We Are All Mechanical Sleepwalkers

A mystic's formula for freedom.

A planet of playthings, we dance on the strings of powers we cannot perceive. The stars aren't aligned, or the Gods are malign; blame is better to give than receive. You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill. 

– Rush 

Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself, and he will always remain a slave. 

– George Gurdjieff 

Mechanical Man 

The seeker’s drive can be unrelenting. One day, there seems to be no choice in the matter. Something in us needs to understand. Maybe we’ve seen a glimpse of something that takes us out of our ordinary sense-data-driven life. Maybe we’ve had a deep and incomprehensible loss. Maybe the compulsion for more just arose, seemingly out of the blue. But one day it happens, and life as we knew it is over. The world takes on a strange and unfamiliar sheen, and we don't quite fit into it like we used to. There’s something missing. 

We can no longer relate to the people around us. They all seem to be in a self-imposed daze. As the great poet William Wordsworth put it, “The world is too much with us: late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Somewhere along the way, we gave away our power, and we don’t know how to reclaim it. We don’t even know we lost it. But somehow, we know we need to find it. 

For some, that loss takes on a visceral tone. An instinctual drive surfaces. A latent urge, an urge just as strong as the need for food, for water, for companionship, for safety, begins to take over the mind and body. So the seeking commences. It’s beyond interesting to see how an unnamed, unknown gap or lack can accomplish this task. This is a true miracle. The Buddha might refer to this lack as Dukha or dissatisfaction. Life is suffering. Not always necessarily intense suffering, but more of an underlying unsatisfactoriness that prompts us to look for a panacea. And so we seek. 

A Spiritual Seeker

Image: George Gurdjieff, teachertoolkit.co.uk

There was just such a seeker in the early 1900s named George Gurdjieff. Born in Armenia of Greek descent, Gurdjieff was to become one of the most well-known spiritual seekers, a mystic who brought spiritual knowledge to those living in the West. Prompted by his own instinctual drive to seek a better way of life, his heart and mind turned to the East for knowledge he might be able to bring back to those in the “real” world. By the real world, Gurdjieff meant to deny the common assumption that the only way to remove suffering and awaken to our true nature is through austere methods, monkhood, or physical renunciation. 

Rather, the goal is available to all, but to accomplish that goal requires work to unearth the truth of who we are and to transcend our limitations. His own seeking took him to all parts of the world, buoyed by the understanding that someone must have the answers he sought, that somewhere, there must be schools of esoteric knowledge that hold the keys to reality. He found such a school. somewhere in central Asia, and having discovered his true self, free of suffering, returned to disseminate his wisdom.

To Gurdjieff, most of us are living as automata, as what he calls “mechanical men”. We are sleepwalking through life and must do all we can to awaken. This was a new concept for Westerners in the early part of the 1900s. Today, there seems to be an epidemic of spiritual awakening occurring, with people realizing that the spiritual path is not just for the renunciate monk living in a cave or the nun in a catholic nunnery but for the “ordinary” person on the street. Gurdjieff would be pleased. 

But what does Gurdjieff mean when he says that we are all mechanical sleepwalkers? He gives us these clues. He says we are divided from ourselves, that we must remember ourselves. And that only then can we break through the bonds of determinism. Only then can we maybe start to be truly alive. We have to start by noticing and admitting we have a problem. This may be the hardest step. How do we discover our automation? How do we find out about our somnambulance? 

Trapped in Our Thoughts

Gurdjieff’s insight, like the Buddha’s before and like many awakened masters after, is that the way to freedom from suffering is through understanding that we are identifying with our thoughts. Thoughts of who and what we are. It is those thoughts and the sense of identification with them that traps us into our machine-hood. In today’s spiritual terminology, it is the identification with ego, with the small, struggling self built up through thoughts and concepts about ourselves, that must be jettisoned. 

Sam Harris, a popular neuroscientist and secular Buddhist, said, “Ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing you’re thinking.” Ego is when we are fully identified with thought. So much so that we don’t even know we’re having thoughts. It is hard to know what this means until something happens to provoke the experience of this in the seeker. Until something prods us to remember ourselves apart from the ego. I had no conception of what this meant until I began to meditate about a decade ago. And then I saw. 

When you slow down your mind enough so that there is a small gap in between thoughts, you discover something miraculous. You are still there. And the incessant thought train that the wonderful spiritual teacher Michael Singer calls the “annoying roommate” in your head, is found out for who and what it is. There is truly an automaton that has been running the show. Sometimes for decades without us noticing. 

That noticing is our liberation. That noticing is what enlivens the machine. When the mechanicalness is turned off, and the life force begins to flow through us, our lives are dramatically changed for the better. And we discover that we have somehow, as automata, through that strange miraculous lack that caused us to seek, made the choice to remember who we truly are.