The Pairing of Sensing
In the article “Perception of the sense of Gurdjieff's words,” I made a plea for the examination of the words Gurdjieff uses, even though they may be well-known in contexts of ordinary usage. And in the post “Exact and Inexact,” reference was made to the need to make paste to stick together the fragments of what Gurdjieff gives us, in order to be able to fathom the gist of what he is saying.
Gurdjieff says that both the practical method and the theory are taught little by little, they are given out in bits and pieces which have to be fitted in and stuck together. “But you must make paste,” he says, “without paste nothing will stick.”1
So, in the spirit of the saying attributed to Gurdjieff, “philology [is] a better route to Truth than philosophy,”2 I begin here a study of the word sensing as used by Gurdjieff, in an attempt “to make paste.”
The word sensing is often paired in surprising ways with certain other words in the writings of Gurdjieff. In this piece, I put forward the proposal that each component of at least some such pairs represents one of two specific kinds of interlocked and reciprocally acting processes of experience.