What is Essence?

Essence is the more real part of ourselves. It is who we were at birth and is the receptive, absorptive state of an infant. It has a natural interest in its surroundings …  

We live in an age fascinated by knowledge. In my free time, every few minutes, I feel obligated to look up some trivial fact in the Internet, as if it were somehow more urgent than simply being present to an ordinary moment. …

Our being is the index of our ability to ‘be’. To be means to be present – aware of oneself and of one’s surroundings simultaneously. Our degree of presence changes every moment, so our being is constantly fluctuating. My average level of being is that of a man number four, although …

Not expressing negative emotions means just that, to stop the external expression of negativity. It implies that we understand that the emotion is not ‘I’, that our identity is separate from it. A part of us, known as false personality, thrives on negative emotions …

Ouspensky writes in the Psychology, “The term ‘negative emotions’ means all emotions of violence or depression: self-pity, anger, suspicion, fear, annoyance, boredom, mistrust, jealousy and so on. Ordinarily, one accepts this expression of negative emotions as quite natural and even necessary.”

“The chief means of happiness in this life is the ability to consider externally always, internally never.” – George Gurdjieff External considering is the antidote for internal considering. Internal considering is a mechanical relationship to other people, external considering a conscious one.

Inner Considering is ‘thinking’ about how other people act towards us – how they ignore us, how they treat us poorly, or perhaps even better than we think we are. We unconsciously repeat in our mind what they did to us, or what they forgot to do for us. We think we are are superior […]

The ‘Ray of Creation’ presents the idea that there are different worlds, each containing all lower worlds. World 1 or the Absolute contains all other worlds. In the same way, World 3 contains all lower worlds, and so on. World 6 is all galaxies; World 12, all suns …

Divided attention is likened to a two-headed arrow. One end points to the object of observation, the other points to ourselves. …

Ouspensky writes in the Psychology, “’Identifying’ or ‘identification’ is a curious state in which man passes more than half of his life. He ‘identifies’ with everything: with what he says, what he feels, what he believes, what he does not believe, …