Gurdjieff:
If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying here is useless. —Aphorisms
The first injunction inscribed on the walls of the Institute is: “Believe nothing, not even yourself.”
I believe only if I have statistical proof; that is, only if I have obtained the same result over and over again. I study, I work for guidance, not for belief. “ —Views From the Real World, New York, February 20, 1924
“At first it is very difficult to verify whether the work is right or wrong, whether the directions received are correct or incorrect. The theoretical part of the work may prove useful in this respect, because a man can judge more easily from this aspect of it… And if he learns something new, something that cannot be learned in the ordinary way from books and so on, this, to a certain extent, is a guarantee that the other, the practical side, may also be right. But this of course is far from being a full guarantee because here also mistakes are possible. All occult and spiritualistic societies and circles assert that they possess a new knowledge. And there are people who believe it.
“In properly organized groups no faith is required; what is required is simply a little trust…for a little while, for the sooner a man begins to verify all he hears the better it is for him.” —In Search of the Miraculous – Chapter 11
You must learn to divide the real from the invented… —In Search of the Miraculous – Chapter 8
P.D. Ouspensky:
Q. (H)ow does one attain any certainty that your method is right?
A. Just by comparing one observation with another. And then we talk when we meet. People speak about their observations; they compare them… and in that way one becomes sure of ordinary things, just as one knows that grass is green. —Fourth Way, Chapter 1
Gurdjieff:
Only one who has no faith can have the possibility of going forward. From the start, he must be critical and take everything as in mathematics: two times two, four. If you’ve understood the truth of a thing like that, you can keep it in yourself. If you only believe, without verifying it, that two times two is four, kill that belief, for you believe anything. Do not take anything to crystallize it in you if you cannot be sure. Just take it as material to be checked afterwards, but don’t take anything without criticizing it… (T)he one who automatically believes goes to psychopathy. He will never be a man. He is a half-man, a “misunderstanding”. The real man believes nothing but what he can prove either mathematically or by finding it by frequent experiments. This is my opinion. If my own brother asked me that question, I wouldn’t answer him anything else. Believe neither father, nor God, nor nothing, except yourself. Apart from you, have doubts, suspicions about everything… The rest can remain as theoretical material. Any intelligent man knows that the more material he has, the more possibilities he has to choose then, to orient himself, to make statistics based on his experiences. But you must check this material. Among other things, since we are talking about statistics, three quarters of people who are engaged in self-perfection and who live in monasteries are lost by faith. In the remaining quarter, there are many who are lost through their education and many other things. The result is that 1% stays on the right track. The greatest scourge that one can meet on the path to the possibility of liberation is faith. But there are two kinds of faith: ordinary faith for “men” in quotation marks, and faith for real men without quotation marks. This faith has a completely different character. It’s real faith… I divide faith into two qualities, like everything else, depending on whether it belongs to the “man” in quotation marks or to the man without quotation marks… —Meetings With G.I. Gurdjieff in Paris 1944, Friday February 4, 1944
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
“As for their psyche, its fundamental traits have precisely the same peculiarities in all of them… that special property thanks to which only on that strange planet…does there occur…as they call it on that ill-fated planet, ‘war.’
“Besides this chief particularity of their common psyche, certain properties in each of them, regardless of where they arise and exist, are completely crystallized and become an integral part of their common presence, properties that exist under the names of ‘egoism,’ ‘self-love,’ ‘vanity,’ ‘pride,’ ‘conceit,’ ‘credulity,’ ‘suggestibility,’ and many others no less abnormal and unbecoming to the essence of any three-brained being whatsoever.
“Of these abnormal properties the most terrible one for them is ‘suggestibility.’ —Chapter 12
“Thanks to their peculiar inherency called ‘suggestibility’ which I mentioned before, all the beings… believed this ‘propaganda’ of theirs and…there gradually crystallized in each of them the…factor which causes in their common psyche that strange and relatively prolonged psychic state that I would call the ‘loss of sensation of self.’ —Chapter 42
Jean Vaysse:
…Of all the impressions we have of our inner life, physical sensation is undoubtedly what is most immediately accessible to us, the most “concrete,” and the least given to fallacious imagination. To recognize it is easy…and this is why it can be considered one of the best tests for verifying the reality of efforts toward self-awareness. —Toward Awakening, Centers and Functions
Mme. de Salzmann:
I need to recognize that sensation is an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of contact with myself. If I wish to know that I exist, I have to feel the force and energy in me by contact. If, for example, I wish to know the quality of my thinking, I have to come into touch with it through a certain sensation. It is the same with the energy of the body and the energy of the feeling. I need to have a sensation, not merely of the flesh, of tensions, but an inner sensation of the energy, a sensation that my body is alive. —The Reality of Being, 29. An instrument of contact