Our natural state

Where were you before you woke up this morning. Of course, we know where your body was—that speck of a thing lying on a mattress. But where were you?

Asleep at the wheel

Gurdjieff had the view that humanity exists in a near-perpetual state of sleep. “Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.” On the evidence—climate change, consumerism, ceaseless warring and the wanton destruction of the planet—the Russian mystic wasn’t wrong.

Technique-wise

In sleep we fall into our deepest essence. We don’t know what that’s like because ego doesn’t come with us and we go there without a memory. We wake up thinking, ‘Nothing happened.’ And technically we’re right.