The Atmosphere Exercise

"Like the earth, man also has an atmosphere, which surrounds him on all sides, for a meter, more or less – to a limit… Your atmosphere is displaced in the direction in which your thought goes. If you think of your mother, who is far away, your atmosphere moves towards the place where your mother is… Concentrate all your attention on preventing your atmosphere from escaping beyond the limit. You do not allow it to go further than one meter or one meter and a half. When you feel your atmosphere quietened, without waves, without movement, then with all your will you suck it into yourself – you conserve yourself in this atmosphere. You draw it consciously into yourself."[1]

This apparently simple exercise, given by Gurdjieff to enable people to come into what he called a collected state, is remarkable in its effects and ramifications, when you sit down and actually work at it. It is completely an exercise of will. Your body does not move. Your thoughts are not engaged. It is all attention, intention, and inward action. Thus, the first challenge is the exploration of what this means, of how to make that inner effort of will to do the exercise, first in the somewhat static effort of stabilizing our atmosphere and then in the dynamic effort to draw it into ourselves.

Putting our attention on our atmosphere trains us to direct and maintain our attention toward an inner object. Keeping our atmosphere within the meter and a half limit trains us to sustain another aspect of our will, our intention. Drawing the atmosphere into ourselves with all our will trains both attention and intention, as well as the ability to act in our inner world. All of that is crucial to developing our inner life and finding our way along the spiritual path.

In that process, the Atmosphere Exercise develops our inner perceptions, opening us toward being able to perceive inner worlds, like the world of sensitive energy and being in vivid contact or the world of presence, peace, and consciousness. In practice, we discover that our atmosphere is made primarily of shimmering particles of energy akin to the vibrating particles of sensation that we experience within our body when we sense our body. Using our attention as a kind of net, we make the inner act of will of casting that attention-net out into our personal atmosphere and drawing it, along with its contents, back into our body. Alternatively, we can suck air in through our nostrils while paying close attention to that air, an act that liberates the particles of energy from the air that carries them. Either approach can prove effective, with the result showing up immediately as an enhanced level of sensation throughout our body. Indeed, these two can be combined into a single and even more effective approach.

With further practice, we may notice a deeper possibility within the exercise. Underneath our sensation, feeling, and thought energies, there is layer of pure awareness that we call consciousness, or the conscious energy. The work of sensing brings the sensitive energy into a coherent, body-shaped, and at least temporarily stable mass of vibrations that allows us to sink into the conscious energy, into pure awareness. Without that work of sensing, our ongoing random sensory stimuli mask the conscious energy, diverting our attention and presence from their natural home in consciousness. The work of focusing our attention in the Atmosphere Exercise also helps bring consciousness to the foreground, because attention engages and directs the conscious energy.

Once we start to become aware of and be in the conscious energy, the possibility arises of concentrating it within ourselves, just as we concentrate the sensitive energy from our atmosphere into our body. But with the conscious energy, the action of concentrating it from outside ourselves is quite different than how we concentrate the sensitive energies. This is because we cannot directly control the conscious energy in the way we can act on the sensitive energies.

Instead, we suck the conscious energy into us. But rather than creating a vacuum in our airways to give the incoming air a little boost, we create an existential vacuum within us, an intentional emptiness in our core, a kind of hole in the center of our being, a hole that consciousness fills. The conscious energy is a boundless and seamless field of pure awareness. Intentionally making a consciousness vacuum draws that energy into us, strengthening the field of consciousness in us. Unlike the action of casting an attention-net outside of us to capture and draw our sensitive atmosphere into us, we generate a vacuum within us and let it suck the conscious energy into us.

Slowly, actions such as these build up our inner body, which consists of a blend of the sensitive and conscious energies. We find ourselves collected, able to be present, able to inhabit our bodies, physical and inner, and just be. The Atmosphere Exercise is a seminal pillar on the way toward all of that.

[1] Transcripts of Gurdjieff's Wartime Meetings 1941-1946; pp. 148-149

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