Self-Observation
Self-observation—sustained attention without judgment—develops intention and will, and becomes the doorway to inner purification.
Key ideas
- At first, self-observation is informational: see what is happening in you without trying to fix it.
- Change begins when you recognize mechanical patterns (anger, negativity, inner considering) and stop justifying them.
- Seeing a habit as inherited or imitated (a “ghost” of family/culture) loosens identification and creates inner freedom.
- Purification is not moral self-attack; it is a realignment of energy and attention—less leakage into worry, depression, imagination, and reactivity.
- A decisive moment of presence—choosing not to react—marks a breakthrough and strengthens conscious will.
- Inner silence (stepping back from the crowd of thoughts/feelings) creates space for higher perception and intuitive knowing (nous) to emerge.
- The work is practiced in ordinary life—“in the middle of the pots and pans”—where triggers reveal what must be seen and transformed.
- Over time, this opens the possibility of agape-like love, service, and receptivity to grace—living from a truer self rather than a mechanical personality.
Gurdjieff and the Practice of Self-Remembering
In this day and age, spiritual and esoteric information can be found instantly across the internet—often in forms whose sources and understanding are questionable. We find ourselves in a complicated situation.
How wonderful it is to have access to information about how to awaken, evolve, heal, and become whole in this life. Spiritual teachings—which only in the 1960s began to appear widely in the West, for instance, through books and translations from Tibet—are now readily available.
In earlier days, the seeker had to dig through old bookstores or come across individuals with particular knowledge. It is in that world that Gurdjieff and his teachings were discovered by serious seekers. Now, anyone can come upon information and form a quick judgment—an immediate first impression—about something that cannot possibly be received so superficially.
In an effort to bring variance and depth to what is hiding in plain sight amid the noise and cacophony of the internet, we can ask what Gurdjieff’s legacy might offer the seeking soul today—something that resonates as a path of authentic self-awareness and inner transformation.
Gurdjieff called us to remember ourselves—le rappel de soi (in French), the recall of self—pulling ourselves back into a place of unification and presence, free from imagination, illusion, and identification. Self-remembering builds on self-awareness, an inner separation, and divided attention: awareness of self and awareness of the world around us. It points to freedom from the endless noise in our heads—the random associations and the multiplicity of our being.
This gathering into an authentic place within is a key teaching that supports awakening to our true nature—a purification and unification echoed in many great spiritual traditions. Gurdjieff offered it psychologically and practically: rising into presence in the midst of everyday life, without retreating to a monastery or ashram, and making the friction of life itself fuel for spiritual development. He called this the “Fourth Way”: using life for awakening, even in its contradictions—transcending and transmuting negativity into greater peace, clarity, and self-awareness.
The Third State of Consciousness
This legacy, as presented here, points beyond Gurdjieff’s own system into the best of religion and spirituality—toward direct communion and encounter with the divine. In that context, the teachings describe a “third state of consciousness”: a higher consciousness known as self-remembering, an encounter with the higher self—one’s “real I.” Many of us have tasted it briefly in moments of sublime peace or wondrous joy, creating vivid memories without fully understanding what we touched. The aim, however, is consistency: self-remembering lived for long periods, not only in unexpected bursts.
The structure of “Fourth Way” teachings is meant to help establish this state in daily life—woven into ordinary experience as naturally as breathing. It is a way beyond dysfunction, wounds, and confusion; above illusion, depression, anger, and ego; into the brightness of true being—who you really are.
Practical Approach: Entering the State
The work puts great emphasis on self-remembering. It can be approached as a practice, but more accurately it is a state: self-awareness, self-consciousness, and self-remembering—above the sleeping level of humanity. In this state, personality and its identifications fall quiet.
The teaching suggests trying to remember oneself at least once a day, yet the practice can remain obscure for a long time. One reason is the experience of “many selves” (many voices, roles, or viewpoints) and the confusion of trying to decide which self to remember—an approach that tends to go nowhere.
Instead, the practice can begin more simply: for a few minutes, lift yourself above the turmoil of life events and your reactions to them. Imagine the commotion, issues, and concerns continuing “below,” while you do not touch them, hear them, or even fully see them.
It is called self-remembering because it is the recollection of the real “I”—one’s true essence and origin. It is remembering something forgotten, yet immediately familiar.
Maurice Nicoll: “Self-remembering is not going against the flood stream of inner and outer things. It is raising oneself, not contending. Contending is another kind of effort.”
Maurice Nicoll: “Self-remembering is a non-identifying with oneself, for an instant, as if one were merely acting and had forgotten. When one remembers oneself, one forgets oneself.”
The practice of self-remembering is the deliberate act of lifting oneself into that state. Self-observation and other work practices can be understood as degrees of self-remembering: conscious efforts to lift oneself out of sleep, leading ultimately to the third state of consciousness.
According to the work, influences “coming down from above” can be received only at the third state of consciousness. Light and help are possible at this level, but not at the lower levels because they are clouded by negative emotions, the noise of personality, and identification—conditions too coarse to register finer influences.
It is not that stronger influences cannot reach where they will, but that the two lower states of consciousness—both states of sleep—cannot comprehend them. Awakening from sleep is therefore essential to human development.
Maurice Nicoll: “Everything you build up in yourself by work becomes a transforming cause in the future.” The work distinguishes mechanical living—life experienced only as cause and effect—from the possibility of coming into new influences through self-remembering.
To regard one’s life as nothing but causal is to miss the idea that a person can come into new causal influences by self-remembering—an idea echoed in religious language as forgiveness and mercy. Yet the state of self-remembering can remain elusive for a long time, partly because it is difficult to remember oneself while confined to purely sensual thinking, having no other influences than those of ordinary life.
Although one should practice self-remembering every day—reaching up to touch the third state and taste its quality—self-observation informs and refines the practice and is critical to it. As Nicoll notes, trying to remember yourself without prior work observing the different “eyes” in you can become purely theoretical. Unless you have some power to observe how you are taking other people and life situations, you cannot remember yourself.