Toward Awakening —Jean Vaysse
..(I)magination in all its forms is one of man’s…main obstacles to his awakening and his evolution. A man can undertake nothing so long as he does not begin to see things simply as they are. Then he can acquire an understanding, and only later does an authentic “imagination” become possible for him, that is to say, that law-conformable “previsioning” which is indeed one of the major faculties of a man worthy of the name. —Awakening and Obstacles
…(I)magination and dreaming (are both) examples of the wrong functioning of the intellectual center, and of its laziness, owing to which, it tries to spare itself all the efforts which effective work would require…going in a definite direction, toward a well-defined aim…
Imagination exists in each of one of our centers in a form peculiar to it. It follows closely on a moment of real work, having a definite direction, after which the effort weakens, the attention deviates, the aim is lost sight of, and the functioning continues within the center itself, without any connection whatever with the work which was undertaken, or any connection with the other centers, except for bringing in useless and aimless—that is, imaginary—impressions of life, made up purely for satisfying the function, and not for effective expression in the realm of reality…
…This kind of imagination is in no way that creative faculty rightly regarded as of incalculable worth. It is in fact pernicious, merely a degenerate caricature of a higher faculty, that of real creative imagination, or conscious prefiguration in conformity with an objective knowledge of data and laws, which ordinary man does not possess… —The conditions, means and significance of real self-observation
(T)he power of imagination…is called Kundalini in certain teachings… This dreadful force can act in all of the centers—each has its own form of it, and with its help all the centers can be satisfied with the imaginary rather than with the real. Under its sway, men lose the sense of what they are, and soon—just as with “drugs” they can no longer free themselves from it—they believe it is useful, even necessary, for their development while in fact it is a hindrance. If men could really see their true position…(t)hey would seek a way out and they would find it, because one exists. But the force and the attraction of imagination, which keeps them in this state of hypnosis, prevents them from seeing what Gurdjieff calls the “terror of their situation.”
Thus to awaken, for a man, means first of all to be de-hypnotized—to escape from the power of imagination and to see things—and himself—freshly as they really are. —Awakening and Obstacles
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York: Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931
Real thinking is the application of imagination, (real imagination not fancy) to fact or facts. —Wednesday, 23 March 1925
…Make this an effort in concrete imagination – while we sit here there are two thousand million people on the planet, being born and dying at the rate of one every three seconds. Every moment of our day is a present moment for everyone else. Every disease possible to man is occurring, being suffered, somewhere at this time. No one can have an experience that has not been experienced by someone a moment before us, or a moment after.
There is no unique accident… no unique deformity… no unique experience. There is no unique being.
You will begin to realize there is a community of total experiences which we share to a certain extent…
…Each individual is a cell in total humanity… (T)urn your attention to the one cell in the human organism which happens to bear your name, and say: “there is one being in the universe that I can turn my attention to,” and say, “I am responsible for that cell.”
…Within fifty years, one hundred years, everyone here will be dead…but change will take place between now and the grave, which will not be a change pleasing to our friends, to ourselves. This is one reason of our infantile state—we dare not project our imagination into this picture of what is going to happen to us. Instead of doing this, we have a child’s imagination—that all will go well for us; our friends will help us out, etc.—when we should be planning what we should like to become in mind, body and emotions, five, ten, fifteen years hence, in respect to quality.
What is the force of your wish about the future of this creature? What is the amount of effort you are making to become the kind of person you would like to be? Or are you leaving it to hope?
…Here is the moment when the human psyche is as slippery as an eel. There is a reason for facing these facts about ourselves, but we prefer to consider others when we try to pin ourselves down to facts about ourselves… —Monday, 2 December 1929 – ix
Life is real only then, when “I am”
…to attain this in reality, you must at the beginning often imagine, but imagine only, that this is already present in you.
…when a…man who already has his real I, his will, and all the other properties of a real man, pronounces aloud or to himself the words ” I am,” then there always proceeds in him, in his, as it is called, “solar plexus,” a so to say “reverberation,” that is, something like a vibration, a feeling, or something of the sort.
If the ordinary man, not having as yet in himself data for the natural reverberation, but knowing of…this…will, with conscious striving…correctly and frequently pronounce these… for him as yet empty words, and…imagine…this same reverberation proceeds in him, he may…through frequent repetition gradually acquire…a…theoretical “beginning” for the possibility of a real practical forming in himself of these data.
He who is exercising himself with this must at the beginning, when pronouncing the words “I am,” imagine that this same reverberation is already proceeding in his solar plexus…
Without this, even if only imagined experiencing of the reverberation, the pronouncing aloud or to oneself of the words “I am” will have no significance at all. —Fifth Talk, December 19th, 1930