Man is an imperfect creation. He is not a truly unique cosmic being whose intelligence and ability to act reflect the energies of the source of life itself. On the contrary, man as we know him is more like an automaton.

His thoughts, feelings and actions are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. In him and around him, everything happens without the participation of his own authentic consciousness. 

But man is unaware of this fact because the omnipresent influence of culture and education imbues him with the illusion of an autonomous conscious self. 

Modern man has no idea how self-deceptive a life lived in only one part of himself can be. The head, the emotions and the body each have their own perceptions and actions, and each can live a simulacrum of human life. 

In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic ‘I am’ in his presence, only an egoism that masquerades as the authentic self and whose machinations poorly mimic the normal human functions of thinking, feeling and willing.

Many factors reinforce this sleep. Each of the reactions that take place in one's own presence is accompanied by a deceptive sense of self - the human being is many selves, each of which imagines itself to be the whole and each of which is buffered from the perception of the others. 

Each of these many ‘I's represents a process by which the subtle energy of consciousness is absorbed and dissipated, a process Gurdjieff called “identification”. Man identifies himself - that is, he wastes his conscious energy - with every passing thought, impulse and sensation. 

This state manifests itself in a constant self-deception and an uninterrupted succession of egoistic emotions such as anger, self-pity, sentimentality and fear, which are so painful that man constantly tries to alleviate this state by the endless pursuit of social recognition, sensual pleasure or the vague and unattainable goal of ‘happiness’.

- Jacob Needleman