly what you would have to gain by participation. As with all consciousness work, you will have to verify this for yourself.

XI. Glossary of Fourth Way Terms