Life Is Real Only Then When I Am
About This Book
The third and unfinished series of Gurdjieff's writings — containing his most personal and autobiographical reflections, written in the final years of his life. The title states the central aim of all his teaching: genuine existence — as opposed to mechanical sleepwalking — requires the specific quality of self-awareness that most people experience only fleetingly. The fragments collected here reveal a Gurdjieff who is simultaneously more vulnerable and more direct than in the earlier works.
What You'll Learn
The "I Am" of the title refers not to the personal ego but to genuine self-awareness — the state in which consciousness is genuinely present to itself rather than absorbed in automatic, habitual response patterns. Most people exist in a state of functional sleep in which the "I Am" is absent — they move through life reacting mechanically to stimuli without genuine awareness of themselves as the ground of all experience. The development of the "I Am" is not achieved through intellectual understanding but through the specific discipline of self-observation, self-remembering, and the voluntary suffering that genuine inner work requires.
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