It happened again. Another national tragedy involving that lethal alchemy of violence and trampling our rights. Just as terrible is the after-affect: so many people (but how many of them are bots programmed to stoke outrage?) defending these dehumanizing actions as somehow justified. Social media is on fire: hot-takes, impassioned arguments, points and counterpoints. Strangers yelling at each other; in-real-life friends becoming in-real-life enemies. I enter the fray; I cannot believe anyone would be as stupid and heartless as the side with the oppressors. Don’t they understand how short-sighted, foolish, and hypocritical they’re being??
My body knows this dance well: cortisol flooding my system, adrenaline sharpening my focus to a single point, dopamine rewarding each clever retort—a biochemical cocktail that feels like moral clarity but functions more like addiction. I’m entirely consumed by the argument, by being right, by making them see. Hours pass. Nothing changes—not their minds, not the underlying injustice, certainly not the trajectory of my day, which is now shot. But in these moments, I’m not just having thoughts about the situation. I became the outrage. Of myself, as G.I. Gurdjieff would say, nothing remained.
This pattern has a name in the Fourth Way tradition. Identification—the involuntary fusion of our attention with whatever captures it—is the central obstacle to awakening in Gurdjieff’s teaching.
When identified, we lose ourselves entirely in thoughts, emotions, or situations; we become what we observe and “of ourselves nothing remains.”
What identification is
The most succinct definition of identification in Fourth Way literature comes from P.D. Ouspensky’s record of Gurdjieff’s teaching. In The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (1950), Ouspensky writes:
“‘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, what he wishes, what he does not wish, what attracts him, what repels him. Everything absorbs him, and he cannot separate himself from the idea, the feeling or the object that absorbed him.”
This definition establishes identification as a near-constant condition rather than an occasional lapse. Ouspensky elaborates in The Fourth Way (1957), Chapter 1: “It begins first with interest. You are interested in something, and the next moment you are in it, and do not exist any more.” The mechanism operates with startling speed—innocent interest instantly becomes complete absorption.
Rodney Collin, Ouspensky’s student, offered a particularly evocative description in The Theory of Celestial Influence (1954), pp. 210-216:
“Most commonly of all it simply diffuses from him to create the curious psychological state of ‘fascination,’ in which a man completely loses his identity in a conversation, a task, a friend, an enemy, a book, an object, a thought or a sensation. This ‘fascination’ constitutes in fact man’s usual state, and for this very reason is completely unrecognised and ordinarily invisible.”
The word “fascination” captures something essential: identification isn’t dramatic or unusual—it’s the texture of ordinary consciousness, invisible precisely because it’s everywhere.
Why identification keeps us asleep
Photo by Anh Tuan To, Unsplash
Gurdjieff taught that identification is “the chief obstacle to self-remembering.” As recorded in In Search of the Miraculous (1949), Chapter 8, pp. 150-151:
“Identifying is the chief obstacle to self-remembering. A man who identifies with anything is unable to remember himself. In order to remember oneself it is necessary first of all not to identify.”
The deeper reason identification keeps us “asleep” is explained through the metaphor of energy. Maurice Nicoll writes in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, pp. 22-23: “The more often we identify with something, the more we are slaves to it” and “Force is taken away from us by identifying.” Whatever captures our attention drains our psychological energy and uses it for its own purposes, leaving nothing for conscious work.
J.G. Bennett, in Deeper Man (pp. 170-173), articulates the paradox brilliantly:
“When we are identified, our vision of the world is terribly small. The present moment shrinks to a point. But when we are totally identified, utterly lost, we believe ourselves to be most free.”
This is identification’s cruelest trick: maximum enslavement feels like maximum freedom. We feel most alive and engaged precisely when we’ve most completely disappeared.
How identification disguises itself with flattering names
One reason identification is difficult to recognize is that we value it and give it positive names. As Gurdjieff taught (recorded in In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 8):
“Oddly, when people see identification in themselves, they call it ‘enthusiasm’, ‘zeal’, ‘passion’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘inspiration’.”
Bennett expands on this in Deeper Man:
“We even make it somehow seem valuable to be identified, praising a man who is really wrapped up in his work or spending vast sums of money for the latest sensational, that is, identifying, book or film.”
This cultural valorization makes the work against identification psychologically difficult. We must learn to distinguish genuine presence from the excited absorption we’ve been taught to admire.
Examples of identification in everyday life
Gurdjieff offered vivid examples of identification in daily situations. As recorded in In Search of the Miraculous:
“Look at people in shops, in theaters, in restaurants; or see how they identify with words when they argue about something or try to prove something, particularly something they do not know themselves. They become greediness, desire, or words; of themselves nothing remains.”
The phrase “of themselves nothing remains” captures the essential phenomenon—complete dissolution of self-awareness into the object of attention.
A particularly common form of identification is what Gurdjieff called “internal considering”—preoccupation with how others perceive us. From In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 8, pp. 151-153:
“On the most prevalent occasions a man is identified with what others think about him, how they treat him, what attitude they show towards him. He always thinks that people do not value him enough, are not sufficiently polite and courteous. All this torments him, makes him think and suspect and lose an immense amount of energy on guesswork, on suppositions, develops in him a distrustful and hostile attitude towards people.”
Nicoll elaborates in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 1, pp. 253-257: “Internal considering is a branch of identifying… This refers to a process which takes a great deal of force from us and, like everything that takes energy from us uselessly, keeps us asleep.” Internal considering includes feeling owed, making mental “accounts” against others, and nursing grievances—all forms of identification that hemorrhage psychological energy.
Identification with negative emotions
Negative emotions represent a particularly powerful form of identification. Nicoll addresses this directly in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 2, p. 712:
“Try to separate from a negative state, not to go with it, not to consent to it, with the mind at least. For if both the mind and the emotions consent then there is a full identification and a full influx of energy into the negative state. That is why we must try to starve our negative states because the more we nourish them, secretly approve of them and secretly enjoy them, the more energy they will insist on taking from us.”
The teaching emphasizes that consciousness and negativity cannot coexist. As the Fourth Way formulates it: “There are no such things as conscious negative emotions. Where there is consciousness, there is no negativity. Where there is negativity, there is no consciousness.”
Nicoll offers a striking description of complete identification with a negative state in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 1, p. 305:
“When you say: ‘I am feeling negative,’ you are not observing yourself. You are your state. You are identified with your state. There is nothing distinct in you that is standing outside your state, something that does not feel your state, something that is independent of it, and is looking at it.”
This distinction between knowing you’re negative (passive, still identified) and observing the negative state (active, creating separation) is crucial for practical work.
The relationship between identification and self-remembering
The Ten Largest, Youth (Group IV, No. 3.) – Hilma af Klint, 1907
Self-remembering and identification are mutually exclusive states. Ouspensky describes the essential practice of self-remembering in In Search of the Miraculous, pp. 117-120:
“When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe—a line with one arrowhead: I → the observed phenomenon. When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line: I ↔ the observed phenomenon.”
This “double-headed arrow” represents divided attention—the hallmark of self-remembering. In identification, attention flows entirely outward toward the object; in self-remembering, attention simultaneously includes awareness of oneself as the one experiencing.
Ouspensky records his own early experiences of self-remembering in In Search of the Miraculous:
“Self-remembering resulting from this method had nothing in common with ‘self-feeling’ or ‘self-analysis.’ It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavor.”
The “strangely familiar flavor” suggests that self-remembering isn’t adding something foreign but recovering something we’ve always had yet constantly lose through identification.
What becomes possible when we notice identification
The moment of recognizing identification—even after the fact—has genuine value. Bennett describes this turning point in Deeper Man, pp. 170-173:
“At first, when we come across this idea, it is almost impossible for us really to accept that we can ever be identified: other people, yes, but not us. But once we have really seen this in ourselves, when we have tasted the bitter reality of it, it is no longer possible for us to look at ourselves as we did before. We can no longer ‘sleep in peace,’ as Gurdjieff put it.”
John Pentland, who led Gurdjieff Foundation groups in America, describes the quality of these moments in Exchanges Within (Continuum, 1997):
“You should try to understand this feeling. Although it is very fleeting, you should try to understand it more… And strangely, even though it has its side of exposing my weakness, my carelessness, even though it has this side of showing my weakness to myself, there is a great joy in it. It is something very real. It is a moment of presence to myself.”
Nicoll offers a vivid example of what non-identification actually feels like in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 1:
“Lying in bed in the morning I saw thoughts coming in, jealous thoughts, anxious thoughts, sad thoughts, self-pitying thoughts, which followed one another, and seemed to pass through my mind and then went out again, and they were nothing to do with me at all. Now to have this experience means that you begin to realize what is inner freedom.”
This capacity to see thoughts as visitors rather than as “me” represents one practical fruit of non-identification work.
Freedom begins with non-identification
The Fourth Way explicitly connects freedom to non-identification. As stated in In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 8, p. 151:
“Freedom is first of all freedom from identification.”
Gurdjieff taught that liberation proceeds in stages, as recorded in Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff (E.P. Dutton, 1973), p. 266: the first and lesser liberation is liberation from influences within us—from our own mechanical reactions and identifications. Only after achieving this inner freedom can one work toward freedom from external influences.
Rodney Collin describes what opens up through this work in The Theory of Conscious Harmony (1954):
“In a moment of self-remembering, body, soul and spirit are all aligned. Understanding flows between them. Therefore, in a moment of self-remembering we have no sense of time, we have no fear, we have no doubt. Forget ourselves again and time, fear and doubt return. But in self-remembering they have no place. It is true freedom.”
The difference between experiencing and being identified
18th century Tibetan thangka depicting Shakyamuni Buddha with Rainbow Body
A crucial Fourth Way distinction: you can have emotions without being identified with them. The difference lies in whether awareness is present. Ouspensky addresses this in The Fourth Way:
“We always think our negative emotions are produced by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. We always think that. Our negative emotions are in ourselves and are produced by ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else’s action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness.”
He continues: “We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes, and in this way we do not struggle with them.” The recognition that we “permit” our identified states—rather than being helpless victims of them—opens the possibility of not permitting them through conscious awareness.
Nicoll’s distinction in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 3 clarifies the practical application:
“You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side.”
When identified, we are the emotion or thought. When observing, there’s something in us that stands apart and witnesses. The emotion may still be present, but our relationship to it has fundamentally changed.
How to observe without merging: practical methods
The divided attention exercise
The fundamental practice is maintaining divided attention—awareness of both the object of attention and oneself as the one attending. Gurdjieff offered practical instruction in Views from the Real World:
“Sit quietly and allow your associations to proceed but do not be absorbed by them… Look upon your associations as though they belonged to someone else, to keep yourself from identifying with them.”
The Stop exercise
Gurdjieff used the “Stop” exercise to interrupt identification’s continuous flow. From a 1924 transcription cited in Joseph Azize‘s Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (2020):
“The pupil must at the word ‘Stop’… arrest all movement. The tension of his muscles must be maintained, his facial expression, his smile, his gaze, must remain fixed… The physical body being maintained in an unaccustomed position, the subtler bodies of emotion and thought can stretch into another shape.”
By freezing the body, one simultaneously freezes the mechanical flow of thought and emotion, creating a gap where observation becomes possible. (This exercise is best done as part of a Work group or retreat, where someone other than you is calling the ‘Stop.’ It’s impossible to stop oneself with the same effect, as you’ll have time to prepare an ‘ideal’ time-freezing moment before doing so.)
Non-expression of negative emotions
The teaching emphasizes not expressing negative emotions—not as suppression but as creating space for observation. Nicoll writes in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 2: “The non-expression of negative emotions is the beginning of transforming them into presence.”
External considering
Gurdjieff taught: “The chief means of happiness in this life is the ability to consider externally always, internally never.” Nicoll explains the distinction in Psychological Commentaries:
“External considering is always conscious. It is anti-mechanical and so requires conscious effort. Internal considering is always mechanical and so effortless… To put yourself consciously in the position of another person and see yourself in him and him in yourself is a conscious act requiring conscious effort.”
External considering—making genuine effort to regard another’s needs, feelings, and wishes —breaks the grip of identification with our own viewpoint.
Why struggle against identification is essential
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, 1931
Gurdjieff emphasized that inner work requires active struggle. As Nicoll explains in Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 3, pp. 661-662:
“Self-observation carried out with the idea of not identifying with what you observe is the keynote of this system practically…. You know you must divide yourself into two, an observing side and an observed side—i.e. you must not identify with what you observe. This is the same as saying that you cannot change if you identify with everything that goes on in you—i.e. with every mood, every thought, every sensation, every form of imagination.”
Nicoll continues in Vol. 3 on personality and essence:
“Life makes us identify with the Personality. It naturally makes us identify with what it has itself created in us. The Work is to make us cease to identify with what life has created in us… If you say ‘I’ to the wrong thing you increase its power over you. You do not then separate from it.”
The struggle is essential because identification is not neutral—it strengthens whatever we identify with and weakens our capacity for conscious choice.
The sleep of identification and the shock of awakening
Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s closest student and successor, describes the fundamental predicament in The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff, (Shambhala, 2010):
“I wish to be conscious of myself. Yet, as I am at this moment, can I know myself, can I be conscious of myself? I cannot. I am too scattered. I feel nothing. But I see that I am asleep, and I see the symptoms of this sleep. I have forgotten the sense of my existence, I have forgotten myself. And at this moment I receive a shock: I am awaking, I want to wake up. Then, having scarcely felt the shock, I feel myself taken again, held back by the elements of my sleep—associations that turn around, emotions that take me, unconscious sensations. I feel myself fall back into forgetfulness.”
This passage captures the rhythm of the work: brief awakening, identification returning, falling back asleep, awakening again. The struggle is not to achieve permanent non-identification but to increase the frequency and duration of moments of presence.
De Salzmann also emphasizes: “I begin to realize that my Presence is where my attention is… We must see where our attention is.” Attention is the key—presence exists only where attention is consciously placed.
Gurdjieff put the starting point starkly, as recorded in In Search of the Miraculous:
“Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you. That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember yourselves. You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves… If you ask a man whether he can remember himself, he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself, he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness.”
Tying it All Together
Identification is the state of being completely absorbed in whatever has captured our attention—thoughts, emotions, situations, other people, opinions—to the point where we forget ourselves entirely. It’s not occasional; it’s how we spend most of our lives.
Self-remembering is the antidote: maintaining awareness of both what we’re experiencing and the fact that we exist as the one experiencing it. It requires deliberately dividing attention rather than letting it flow entirely outward. (I personally prefer understanding this as multiplied attention, but it’s my long-standing terminology debate with the Fourth Way lineage, and it’s not one I plan to win anytime soon.)
The work begins with observing identification in ourselves without trying to change it. Simply seeing that we’re identified—even after the fact—is valuable. Over time, this observation creates separation between ourselves and our mechanical states.
Freedom in the Fourth Way sense means freedom from being controlled by our own reactions, emotions, and identifications. It doesn’t mean having no emotions but rather not being enslaved by them.
Read All About It: Identification and Awakening
G.I. Gurdjieff:
- Views from the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff (transcribed by students), E.P. Dutton, 1973
- Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Harcourt Brace, 1950
- Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’, Triangle Editions, 1975
P.D. Ouspensky:
- In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949 (Chapter 8, pp. 150-154 for identification material)
- The Fourth Way, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957
- The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, Hedgehog Press, 1950
Maurice Nicoll:
- Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, 5 volumes, Vincent Stuart, 1952-1956
- Maurice Nicoll Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way, Gary Lachman Inner Traditions, 2024
Jeanne de Salzmann:
- The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff, Shambhala Publications, 2010
- Heart Without Measure: Gurdjieff Work with Madame de Salzmann, Ravi Ravindra, ShailaPress, 1999
J.G. Bennett:
- Deeper Man, Bennett Books/Turnstone Press
- John G. Bennett: Witness to Death and Resurrection, Joseph Azize, Red Elixir, 2024
John Pentland:
- Exchanges Within, Continuum, 1997
Rodney Collin:
- The Theory of Celestial Influence, London, 1954
- The Theory of Conscious Harmony, 1954
- Rodney Collin: A Man Who Wished to do Something with His Life, Terje Tonne, Karnak Press
Conclusion: Identification and Witness
Identification is not a fault to correct but a fundamental condition to understand. The Fourth Way doesn’t promise escape from identification but offers a method for gradually developing the capacity to witness our own experience without being completely absorbed by it. Each moment of recognition—”I was just identified”—is not a failure but a small awakening. The cumulative effect of such moments, according to this teaching, is the development of something that can eventually choose rather than merely react.
It is difficult (some would say impossible) to do this Work alone. If you live within driving distance of Asheville, you’re welcome to join me and others in the Gurdjieff Foundation of Western North Carolina this Thursday from 7-8pm for a public exchange, Identification: The Root of Our Sleep.Here’s what we’ll be exploring:
Why can we so easily lose ourselves in anger at a driver who cuts us off, in worry about a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, or in the opinions we defend as though our life depends on them? Gurdjieff called this loss of self identification—the involuntary fusion of our attention with whatever captures it. When identified, we become what we observe. In this state, we have a limited perspective and a reduced ability to control our actions. Identification isn’t occasional: it is our default state and the primary mechanism that keeps us asleep.This session explores how identification operates in everyday life. What becomes possible when we begin to notice that we are identified? Can we find a different relationship to our thoughts and feelings—not by suppressing them, but by developing the capacity to observe without merging? Together we will investigate this core concept of the Work and why Gurdjieff taught that struggle against identification was essential. No previous experience with these ideas is necessary—only a willingness to question who and where you are. Want to let us know you’re coming? RSVP appreciated but not required: email info [at] gurdjieffasheville [dot] org
If you’re in western North Carolina and happen to be reading this later than January 15th, check out our Events section to see if there’s something else coming up.
If you live elsewhere in the world and are interested in potentially joining a Work group, check out this directory.
If you don’t live near an in-person Work group and would like to explore Fourth Way ideas and application online, check out the Church of Conscious Harmony’s Journey School. (Note: Not affiliated with the Gurdjieff Foundation, though they have guest-teachers from the Foundation and other Fourth Way lineages.)
Wherever you’re at—in geography and in life—I encourage you to loosen the grip of identification in your life, so you can get one with truly living.
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