Ordinary human consciousness exists in a state that traditional teachings unanimously describe as sleep. Not the sleep of the physical body in bed, but a waking sleep – a condition of complete identification with passing thoughts, emotions, sensations, and circumstances. In this state, there is no “I” present to experience. There is only experience happening to no one, thoughts thinking themselves, emotions moving through an empty space that mistakes each passing content for itself.
Ouspensky called the exit from this condition self-remembering. Vedanta calls it sākṣī-bhāva – witness consciousness. Sri Aurobindo approached it through the dual movement of aspiration and surrender, calling forth descending force while establishing the psychic being as inner witness. These are not merely analogous practices from different traditions but convergent methods addressing the same fundamental problem: consciousness trapped in mechanical identification, unable to recognize its own nature.
The Illusion of Unity: Polypsychism
Before describing the practice, we must confront Ouspensky’s most disturbing observation: there is no permanent “I.” What we call “myself” is not a unified entity but a succession of different “I”s, each taking control for a moment before being displaced by another. The “I” that makes a resolution in the morning is not the “I” that breaks it in the afternoon. The “I” that decides to practice self-remembering is not the “I” that forgets five minutes later. There is no continuous self threading through experience – only a parade of temporary selves, each convinced of its own permanence while it occupies the stage.
This is polypsychism: man has many “I”s, not one. Each desire, each thought, each mood produces its own “I” that speaks with full authority: “I want this,” “I believe that,” “I will do this.” But these “I”s contradict each other, make incompatible plans, pursue opposing goals. The “I” that wants to meditate wars with the “I” that wants to sleep. The “I” that values truth conflicts with the “I” that prefers comfortable illusions. There is no master coordinating these selves, no permanent center of gravity. Consciousness is a ship with a rotating crew, each sailor thinking himself the captain during his brief watch.
This observation shatters the ordinary sense of self more completely than any philosophical argument. Watch yourself for a day and you will see it: “you” are not one but many, a multiplicity masquerading as unity through the trick of memory. Each “I” inherits the memories of previous “I”s and mistakes this continuity of memory for continuity of being. But memory is passive recording, not active presence. The “I” remembering is not the “I” that experienced what is remembered.
Vedanta, beginning from a different angle, posits the stable jīva (individual soul) that misidentifies with body and mind but nonetheless maintains coherence across lifetimes. Yet even here, the jīva in its identified state exhibits the fragmentation Ouspensky describes – pulled by the guṇas (sattva, rajas, tamas), driven by impressions (saṃskāras), reactive rather than self-possessed. The difference is that Vedanta sees this fragmentation as obscuration of an underlying unity, whereas Ouspensky insists the unity must be created through work.
Aurobindo’s synthesis resolves the apparent contradiction. Behind the multiplicity of surface personalities – what he calls the outer being – stands the psychic being or soul, the evolving spark of the Divine that carries the thread of continuity through incarnations. This psychic being is real but veiled. Most people live entirely on the surface, identified with the revolving committee of “I”s, never touching the psychic center. The work consists in bringing the psychic forward to organize and unify the outer nature. Until this occurs, polypsychism reigns – mechanical multiplicity without conscious center.
The suffering inherent in this condition cannot be overstated. Each “I” experiences itself as absolute, its desires as imperative, its fears as ultimate. Yet each is powerless – displaced by the next “I” before it can accomplish anything substantial. The result is perpetual internal war: conflicting desires, broken resolutions, self-sabotage that appears inexplicable because the “I” that sabotages is not the “I” that made the plan. Life becomes a chaos of fragmentary impulses, none strong enough to achieve coherence, all consuming energy in mutual opposition.
Self-Remembering: The Divided Attention
Self-remembering is the practice that begins to create unity from multiplicity. Ouspensky describes it as a state of divided attention. In ordinary consciousness, attention flows outward toward objects. I see the tree, hear the sound, feel the sensation. Attention is absorbed entirely into the object – this is identification. In self-remembering, attention simultaneously includes both object and subject. I am aware of the tree and of myself seeing the tree. I hear the sound and am aware of myself hearing. I feel the sensation and observe myself feeling.
This is not analysis or thinking about oneself. It is direct awareness – consciousness becoming conscious of itself in the very act of experiencing. The division is not between two different thoughts but between consciousness (the subject) and its contents (objects). As long as attention remains only on objects, self-remembering is impossible. As soon as attention includes the subject – the one aware – self-remembering begins.
Try it now. Be aware of these words and simultaneously aware of yourself reading them. Notice the quality of presence when attention divides this way. There is a heightened clarity, an intensity of being, a sense of existing more fully than in the absorbed state. This intensification signals that consciousness has partially escaped identification. Instead of being the reading, you are observing the reading occur. More precisely: instead of one of the many “I”s being absorbed in reading, something witnessing the “I” has awakened.
The difficulty is that this state evaporates almost immediately. You succeed in dividing attention for a moment, then forget, and identification resumes. The mechanical rotation of “I”s continues, each forgetting the practice as it takes control. Hours pass in mechanical absorption before you remember to remember yourself again. The practice consists in repeatedly creating this divided attention, noticing when it is lost, and recreating it. Not once or twice but thousands of times, until something begins to crystallize – a permanent “I” that persists through the changes, an observing presence that does not rotate with the mechanical “I”s.
This crystallization is not automatic. Gurdjieff insisted it requires conscious labor and intentional suffering – what he called conscious suffering. The mechanical “I”s seek comfort, distraction, sleep. To maintain self-remembering against this momentum creates friction, generates heat. This friction is tapas – not the ascetic austerities of mortifying flesh but the transformative discipline of staying present when every mechanical impulse urges escape into identification.
The Witness in Vedanta
The sākṣī (witness) is that in you which observes but is never observed. It is aware of thoughts but is not a thought. It is aware of emotions but is not an emotion. It is aware of sensations but is not a sensation. It is even aware of the sense “I am” – the basic self-feeling that persists through changing experience – which means the witness transcends even the ordinary ego-sense. Crucially, the witness observes the parade of mechanical “I”s without being any of them.
Advaita Vedanta uses the practice of neti neti (not this, not this) to discover the witness. Whatever you can observe is not the Self. The body is observed – not Self. Sensations are observed – not Self. Emotions are observed – not Self. Thoughts are observed – not Self. Even the “I” thought is observed – not Self. What remains when all objects of consciousness are seen as “not this”? The pure subject, the witness, consciousness itself – Ātman, which was never born and will never die.
This witness is called sākṣī because it is sākṣāt – immediate, direct, self-evident. You cannot prove its existence because it is presupposed in every attempt at proof. You cannot doubt it because the doubter is the witness witnessing doubt. It is the one certainty that survives all skepticism: awareness is present. Not “I think therefore I am” but simply “awareness is” – prior to any “I,” prior to any thought.
The cultivation of sākṣī-bhāva (witness-attitude) consists in repeatedly shifting identification from objects to subject, from contents to container, from what appears to that which observes appearances. When anger arises, instead of being angry (identification), observe anger (witnessing). When thoughts flow, instead of being the thinker, observe thinking. When one of the many mechanical “I”s takes the stage, instead of becoming that “I,” observe it performing.
This practice generates its own form of tapas. To witness suffering rather than be suffering creates intense heat. The mechanical “I”s want to be the suffering, to dramatize it, to extract its full emotional value. Witnessing refuses this satisfaction. It neither suppresses the suffering (repression) nor indulges it (identification), but observes it with detached awareness. This observing burns – a concentrated attention that transforms the quality of experience without changing its content.
Aurobindo’s Integral Transformation
Sri Aurobindo’s yoga introduces elements absent from both Fourth Way and classical Vedanta: the psychic being as evolving soul, the descent of higher consciousness from above, and transformation rather than transcendence as the goal. Where Vedanta seeks liberation from manifestation and Fourth Way seeks escape from mechanical sleep, Aurobindo seeks to bring divine consciousness into matter itself, transforming rather than abandoning earthly existence.
The psychic being (caitya puruṣa) is distinct from the witness. The witness is impersonal – the same in all beings, pure consciousness without individual characteristics. The psychic being is personal – the evolving divine spark unique to each individual, carrying the essential truth of one’s being across lifetimes. In Aurobindo’s framework, both are real and both must be realized. The witness provides the detached observation necessary to disengage from mechanical nature. The psychic being provides the divine anchor that can organize and transform that nature.
Most people live in what Aurobindo calls the outer being – the surface personality composed of mental, vital (emotional), and physical parts, each with its own “I”s, desires, and habits. This is the domain of polypsychism, the rotating committee of selves. Behind and within stands the psychic being, mostly veiled, occasionally breaking through in moments of genuine aspiration, love, or beauty. The work consists in calling the psychic forward until it governs the outer nature, bringing unity, purpose, and divine orientation to what was mechanical multiplicity.
This calling forward occurs through aspiration – an intense upward flame in the heart, a crying out for the Divine, a rejection of all that is false and a hunger for all that is true. Aspiration is not desire. Desire belongs to the vital “I”s and seeks objects to possess. Aspiration belongs to the psychic being and seeks only the Divine, not for what the Divine can give but for its own sake. Aspiration is the soul’s will toward union with its Source.
Complementing aspiration is surrender – the offering of all that one is and has to the Divine working from within and above. Surrender means acknowledging that the small “I”s cannot transform themselves, that personal effort while necessary is insufficient, that transformation requires grace – the descent of higher consciousness into lower nature. This descent Aurobindo calls the supramental – consciousness-force from planes above mind that can transmute matter itself.
The practice combines ascending and descending movements. Through witness consciousness and aspiration, one rises above mechanical identification, establishing awareness in higher planes. Simultaneously, through surrender and receptivity, one opens to forces descending from above – peace, light, force, ānanda (bliss) – that progressively transform the outer being. Both movements are necessary. Pure ascent risks abandoning earth for heaven. Pure descent without witness consciousness risks the descending forces being captured and distorted by mechanical nature.
Tapas in Aurobindo’s sense is neither ascetic mortification nor mere mental discipline but will-force – the power of consciousness to transform substance. True tapas comes not from personal striving but from the supramental force working in the practitioner. When suffering is witnessed with aspiration and offered in surrender, it becomes material for transformation. The pain does not disappear but its meaning changes. Instead of mechanical suffering that weakens and depletes, it becomes conscious suffering that purifies and strengthens – lead transmuting into gold through alchemical heat.
The Synthesis: Three Paths as One
These three approaches – Fourth Way self-remembering, Vedantic witness consciousness, and Aurobindo’s psychic transformation – are not contradictory but complementary faces of a single work. Each addresses a different aspect of the problem; each provides tools the others lack.
The Fourth Way’s strength lies in its psychological precision about mechanical functioning. Ouspensky’s polypsychism is unflinching diagnosis – you have no permanent “I,” no real unity, no consistent will. This shatters comforting illusions and creates genuine urgency. The practice of self-remembering provides immediate, concrete method: divided attention, remembering oneself, creating friction against mechanical sleep. The teaching on conscious suffering reveals that difficulty itself can be food for higher development if experienced without identification.
Vedanta’s strength lies in its metaphysical grounding. The witness is not something to be created but to be recognized – it is what you always already are beneath identification. Ātman is Brahman; your true Self is the absolute Self, never born, never dying, eternally free. This provides unshakeable foundation: even total failure in practice cannot touch what you essentially are. The teaching on turīya (the fourth state) reveals that witness consciousness is not one state among others but the ground of all states, present even in deep sleep though unrecognized.
Aurobindo’s strength lies in providing evolutionary purpose and transformative method. The witness alone risks passive detachment – observing suffering without transforming it. The psychic being provides divine anchor and evolutionary direction – not escape from life but its divinization. Aspiration and surrender open vertical channels for grace to descend. The goal is not liberation from matter but transformation of matter, bringing light into darkness rather than fleeing darkness for light.
In practice, they weave together. Self-remembering creates the divided attention necessary for witness consciousness to emerge. Witness consciousness provides the stable observing position from which to see mechanical “I”s clearly. Recognition of polypsychism generates genuine humility – “I” cannot do this alone because there is no “I” yet. This humility opens surrender. Surrender invites descending grace. Grace strengthens witness consciousness and self-remembering. The circle completes: what begins as personal effort reveals itself as divine work using personal effort as its instrument.
The practitioner works simultaneously on multiple levels. On the surface, practicing self-remembering: dividing attention, catching identification, remembering oneself amidst mechanical life. At a deeper level, cultivating witness consciousness: observing thoughts, emotions, and mechanical “I”s without becoming them. At the deepest level, aspiring to and surrendering to the psychic being and supramental force: calling for transformation, offering all that arises, opening to descent from above.
Transmutation Through Conscious Suffering
All three teachings converge on a paradox: suffering is both the problem and the solution. Mechanical suffering – unconscious identification with pain – depletes, weakens, embitters. Conscious suffering – witnessing pain while maintaining presence – transforms, strengthens, purifies. The difference lies entirely in the quality of consciousness, not in whether suffering occurs.
Gurdjieff taught that man is a transforming apparatus – a factory designed to refine coarse substances into finer ones. Food, air, and impressions enter at gross levels and can be transformed through conscious work into the subtle substances needed for higher bodies. But this transformation requires intentional suffering – deliberately creating and enduring friction rather than seeking comfort. When mechanical “I”s suffer, they dramatize, complain, seek sympathy or revenge. When suffering is witnessed, it becomes raw material for alchemical work.
This is tapas in its deepest sense – the heat generated by consciousness maintaining presence under pressure. Physical pain, emotional turmoil, mental confusion – all generate heat when witnessed rather than identified with. This heat is not metaphorical. Something actually burns – the mechanical patterns that cause suffering in the first place. Each time anger arises and you witness rather than become anger, the pattern weakens. Each time fear appears and you observe rather than be fear, the grip loosens. The mechanical “I”s literally burn away in the fire of sustained attention.
Aurobindo called this agnī – the sacred fire that transforms impurity into purity, ignorance into knowledge, mechanical nature into divine nature. When suffering is offered in surrender rather than clung to in identification, it becomes fuel for this fire. The pain does not necessarily lessen – sometimes it intensifies as consciousness becomes more sensitized. But its meaning inverts completely. Instead of punishment or meaningless cruelty, it becomes grace – the universe providing precisely the friction needed to burn away what is false and reveal what is true.
The key is maintaining the double movement: witnessing (ascending) and surrender (descending). Witnessing alone can become cold detachment, observing suffering with indifference. Surrender alone can become passive acceptance, suffering without understanding. Together they create the alchemical vessel – witness consciousness holds steady presence while surrender opens to transforming force from above. Suffering caught in this vessel transmutes: the lead of mechanical pain becomes the gold of conscious experience, then the diamond of unshakeable peace that remains serene even while experiencing the full intensity of earthly life.
The Three States and the Fourth
The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad analyzes four states of consciousness: waking (jāgrat), dreaming (svapna), deep sleep (suṣupti), and the fourth (turīya). In waking, consciousness identifies with gross external objects. In dreaming, consciousness identifies with subtle internal objects. In deep sleep, consciousness experiences neither gross nor subtle objects but remains in undifferentiated potential. In turīya, consciousness witnesses all three states without identifying with any.
Ouspensky observed that in ordinary consciousness, waking and dreaming are functionally identical. Both involve complete identification with appearances – the only difference being whether appearances are called external or internal. The rotation of mechanical “I”s continues in both states, each “I” convinced of its reality while it holds the stage. True waking means self-remembering: consciousness aware of itself experiencing, rather than lost in experience. Until this occurs, we merely dream with eyes open.
The goal is not eliminating the three states but adding the fourth. The body still cycles through waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Thoughts still arise and pass. Emotions still move. Mechanical “I”s still appear. But consciousness no longer exclusively identifies with these movements. It remains established in the witness – present, aware, observing all changes without being changed by them. In Aurobindo’s terms, the psychic being comes forward and consciousness remains there even while the outer being cycles through its states.
This is the meaning of jīvanmukti – liberation while living. The liberated being still possesses body and mind, still acts in the world, experiences pain and pleasure, but no longer mistakes these temporary vehicles and experiences for the Self. Consciousness has permanently awakened from identification into witnessing. This is also what Gurdjieff meant by “crystallization” – the formation of a permanent “I” that survives all changes of state because it is not identified with any state.
But Aurobindo pushes beyond even this. Jīvanmukti is liberation, but liberation that still leaves matter as it is – gross, ignorant, subject to death and decay. The Integral Yoga seeks not just witness consciousness established in turīya but the transformation of the three states themselves. The descent of supramental consciousness into waking, dreaming, and sleeping states would transmute them – not eliminating body and world but divinizing them, bringing light into the darkness of matter, establishing heaven on earth rather than escaping earth for heaven.
Obstacles and Self-Deceptions
The practice sounds direct but proves extraordinarily difficult. The primary obstacle is the sheer force of habit – identification has been reinforced not just for a lifetime but across lifetimes according to Vedanta and Aurobindo. Consciousness has never known itself except through identification with mechanical “I”s, so the very attempt to witness feels unnatural, forced, impossible to sustain.
Ouspensky identifies three specific obstacles: identification, considering, and imagination. Identification we have discussed. Considering is internal accounting – constantly calculating how others perceive you, whether you are being treated fairly, what is owed to you. It is one of the mechanical “I”s’ favorite activities, consuming enormous energy in endless internal dialogue about external relationships. Imagination is not creativity but daydreaming: the mechanical flow of fantasy that fills consciousness when not occupied by external demands. All three are forms of identification that consume consciousness and prevent self-remembering.
Vedanta names different but equivalent obstacles. Avidyā (ignorance) is the root – not knowing the Self, mistaking the non-Self for Self. From this flows asmitā (I-am-ness wrongly placed), rāga (attraction), dveṣa (aversion), and abhiniveśa (clinging to life). These kleśas (afflictions) chain consciousness to identification through desire and fear, constantly pulling attention toward objects that seem to promise completion or threaten loss.
Aurobindo adds the resistance of the vital being – the emotional-desire nature that violently opposes any attempt to dethrone it. The vital loves drama, craves intensity, feeds on emotional storms. Witness consciousness threatens to starve it by refusing identification with its turbulence. In response, the vital generates crises, magnifies difficulties, produces apparently insurmountable obstacles – anything to force consciousness back into identification and keep itself at the center of attention.
The greatest self-deception is imagining you are self-remembering when you are merely thinking about self-remembering. The mind easily produces the thought “I am self-remembering” or “I am the witness” while remaining completely identified. This thought is itself an object, another content of consciousness, not the subject witnessing contents. It is one more mechanical “I” playing a new role. True self-remembering or witness consciousness has no mental content – it is the awareness itself, prior to and independent of any thought about awareness.
Another self-deception is conflating relaxation or calm with witnessing. You may achieve a peaceful state through meditation but still be identified with peacefulness. One of the mechanical “I”s – the “spiritual I” – has taken control and is enjoying pleasant states. The test is whether awareness remains present when disturbance arises. If anger appears and you lose yourself in anger, there was no witnessing – only temporary absence of strong emotion. The witness remains equally present whether experience is pleasant or unpleasant, calm or agitated, because it is not identified with the quality of experience.
A third self-deception involves spiritual bypassing – using the witness position to avoid rather than transform difficult emotions and situations. “I am not this anger, I am the witness” becomes a way to deny anger rather than consciously experience it. But true witnessing does not avoid anything. It experiences everything fully while remaining unidentified. The anger is felt completely – perhaps more intensely than in identification because nothing is repressed. But it is felt as anger, as an energy moving through consciousness, not as “my anger,” not as an identity. This distinction is subtle but crucial.