The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 13 of 125
Everyone you see is asleep
Personally, as a young Marxist, religion had always been anathema to me, and it was only because I was ill in bed and couldn’t find anything else to read that I opened Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, a book I had been sedulously avoiding for years. But the psychology I stumbled on was the last thing I had been expecting. “Everyone you see is asleep,” Gurdjieff tells Ouspensky early in the book. “Asleep and lost in dreams.” This hit me like a bucket of cold water. Perhaps it was particularly shocking for me personally because of something that had happened in a car crash—that had happened twice, in fact, and both times in car crashes. During the last seconds before impact, time had gone into extreme slow motion—or perhaps it would be more exact to say it was both moving and frozen at one and the same time. There was absolutely no fear. On the contrary, I was euphoric: I seemed to have become an integral part of Being itself and felt enormously safe. I wasn’t myself at all, yet never before had I been myself so intensely.