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IDENTIFICATION The World of Delusion

J.G.Bennett / Deeper man/pag. 170-173

Identification plays an important role in Gurdjieffs psychology. It appears many times in Ouspensky's books, In

Search of the Miraculous and The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution.

It is one of the earliest ideas that I was introduced to when I first came in contact with this teaching. Identification

is a false freedom, the illusion of freedom, where we feel free because we are doing what we want to do. Instead

of finding ourselves we lose ourselves in what we are doing; and then what we are doing may be free but we

ourselves are enslaved. People can also become lost in what they are doing even if it is not what they want;

even when it is something they have no choice about. When we are in this state we feel any interference with

what we are doing is an encroachment on our freedom. If we are, let us say, cooking in the kitchen, we become

so excited, so identified with what we are doing that if anyone comes and tells us that we are not doing it the

right way, we become offended and feel that we are being interfered with. We feel that our freedom consists in

doing it in our own way; but what freedom we might have had we have given away, and, having had a possibility

to be free to do anything, we have chosen to become slaves.

When we are identified it is true to say that we are no longer ourselves at all because we have transferred our

sense of our reality to something outside of ourselves. We even make it somehow seem valuable to be

identified, praising a man who is really wrapped up in his work or spending vast sums of money for the latest

sensational, that is, identifying, book or film. We become the slaves of everything that we are doing, enslaved by

all the people we meet and the situations we enter into, and yet there is this terrible absurdity that in all of this we

think that we are free.

We can, for example, be struggling with ourselves, trying to hold back the _expression of some negative state

while we are boiling away inside. Then suddenly we let it all go and, while objectively we are throwing away all

that we had gained by making that effort, we feel better for it, feel free, and justify it all by saying that we wanted

to be sincere. We have let ourselves be controlled by this negative triad, yet we feel good, feel all the better for it,

because we do not even suspect that such negative states have no place at all in anyone who aspires to the

name of man.

Or, again, we find this state in ourselves quite clearly in regard to our possessions. All of us have some

possessions we are attached to, as we say, or identified with, and if there is any danger of its being lost it is

worse for us than if we were to lose ourselves. I can remember a very striking example of this which took place

long, long ago when I was in one of Ouspensky's groups. We were talking about the difficulty we were having in

remembering ourselves and he said that in order to remember we had to have a reminding factor. He continued

that to have a reminding factor we would have to sacrifice something that was precious to us, put away from

ourselves something which we valued. One woman said to him that she was becoming desperate, that she hadbeen trying to do something for several months and had been unable to do anything. He told her that she should

look around her home and find something that she really cared about and sacrifice it. She looked very

embarrassed for a moment and then said, "Well, to tell the truth, I have a very beautiful old tea-service at home

which I inherited complete from my mother, which I'm attached to." His reply was, "Break one of your Dresden

cups and you will remember yourself." The next week she came in a genuine hysterical condition, saying, "I have

been so agonized by what you said about my Dresden cups. I could not break a Dresden cup even if it were to

save my soul." His answer to her was simply, "Do you see what is meant by identification?"

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Our personal relationships are constantly being spoiled because we are identified with people and what they

may be thinking or feeling about us. Someone has only to make the slightest little gesture and our inner world is

filled with all sorts of emotional reactions. Anything at all can be exaggerated to the most absurd lengths. A word

of criticism and we believe that we are hated outcasts. A nod and we believe ourselves to be acknowledged as

wise or supremely important. In all of this, nobody else has made us identified. We ourselves have done it. When

something shakes us out of the state of identification, there is something very disagreeable in realizing how lost

we have been; we can hardly bear to acknowledge the truth.

When we are identified, our vision of the world is terribly small. The present moment shrinks to a point. But when

we are totally identified, utterly lost, we believe ourselves to be most free, that we see everything that is real. At

first, when we come across this idea, it is almost impossible for us really to accept that we can ever be identified:

other people, yes, but not us. But once we have really seen this in ourselves, when we have tasted the bitter

reality of it, it is no longer possible for us to look at ourselves as we did before. We can no longer "sleep in

peace," as Gurdjieff put it. That is why self-observation must be undertaken with the resolution not to stop at any

barrier, not to flinch from anything that is discovered, and not to fail to follow up the inferences that inevitably

follow from what is seen.

When I was working in one of Ouspensky's groups, we would meet only once a week but would spend months

and even years trying to come to an understanding of just how these negative laws worked in us and how, once

we have understood their working, we might supersede it, how we might place ourselves under the influence of

higher laws. In reality, there are not two different approaches to this work, one which deals with the negative

laws and one which deals with the higher laws, the essential laws. Every time that, through struggling with our

negative states, we come to a point where we are able to separate ourselves from ourselves and observe

ourselves impartially, we are not only coming to understand how the lower laws work in us but are also, at the

same time, creating a place in ourselves that is free from their influence, that is working under different laws. And

every time we approach any theoretical study of higher laws, of the laws of essence, which is not founded on

work on ourselves, then whatever our subjective sensations may be, we are not experiencing the action of

higher laws but only the action of our imagination. Gurdjieff said more than once that this teaching originatesfrom a conscious source. To understand it we have to be able to approach it consciously, to be able to approach

it through and not from the machinery of our ordinary selves. We can say that the whole theme of negative laws

is of immense importance for an understanding of human psychology in general and of special importance for an

understanding of the psychology of our possible development, provided, of course, that it is all approached in the

right way, that is, practically, in terms of our own negativities and our own mechanicalities. And though we

ourselves are the only proper subject of this study, it is not something which we can do alone.