Sublime

In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky,

G. I. Gurdjieff, that marvelous rascal-sage, wrote in his All and Everything:

Old habits are an illusion of comfort.

Gurdjieff’s teachings portrayed humankind as living in a kind of waking sleep. His “Fourth Way” approach held out the possibility of finding a path out of mechanical functioning through self-knowledge:

Russian mathematician and esotericist P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) stated that careful observations of his mental states led him to believe that people are always dreaming.4 According to Ouspensky, our waking consciousness overshadows the ever-present dreams going on in our brains, just as the sun outshines the stars in the sky during the day, but t