” ‘There are,’ said, ‘two lines along which man’s development proceeds, the line of knowledge and the line of being.
In right evolution the line of knowledge and the line of being develop simultaneously, parallel to, and helping one another.
But if the line of knowledge gets too far ahead of the line of being, or if the line of being gets ahead of the line of knowledge, man’s development goes wrong, and sooner or later it must come to a standstill.’
In ordinary thinking, people do not distinguish understanding from knowledge. They think that greater understanding depends on greater knowledge. Therefore they accumulate knowledge, or that which they call knowledge, but they do not know how to accumulate understanding and do not bother about it.
And yet a person accustomed to self-observation knows for certain that at different periods of his life he has understood one and the same idea, one and the same thought, in totally different ways.
It often seems strange to him that he could have understood so wrongly that which, in his opinion, he now understands rightly. And he realizes, at the same time, that his knowledge has not changed, and that he knew as much about the given subject before as he knows now.
What, then, has changed? His being has changed. And once being has changed understanding must change also.
The difference between knowledge and understanding becomes clear when we realize that knowledge may be the function of one center. Understanding, however, is the function of three centers. Thus the thinking apparatus may know something. But understanding appears only when a man feels and senses what is connected with it.
If Gurdjieff’s method of self-observation is to be an intimate pathway into our being, it can only do so if we are willing to truly expose ourselves to ourselves. What is needed, says Gurdjieff, is ‘inner sincerity.’
… we believe we are masters of ourselves, seldom noticing our own inner fragmentation and our lack of will and choice as a result of this fragmentation. We lose ourselves at every moment in one or another aspect of our lives, out of touch with the remarkable wholeness that is our birthright.”
