asato mā sadgamaya tamaso mā jyotirgamaya mṛtyor mā amṛtaṁ gamaya From the unreal lead me to the real, From darkness lead me to light, From death lead me to immortality. - Brihadaranyaka Upanishad Have you ever stopped to wonder just how much of reality you simply don't notice? Gurdjieff used to talk about "buffers", and how people block out reality in accordance with their own mindset. He termed this semi-aware state "sleep" and insisted that the vast majority of people live out their entire lives as slaves to this condition of automatic self-hypnosis. He developed what he called the Stop Exercise, which was a method of bringing each practitioner into an awareness of their own state of “sleep”. He devised all sorts of irritating, annoying and seemingly pointless tasks for people to do with the sole intention of jolting them from their unconscious habits. This wasn’t a new idea, of course. Many monastic orders and religious teachings have u