In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 8
It is very hard to live without ‘buffers.’ …’Buffers’ …give him the agreeable and peaceful sensation that …no contradictions exist and that he can sleep in peace. ‘Buffers’ are appliances by means of which a man can always be in the right. ‘Buffers’ help a man not to feel his conscience.
Psychological Commentaries, Maurice Nicoll, Vol 2
Quaremead, Ugley, August 4, 1945 – A Note On Buffers
The place of Real Conscience has been taken by what in the Work are called ‘buffers.’ …Mr. Ouspensky …said: “Buffers make things easy for us. They prevent us from seeing what we are really doing and saying. … A well-buffered man or woman has no doubts about himself or herself.” Mr. O. said also that people with very strong buffers usually cannot observe themselves at all and they take themselves for granted. They are kept going by their buffers, …(A) well-buffered person, a person with very thick buffers, does not …seek to justify himself. It is only a person whose buffers are not quite so strong, and who begins to feel a little uneasy, who begins to use self-justification to keep his buffers going.
…the action of buffers is so powerful that no one can understand it unless he has begun to see for himself the existence of a single buffer in himself.
Toward Awakening, Jean Vaysse
Essence and Personality
…To observe himself …would make (man) see that something is false in his way of life and that his values are upside down. But a whole system of dampening devices —excuses and buffers—well-established in his person prevent him from seeing this. The excuses are different from buffers in the sense that they are an artificial development, always changing, always different and depending on what is expedient at the moment. They may serve to express buffers, but they have no deep roots themselves other than the urgent need of each personage …always to be right;…Buffers, on the contrary, are always deeply imbedded inner devices, conditionings that are securely set in the structure…..of the personality and have grown…..to damp down or camouflage or avoid the contradictions that make up the usual life of man—not only the contradictions between his different personages, but above all the contradictions between them and essence, arising from the abnormal predominance they have assumed. Buffers are permanent automatic mechanisms within the structure of personality, with whose development they have been built up. They have made its development possible, and thus it is they who maintain its predominance.
A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, Kenneth Walker
‘What is the best way of seeing buffers?’ another person asked.
‘Pay particular attention to any subject on which you are touchy. You have perhaps attributed to yourself some good quality, and that is an idea which lies on one side of the buffer, but you have not as yet seen clearly the contradiction which lies on the other side of it. Nevertheless you are little a bit uncomfortable about this good quality, and that may mean that you are in the neighbourhood of a buffer.’
Psychological Commentaries, Maurice Nicoll, Vol.3
Great Amwell House, August 7, 1948 – Buffers, Pictures And Work-Shock
…one is always touchy about something that is not real in oneself—some pretence—that is, some picture. A picture is a form of imagination about oneself—that does not correspond with the reality of oneself. It does not take in the opposite side —that is, the side on the other side of the buffer. A buffer stands like a wall between two sides that contradict each other…(Ouspensky) …said that Gurdjieff taught that as long as we live by means of buffers that prevent us from seeing contradictions, Real Conscience can never open to us.
…Yes—very disturbing it is to be touched by Real Conscience. It is indeed merciful that we have plenty of buffers and pictures to stifle it—especially as it has little or nothing to do with our ideas of what it is to be good, kind, patient, right, calm, tolerant, and all the rest of the things that the False Personality prides itself on possessing and ascribes to itself. Only the realization of one’s own nothingness, in its first rather terrible visitation, can make you understand what I mean here—when you begin to realize there is practically nothing in you that is worth anything under the incandescent light of Real Conscience. …How pictures, buffers, self-justifying, and the giants of pride and vanity, and all the hosts of False Personality gather their forces together and hiss and spit and are outraged, offended, at the very suggestion that one is not the most perfect example of manhood and womanhood on this Earth. Just notice for yourself, say, when you are given a little shock.
The Fourth Way, P.D. Ouspensky
Chapter 6
….conscience must be awakened. …and we can do this only by not being afraid to face contradictions in ourselves.
……Buffers divide us into sort of thought-proof compartments. We may have many contradictory desires, intentions, aims, and we do not see that they are contradictory because buffers stand between them and prevent us from looking from one compartment into another. When you are in one compartment, you think it is the whole thing, then you pass into another compartment and you think that this is the whole thing. These appliances are called buffers because, as in a railway carriage, they diminish shocks. But in relation to the human machine they are even more: they make it impossible to see, so they are blinkers as well. People with really strong buffers never see; but if they saw how contradictory they were, they would be unable to move, because they would not trust themselves…
….Only sincerity and complete recognition of the fact that we are slaves to mechanicalness and its inevitable results can help us to find and destroy buffers with the help of which we deceive ourselves.
Q. When one recognizes a buffer in oneself, can one do anything to get rid of it?
A. First you must see it; before you see it nothing can be done. And whether you can do anything after you have seen it depends on the size of the buffer and on many other things. Sometimes it is necessary to take a hammer and break it; and sometimes it disappears if you throw light on it, for buffers do not like light. When buffers begin to disappear and become less strong, conscience begins to manifest itself.
The Reality of Being
#72. The imagination of myself
We are all, such as we are, under the influence of our imagination of ourselves. This influence is all-powerful and conditions every aspect of our lives. On the one hand, there is this imagination, this false notion of myself. On the other, there is a real “I” that I do not know. I do not see the difference. It is as though this “I” were buried under a mass of beliefs, interests, tastes and pretensions. Everything I affirm is the imagination of myself. What I cannot affirm—because I do not know it—is the real “I.”