Self-Remembering But Not Necessarily Less Suffering
You Do Bot Bargain With the Existence
In Gurdjieff’s system od self-remembering, a person tries to become more conscious of their own existence in the present moment rather than living mechanically through habits, reactions, fantasies, and emotional automatisms. This is fundamentally similar to Spinoza’s movement toward identification with the larger whole.
But there is an objection that cuts directly into one of the hidden confusions inside many spiritual systems. If everything occurring in consciousness is already part of existence, then why privilege one state called “self-remembering” or “pure awareness” over fantasies, habits, emotions, compulsions, or repetitive thinking? These too are existence manifesting. The fantasy exists. The habit exists. The anger exists. The daydream exists. Nothing has stepped outside existence.
This is why the language can become psychologically overwhelming. A person starts trying to observe thoughts, then observe the observer, then observe identification, then observe existence itself. The psyche becomes folded back onto itself endlessly. Instead of clarity, there can be exhaustion and hypervigilance.
What thinkers like George Gurdjieff were really reacting against was not existence itself, but mechanicalness. By “mechanical,” he meant that much of human life runs automatically through conditioning, repetition, emotional reflexes, fantasies, fears, and learned scripts without much reflective participation. A person becomes absorbed completely into each passing state. Angry one hour, euphoric the next, despairing the next, with no stable observational continuity.
Self-remembering was supposed to introduce a second layer simultaneously. Not merely “I am fantasizing,” but “I know I am fantasizing while it occurs.” Not merely fear, but awareness of fear happening. The point was not to abolish fantasies or habits, but to reduce total absorption in them.
But the point remains important because these systems often begin treating ordinary mental life as somehow less real or less valuable than detached awareness. That can become artificial and even hostile toward the organism itself. Fantasies are not alien intrusions. They are expressions of memory, desire, compensation, fear, imagination, and biological regulation. Habits are how organisms conserve energy and survive repeated conditions. Emotional automatisms often emerge from trauma, adaptation, or social learning. These are not mistakes floating outside existence. They are part of embodied existence. So perhaps the healthier interpretation is not “escape fantasies and become pure awareness,” but “develop some capacity to notice processes without being completely swallowed by them.” That is a much smaller and more humane claim.
And it is right that too much self-observation can become oppressive. Some people become trapped in recursive monitoring of every thought, sensation, and emotional fluctuation. Instead of freedom, consciousness becomes surveillance. The organism loses spontaneity because it is constantly trying to stand outside itself. This is one reason certain meditative systems can destabilize vulnerable people psychologically. The self becomes fragmented into observer and observed endlessly.
There is also another irony here. The very desire to “be more conscious” can itself become another fantasy structure, another identity project, another survival strategy against impermanence and helplessness. The organism says, “If I become sufficiently aware, perhaps I can escape suffering, confusion, or death.” But existence does not necessarily grant that bargain.
The sentence “your fantasies are existence as well” is philosophically important. It prevents the split where ordinary human processes are treated as failures compared to some purified state of awareness. The fantasy, the fear, the bodily pain, the self-observation, the confusion about self-observation, all of it belongs to existence already. Perhaps the question is not how to stand outside the machinery completely, but whether moments of awareness can slightly loosen total fusion with it. Not eliminate it. Not transcend it absolutely. Just create a little space where the organism can sometimes notice its own movements without being entirely possessed by them.