In Search of the Miraculous
“… Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it… All three centers are filled with habits and a man can never know himself until he has studied all his habits… So long as a man is governed by a particular habit, he does not observe it… Therefore in order to observe and study habits one must try to struggle against them… Without a struggle a man cannot see what he consists of…
“Even at the first attempt to study the elementary activity of the moving center a man comes up against habits. For instance, a man may want to…observe how he walks. But he will never succeed…for more than a moment if he continues to walk in the usual way… In order to observe himself a man must try to walk not in his habitual way, he must sit in unaccustomed attitudes, he must stand when he is accustomed to sit, he must sit when he is accustomed to stand, and he must make with his left hand the movements he is accustomed to make with his right hand and vice versa. All this will enable him to observe himself and study the habits and associations of the moving center. — Chapter 6
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York:
Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931
Just as your physical habits are set, fixed, so your emotions become habits, crystallized. (If y)ou refrain from expressing emotions which are unpleasant to you(, y)ou will then find yourself having no other kind. If you manifest unpleasant emotions these become habits… —Monday, 17 February 1930
Notebooks of Lawrence S. Morris:
Orage Lectures 1927-1928
The characteristic of the instinctive center is inertia, that is, to continue doing what it has started; habit, in the largest sense. Intelligence is against habit; because no two situations are really the same. Intelligence would make a new activity each time; the instinctive merely offers habit…
Views From the Real World,
…(T)he automatism of our thoughts and of our feelings is definitely connected with the automatism of our movements. One cannot be changed without the other. And if, for instance, the attention of a man is concentrated on changing the automatism of thought, his habitual movements and postures will obstruct the new mode of thought by evoking old habitual associations…
…(T)he combination of habitual postures—intellectual, emotional and moving—is stronger than the will… —Paris, August 6, 1922 – The stop exercise
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York:
Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931
We…may wish to act differently, but our wills are not free. We behave according to the conditioning our environment has subjected us to, we are mechanisms, very perfect ones in many ways, but without the ability to perform in any but the prescribed form, …always as it has been suggested we should act…unable to act apart from our conditioning… (T)he realization of this is the first step in the direction of freedom from it. —Undated
In Search of the Miraculous
“…(E)volution which is possible for humanity as a whole, is completely analogous, to the process of evolution possible for the individual man… All the mechanical forces of life fight against the formation of this conscious nucleus in humanity, in just the same way as all mechanical habits, tastes and weaknesses fight against conscious self-remembering in man.” —Chapter 15
Toward Awakening, Jean Vaysse
…Our functions are ceaselessly answering to life, but it is easier for us to reply as the outer world requires than to experience our actual situation, and reply “out of one’s soul and conscience”… The formation of habits leads to this taking the easy way out… —Essence and Personality
(A)s responses to the demands of life are learned…habits are established. Repetition of the same behavior in analogous circumstances creates…a “way of manifesting” … automatically …every time certain…circumstances reappear. Before long, each of these aspects or ways of manifesting constitutes an entity in itself, a particular small “I.” An “I” of this kind is formed for each of the habitual circumstances of life, and, as each one is set up independently of the others, there is no connection between them…
Contrary to what he almost always believes, he cannot…destroy his habits and his automatic associations, because they are necessary in ordinary life. But…by developing another level within himself, which is the level of the observer or the witness, he can learn to discover them, to know them, and to make use of them… (T)hrough a work of the appropriate kind…a…different order of inner relationship can be established without which no liberation would be possible for him. —Structure of Man
(F)or the struggle with habits to be possible and profitable for self-observation, we need to choose simple habits, directly related to functions which have already been clearly recognized… —Conditions of Self-Observation
Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York:
Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931
We don’t begin by changing good habits—they are all right; not with bad habits—as this might lead to Puritanism. So we begin with these habits that do not matter, to discover how strong habits are, and what you suffer in changing them… We do not do things which are observable to others… —Charles Sumner Greene papers
It is helpful to make a list of certain things you might change in your daily habits, and make as many changes as possible even the simplest, like getting out of bed on a different side, or changing your routine of dressing, etc, would become useful. It is important to change again as soon as it becomes as familiar as to require no effort to accomplish… —5 January
Exercise initiative in devising new methods, in contrast to repetition… (The e)ssence of non-mechanical is the non-repetitive. Habit is the repeated. —Lecture 21
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
“The first and highest kind of being-Reason is… pure or Objective Reason…
“The second kind of being-Reason…can appear in…those…in whom the…kesdjan body, is already completely coated…
“As regards the third kind of being-Reason, this is nothing but the automatic functioning proceeding in…all beings in general, and also in the presences of all surplanetary formations, thanks to repeated shocks coming from outside, which evoke habitual reactions from data crystallized in them corresponding to previous accidentally perceived impressions. —Chapter 39 – The Holy Planet Purgatory