Ideas
Gurdjieff claimed that people cannot perceive reality in their current states because they do not possess consciousness but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep."
"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies." As a result of this condition, each person perceives things from a completely subjective perspective. He asserted that people in their typical state function as unconscious automatons, but that one can "wake up" and become a different sort of human being altogether.
Read more about this topic: George Gurdjieff
Famous quotes containing the word ideas:
“... I want to live and be happy. I believe that we cannot be one or the other by pushing the absurd to all its consequences. I am like everyone. To feel liberated, I sometimes wish death on my loved ones, I covet the wives forbidden to me by the laws of family and friendship. To be logical, I should then kill or possess. But I judge that these vague ideas are unimportant. I everyone tried to put them to reality, we could neither live nor be happy.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“All ... forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)