Journal of Gurdjieff Studies

. . . every event carries us away. Every event fastens its mouth upon our energy and consumes it. Life carries us away, now up, then down. And the illusion of passing-time, and the thinking only in terms of time, cause us to fix our eyes always on tomorrow which never comes – for it is always tomorrow. So we live ahead of ourselves strained out in time, and are never here, never in the place where we really are, the only place in which anything real can happen – in now. 1

Returning again to the Study House aphorism, quoted a number of times, “Man is given a definite number of experiences – economizing them, he prolongs his life,” 2 the whole mystery of Time itself seems bound up with this, or, at least, the experience of Time.

One picture I have which helps me to ponder on the potential squandering of experience, is that of an excited child at Christmas-time, surrounded by presents, who, lacking guidance from their parents, opens one present after another very quickly, hardly looking at each before moving on to the next, and before long becomes exhausted and bored. This is very different to that child who opens a present and savours the contents, as it were, getting to know it and love it, before opening another. The latter is more richly fed, and although seems to spend more time with each present, actually uses time much more wisely and productively. Perhaps economising experience is indeed about focussing on the present!

There can be a repeatedly experienced fact that the subjective sense of the passage of time alters according to one’s degree of self-awareness, which may give us a clue to the close link between time and remembering oneself.

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