Alarm Clocks

Automatic Alarm      Wind Up Alarm

There are as many alarm clocks as there are 'types'.

At the beginning of Chapter 11 in ISOM Gurdjieff addresses the issues that block us from awakening consciously to being fully present.

G: "There is a book of aphorisms which has never been published and probably will never be published [here G is speaking about an esoteric text he had learned of but which had not been published in his time] "I have mentioned this book before in connection with question of the meaning of knowledge and I quoted then one aphorism from this book." 

'A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die, he must first awake.,'
"In another place it says:
"'When a man awakes, he can die; when he dies he can be born.'

"We must find out what this means. 'To awake, 'to die', 'to be born'. These are three successive stages. If you study the gospels attentively you all see the references are often made to the possibility of being born, several references are made to the necessity of 'dying,' and there are very many references to the necessity of 'awakening' -- 'watch, for ye know not the day and the hour...' [Christ warns us in the new testament] and so on. But these three possibilities of man, to awake and not to sleep, to die and to be born, are not set down in connection with one another. Nevertheless this is the whole point. If a man dies without having awakened he cannot be born. If a man is born without having died he may become an 'immortal thing.' Thus the fact that a man has not 'died' prevents a man from being 'born'; and should he be born without having died, he is prevented from 'being'.


A few paragraphs later Gurdjieff begins to outline the obstacles:

"But there are a thousand and one things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. ..."

He speaks about what 'sleep' is and what keeps man from awakening; he speaks of 'shocks' and 'alarm clocks' and then he suggests what will help a man to fully awaken:

"... Only a man who fully realizes the difficulty of awakening can understand the necessity of long and hard work in order to awake."


To those who are struggling with understanding what is meant by awakening and what is required in order to awaken and remain awake, I strongly recommend reading and rereading this chapter regardless of where you are on your journey in the work.  


Excerpts taken from Chapter 11 of In Search of the Miraculous,
[the ISBN 0-15-644508-5 Harvest/HBJ : pbk printing].