A Path Out of Exile: With Gurdjieff in Post-war Paris

"We called the main task, to be repeated tirelessly, the goal of all the exercises: 'to remember oneself!' Self-remembering is this attempt to deliberately remind ourselves of the exile in which we live and to transform it, with the time devoted to this practice, into consciousness. This idea evoked an immense resonance in me. I had been in exile since I was seventeen, banished. That was the word that explained my very painful state. Of course, I had experienced rejection from my country and emigration as an exile, but this was about my personal homeland, my inner world. I had lost it a long time ago: I lived on the margins of myself. Consciousness was 'in exile, ' captured, stuck in secondary and insignificant circumstances, exiled to the domain of functions and appearances."