Imaginative Observation
An unusual practice of observation
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Returning to some unfinished business with A.R. Orage’s Psychological Essays, here is an initial commentary on some aspects of the sixth essay, How to Learn to Observe.
Apart from the difficulty, not to say the seeming impossibility, of the exercise in this essay that Orage instructs the reader in, even his use of the word “observe” is rather peculiar. It could, of course, be said that Gurdjieff’s use of the words “observe” and “observation” is even more original, for example, as in the phrase “the impulses of observation and constatation” that makes up part of a verbal formulation defining attention in an ancient manuscript that he says he is endeavouring to transmit the sense of, in the last chapter of his third series.1 Or, likewise, in Gurdjieff’s well-used term, self-observation, famous for being misunderstood.2
Although Orage is talking about observation of external objects rather than self-observation here, his own use of Gurdjieff’s term self-observation seems to be first of all about observing one’s own body as if it is an external object. For example, he says,
Self-consciousness is awareness of objects including your own body. In ordinary waking consciousness we are aware of all objects except body. In self-observation we are aware of both.3
If there is an “I” that observes, then whether it is the object of the body or an external object that is observed, perhaps in one sense there is little difference, the key being the presence of impartiality or disinterestedness towards one’s organism.
But what about the use of imagination that Orage makes an integral part of the process of observation that he is describing? He complains of the deficiencies of usual scientific observation which is connected to the error of dispensing with the imagination. He says that,
…trained scientific observers…[see things] piecemeal and seldom as wholes, and still more rarely as phases of a process without beginning and without end…
From this, he seems to be introducing the idea that actually to see things aright, we must learn to see them as processes. Gurdjieff said, in an early lecture, New York, February 1924,
Man is a process, a transmitting station of forces.4
Orage seems to indicate that all-round observation must also engage the imagination. It seems that is not enough that we see even all the details of a thing as it is in one instant, but we must include in our vision its possible and inevitable past and future, as well as other things, such as its origin and relationships. Everything is to be present at the same time, that is, we must learn to see things not only as processes but all aspects simultaneously. This is also suggested, for example, by Maurice Nicoll in an exercise to try and make his pupils think about and bring the Enneagram “to some kind of life in your mind and directed imagination”:
Let us try to get rid of the idea of time by means of conceiving the world in higher dimensions—i.e. conceiving that time does not exist and that everything in succession in time is alive and is, so to speak, always there, although we seem to pass from one thing to another.5
Returning to Orage, he writes,
…what we mean by imaginative observation is not such a series of painfully co-ordinated facts after the various lines of observation have been pursued, but a simultaneous perception, in the flash of an eye, of all there is to know of the object in question.
It is a paving-stone we are observing? We should have in mind immediately and simultaneously its nature, its origin, its history, its use, its place in nature, its future.
Perhaps one could even apply the same exercise of assembling all one knows about an object, “in the flash of an eye,” to one’s own body.
Interestingly, as so often, the thorny problem of mixing two processes, observation and perception, comes up again here. (See Orage on Observing and Noticing for some discussion about this.) I would say that "imaginative observation," as Orage is instructing us in, is not the same thing as "simultaneous perception," although Orage seems to put it that way, as quoted above. The problem with the word observation, however, is that it can be taken either as meaning the act of observing, or meaning the result of observing, as in an observation. Imaginative observation, as I understand Orage to be talking about in his essay, is the practice of observing or looking at an object, concentrating one's attention upon it, while asking oneself certain questions about it, and seeking the vista of possibilities with one's mind's eye. The perception, or simultaneous perception, is the result of that process. Or, in other words, seeing is the result of looking, but the two processes enable and enlarge each other. If, however, he had written "an imaginative observation is…a simultaneous perception," then this would be entirely unprovoking.
This essay of Orage’s, How to Learn to Observe, seems to be as much about thinking as about observing, as the latter word is commonly used. Or, rather, it seems to be about increasing the capability of various mental functions, of which observing is one. Orage says, interestingly,
At first, not only will you discover, to your surprise, both how much you know and how much you do not know, but the difference in feeling between observing, thinking, remembering, reasoning, imagination and fancy. These processes are, as a rule, merely names to us. We distinguish them theoretically and in our heads only. They mean as little to us as signs in algebra. But after a very few exercises of such observations as has just been described, these mental functions become certainly and specifically known as different.
It’s perhaps notable that the title of this essay is exactly the same, except for the last word, to the first essay of the fifteen Psychological Essays, How to Learn to Think. Is this perhaps a clue to a link with that earlier essay? Having worked on the exercise in the first essay, with the watch and so on, adding various activities for the attention simultaneously, and increasing our “thought-power,” this sixth essay now instructs exercises which do require increasingly concentrated intense effort, even if for short periods. So the earlier essay does seem to prepare for this one.
Is there something important in this about coming to the state of knowing what one knows and what one does not know, all at once? As already mentioned, Orage says that you will “discover, to your surprise, both how much you know and how much you do not know…” One can compare the following, with Gurdjieff speaking in In Search of the Miraculous:
“Consciousness is a state in which a man knows all at once everything that he in general knows and in which he can see how little he does know and how many contradictions there are in what he knows.”6
And from Orage, in the notes of L.S. Morris:
“Consciousness is the state of knowing what we know and what we don’t.
“Of a conscious man we might say, what he knows he does know and what he doesn’t know he doesn’t deceive himself about. He has experience of the difference between knowledge, opinion, wish, guess, and ignorance, and he knows where his own ignorance lies. Our difficulty is that in the first place we don’t know what we know; secondly, we cannot discriminate between knowledge and plausibility; and thirdly, we cannot distinguish between an objective certainty (being-certainty) and subjective-certainty (a feeling-certainty). This does not mean that the conscious man is omniscient; he is still a learner but with a criterion of knowledge.”7
All this seems to connect to what Orage calls “understanding by forms,” no doubt linked to Gurdjieff’s “mentation by form.”8 Orage says, as reported by C.S. Nott,
‘Formal understanding - understanding by forms - is brought about by being-mentation.
‘Gurdjieff frequently suggests that the value of being-mentation is in the activity of gathering up all experiences, whatever subject you touch on.9
As far as actually doing this exercise of imaginative observation, learning to do things little by little seems the key, especially when something at first seems impossible. For example, to gather up everything about an object that one can in one’s mind, according to the suggested categories, for a pre-defined time, say, five minutes, or even one minute, to begin with, and then to try to picture it all at once.
And Orage himself has said earlier, in the essay On Dying Daily, that “It is no proof of mental weakness to fail scores of times at a new mental exercise.” One can also note the following advice from the 1944 Paris Meetings, where Gurdjieff was advising a pupil on an exercise she found impossible:
GURDJIEFF: Don’t expect results. Just do it as an exercise. When you have the data to do it, you will do it. Now you prepare the place. You expect to be able to do something already. You are wrong. Do not expect anything.10