Wake up, sleepers!

Gurdjieff, Patanjali, and resisting the hypnosis of the every day

"Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention... He does not see the real world."

So said G.I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949)¹, the tough-minded, enigmatic, rascal mystic and guru. He claimed that people were asleep—that they were unawake and unable to act authentically. In response, he developed dances, music, and yogic practices designed to teach people how to cultivate self-awareness beyond delusions as well as non-reactive, deliberate activity.

“I am a teacher of dancing.”

(Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men)

In the early 20th century, he drew to himself a collection of artists, writers, dancers, and seekers. Gurdjieff said that he wished to teach people how to actually observe themselves, to resist their conditioning and hypnosis, so that they could freely act in line with what he called authentic conscience, which means to act from a sensibility above instinctive conditioning. He also called this having “(authentic) aim.” Rather than remaining a multiplicity of disorganized, jostling internal selves, he believed people could become an individual. As Kierkegaard said, “the self is repetition.” Our individuality lies in what we chose to do again and again, and Gurdjieff aimed to make this free, conscious, and deliberate.

The world today is a showcase of reactive people, hypnotized and endlessly reacting to images, inputs, soundbites,Tiktoks. Who is actually awake? Who is not only master of the flood of stimulus that hits them from the outside, but also master of their own internal reactions? Who is truly choosing? Who is truly doing?

Introspection reveals that we are reactive, inattentive, and superficial—a bundle of contradictions. As Paul wrote so dramatically in the Letter To The Romans:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Romans 7:15, 18-19, 22-24 (RSV)

Daily life often feels like a struggle to stay awake—to actually bring our lives into harmony with our goals. It is helpful to have a structure to measure oneself against, which can function like a trellis upon which a plant grows. To that end, I’d like to share a collection of tricks and tips that I use to try to stay awake, drawn from the yamas and niyamas of Patanjali’s Yogasutras.

Each yama (ethical restraint) and niyama (positive observance) of Patañjali’s Yogasūtras helps cultivate an alert, self-aware state that prevents falling into the trance of one’s own reactivity, conditioning (saṃskāras), and unconscious patterns. I’m going to look at six of them here, followed by a tool from the limbs of Aṣṭāṅgayoga.

Ahiṃsā (non-violence)

In order to commit to non-harm, we must continually observe the subtle stirrings of aggression, impatience, or aversion in the mind. We need to become alert to the first impulse of violent thought, word, or deed, and redirect ourselves. Ahimsa requires continual presence and sensitivity in each moment.

Interestingly, Gurdjieff made one general rule for his students: express no negative emotion. Similarly, we can make a commitment to express no violence, even on the subtle levels of speech and behaviour. Doing this- or even attempting to do it and failing, which is what will happen— is a strong eye-opener.

Satya (truthfulness)

Practicing truthfulness means noticing when we’re tempted to lie or deceive — even in subtle ways. We observe the movements of the mind that want to protect ego-image or avoid discomfort. This heightens self-awareness and weakens habitual self-delusion, sometimes spontaneously revealing whole vistas of our own character and habits we had been unaware of.

Brahmacharya (sexual restraint)

This is the practice of taking responsibility for our sexual energy and behaviour. It calls for continuous observation of how we are relating to our own sexual desire, and whether we are directing it in a way that aligns with our values and goals. Are we ogling the opposite sex, making people uncomfortable? Do we sometimes ignore boundaries or become aggressive? Are we addicted to pornography? Are we sleeping with people we know we shouldn’t be?

Traditionally brahmacarya means directing sexual energy only towards a committed, consensual, and ethical relationship. The Buddha defined this as sex between consenting adults only if it didn’t violate the secular or religious agreements of the participants. In traditional Yoga culture its viewed as sex between committed monogamous partners only, which, as in early Christianity, was seen as a way to honour people’s needs without over-indulging them.

Shaucha (cleanliness)

There is a reason Zen monks take such care cleaning their monasteries. As Vaisnava teacher Srila Prabhupada said, “When you clean the Temple, you clean your heart.”

Heidegger argued that care (sorge) is a defining part of what we are: we are in a sense composed of care. We are always showing care for something. Care is the relationship we live in towards reality.

If we don’t deliberately direct our care, then it floats around in an agitated way. Even if we’re more or less doing the “right things” our experience becomes unfocused, unsatisfying.

How do we direct our care consciously? We do it by “taking care.” We might feel that we need to rest, but actually we need to take more care. We need to attend to the details and see if we can refine our behaviour. We need to see if we can go deeper with whatever we’re working on.

This is why Zen monks pay such attention to detail. It’s a practice in itself which wakes us up and triggers a deeper engagement with life.

Tapas (discipline / austerity/doing hard things)

Another hallmark of Gurdjieff’s discipline lay in asking his students to do difficult and unusual things like stopping for a moment every time they were about to walk through a door or not using the word “I”, or being continually aware of one body part throughout the day. All of these things disrupt auto-pilot and show us how conditioned we are. Tapas can function in the same way: we decide to give up sugar or Instagram for a time, or we eat only one meal a day or reduce our sleep. Doing these things for periods of time can teach us so much: ways we are stuck, ways we underestimate ourselves, resources we didn’t know we had, things we actually don’t need.

Svādhyāya (self-study / study of sacred texts)

Svādhyāya literally means “memorization” or “internalization of sacred words.” It refers both to chanting and memorizing sacred texts and reciting mantra. I find reading wisdom texts every day an essential discipline for disrupting my own tendency to become hypnotized by my conditioning, reactivity, and narrow perspective, and I’ve already written about mantra here.

Prāṇāyāma

tataḥ kṣīyate prakāśa āvaraṇam

From that (prāṇāyāma) the covering of the inner light is removed.

dhāraṇāsu ca yogyatā manasaḥ
And the mind becomes fit for concentration (dhāraṇā).

(Yogasutra, 2.52-2.53)

Patanjali used the breath to calm the surface mind, an old and venerable tradition in both Yoga and Buddhist traditions. As the 16th century Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā says, the mind and breath and intimately related, and the state of one reflects the state of the other.

2.2: yāvaddhāraṇā nāsti tāvatprāṇasya nigrahaḥ |
nāsti dhāraṇā-yuktasya prāṇasyaiva nigrahaḥ ||

As long as the mind is not steady, there is no control of the breath. Without breath control, steadiness of mind does not arise either².

The breath can be a powerful tool for staying awake.

A very simple approach to working with the breath in everyday life is to notice whenever we are either having a disproportionate emotional response or getting lost in thought and to bring our awareness to the breath and consciously calm it. This acts to both ground our awareness in something other than the surge of emotion or thought, and to calm our nervous system. This one simple commitment to calm runaway trains of thought or emotion whenever they arise can be very powerful over time.

In Summary, Tools For Staying Awake:

Nonviolence,

Truthfulness,

Sexual Responsibility,

Cleanliness,

Austerity,

Study,

Breath.

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Photo by Yogendra Singh: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-wearing-blue-jeans-doing-pirouette-spin-1701202/

1. Gurdjieff was a charismatic, controversial teacher whose writings and actions are endlessly debated. He wrote a massive esoteric sci-fi fantasy novel which reads throughout like he’s pulling your leg and a fictional autobiography. Yet the practices he gave his students, and his teachings, often contain penetrating and unusual insights.

2. This seems to suggest you can’t have either! What it means, though, is that there are two ways in steady mind and breath, either through the breath or through the mind.