S01/E15: “I Am Two Worlds” – Bridging the Inner and Outer Realities

Introduction

Welcome back to the Martfotai podcast.

There’s a question haunting every previous episode: if you discover yourself as spacious awareness, if you recognise your essential unity with everything – how do you actually live this whilst getting on with ordinary life?

You’ve glimpsed that separation is imagination. You’ve recognised yourself as the awareness in which everything appears. You’ve learned to hold polarities without being torn apart. Yet here you are, still needing to pay bills, maintain relationships, make decisions as if you were a separate person in a world of separate things.

This creates a peculiar double vision. You know yourself as infinite awareness, yet must function as a finite individual. You’ve seen through separation’s illusion, yet daily effectiveness seems to require treating it as real.

The temptation is to choose sides – either live only in the absolute truth of unity, or abandon spiritual recognition for practical concerns. But both choices create suffering. Live only in unity consciousness and you become ineffective in the relative world. Live only in separation and you lose the profound peace and clarity that comes from knowing your true nature.

Today we explore the third option: learning to inhabit both worlds simultaneously without being limited by either.

This is what George Gurdjieff meant when he spoke of humanity’s two worlds becoming three through conscious work. Most people swing unconsciously between outer conformity and inner reaction, never developing the third possibility – their own authentic response that transcends both mechanical patterns.

In the biblical phrase “Be still and know that I am God,” there’s practical instruction hidden in mystical language. The stillness refers specifically to what you can control – your acquired movements, your reactive patterns, your automatic responses. But what you cannot stop – sensation itself, the immediate knowing of what is – that’s what remains when everything else becomes quiet.

Today we discover how to navigate between worlds without losing your footing in either. How to be completely practical whilst remaining utterly free. How to care deeply about outcomes whilst knowing your essential nature depends on nothing external.

Section 1: The Three Totalities of Human Functioning

In his remarkable work “Life is Real Only Then, When I Am,” Gurdjieff revealed something profound about human psychology that most people never recognise. Every ordinary person has two worlds operating simultaneously, but through conscious work, a third world becomes possible.

The First Totality: The Outer World

This consists of everything formed from involuntary outer impressions – all the cultural programming, social expectations, family patterns, and educational conditioning you’ve absorbed throughout your life. When you worry about others’ opinions, conform automatically to social norms, or find yourself thinking thoughts that don’t feel truly yours, you’re operating from this first totality.

But here’s what’s crucial: this isn’t just about external circumstances. Your outer world includes all the ways you’ve been programmed to respond based on forces completely outside your essential nature. It’s reactive conformity masquerading as personal choice.

The Second Totality: The Inner World

This arises from automatic processes of your nature – genetic patterns, biological drives, emotional reactions that run by themselves, inherited psychological tendencies. When you react with anger because someone triggered a childhood pattern, feel attracted or repulsed for reasons you can’t explain, or find your body responding with tension based on unconscious conditioning, you’re experiencing the second totality.

This creates your “inner world” – but not in the romantic way most people imagine. This isn’t about having a rich inner life. It’s about all the mechanical patterns that operate automatically based on your biological and psychological inheritance.

The Ping-Pong Existence

Most people live their entire lives as what Gurdjieff called “man in quotation marks” – bouncing mechanically between these two totalities. Sometimes outer pressures dominate – you’re reacting to external expectations, trying to meet social demands. Sometimes inner compulsions take over – you’re driven by instincts and emotions you can’t control.

Neither response comes from genuine choice. Both are mechanical reactions to forces you’re unconsciously identified with. You’re like a ping-pong ball bouncing between the paddle of social conditioning and the paddle of personal programming.

This creates exhaustion because you’re always reacting rather than responding. You never get to discover what you actually think, feel, or want when freed from both external pressure and internal compulsion.

The Third Totality: Your Own World

But Gurdjieff discovered something revolutionary: through conscious work, a third totality becomes possible. This arises from what he called “contemplation” – the voluntary contact between the first two totalities.

This third world doesn’t arise automatically. It emerges through “conscious labour and intentional suffering” – the deliberate work of remaining aware whilst experiencing the tension between outer and inner forces, rather than being unconsciously driven by them.

The crucial difference is that the first two totalities form automatically through chance causes not depending on you, while the third totality forms exclusively through intentional blending of the functions of the first two.

This is your “own world” – a capacity for authentic response that transcends mechanical patterns. It’s the development of real choice – the ability to receive what is and respond from wisdom rather than programming.

Right now, notice which world is speaking. As you listen to these words, is part of you evaluating whether this makes sense? That’s outer world conditioning – comparing new information to what you’ve already been taught. Is another part having an emotional reaction – interest, resistance, recognition? That’s inner world machinery – automatic responses based on your psychological patterns.

Something else is simply aware of both responses whilst remaining free of both. That awareness hearing these words – that’s the third possibility we’re exploring.

But awareness doesn’t remain an abstract idea. It shows itself in how experience is built.
Every moment is layered: sensation comes first, then movement follows, and only then do words and explanations arrive. If we want to live between the two worlds, we must understand this architecture clearly. Otherwise, we stay lost in stories without ever touching the ground they rest on.

Section 2: The Architecture of Experience

Right now, something extraordinary is happening that you’ve probably never noticed. Your entire experience follows one fundamental pattern: sensation followed by movement. This isn’t just physical – it’s the basic architecture of consciousness itself, operating across three distinct yet interconnected dimensions.

Your Physical Body – The Outer World

Feel your hand touching something solid right now. Notice how the sensation arises first – pressure, temperature, texture. You don’t have to learn how to feel these; they’re given directly. This is pure sensation, your essence in the physical realm.

But watch what happens next. Almost immediately, movement follows. You might pull away from something unpleasant or linger with something pleasant. You develop preferences, attractions, repulsions. This movement aspect is learned, acquired through experience. It’s your personality in the physical realm.

Your Emotional Body – The Inner World

Now think of someone you care about. Notice how significance and meaning arise immediately – that sensing of what this person represents to you emotionally. You don’t manufacture this feeling; it emerges spontaneously. This is emotional sensation, your essence in the feeling realm.

Then observe the movement that follows – thoughts about the person, mental commentary, stories about your relationship. The feeling came first; the thinking about the feeling came second. Emotion as sensation, thought as movement in response.

Your Mental Body – The Deepest Inner World

Here’s where it gets interesting. Bring to mind a situation where you felt a moral conflict. Notice how something immediately pricks your conscience – that instant knowing of what’s right or wrong. You don’t decide this through reasoning; it’s immediate moral sensation, your essence in the realm of conscience.

Then watch how reasoning follows – justifications, rationalisations, complex arguments about why your initial sensing might be right or wrong. Conscience comes first as sensation; reason follows as movement.

This pattern is universal: sensation, then movement. What you sense is given. How you move in response is acquired. Every level of your being operates this way, creating the experience of living in multiple worlds simultaneously.

The Hidden Tension

But this split is not neutral. Part of you wants to collapse into the outer world – to be busy, distracted, endlessly occupied by external demands. Another part wants to retreat into the inner world – to withdraw, isolate, or escape into fantasy and reaction. Each world feels threatened by the other.

The outer world whispers: “Stop navel-gazing. Get practical. Deal with reality.” The inner world insists: “Stop performing. Be authentic. Follow your feelings.” Both voices sound reasonable, yet each demands complete allegiance.

That’s why holding both at once feels so rare, so demanding. The ego resists being stretched between them. It wants the simplicity of choosing one side, the relief of not having to remain conscious of the tension. Yet this very tension, when held consciously, becomes the birthplace of a third possibility.

Section 3: The Biblical Discovery – A Direct Practice

“Be still and know that I am God” contains perhaps the most practical psychological instruction ever encoded in religious language. Let’s explore what this actually means through direct experience.

Guided Practice: The Stillness Recognition

For the next few minutes, we’re going to distinguish between what you can stop and what you cannot stop. This is not meditation – it’s recognition.

First, notice what you can consciously cease:

Stop moving your body unnecessarily. Let go of any fidgeting, restless gestures, automatic physical reactions that serve no purpose. Feel what happens when you simply don’t move.

Stop your mental commentary. The constant stream of judgements, analysis, internal dialogue that creates a barrier between you and direct experience. Don’t fight thoughts – simply don’t generate them.

Stop your reasoning and justification. The endless mental arguments that try to make everything fit your preferred version of reality. Let the need to have an opinion about these words simply fade.

These are all acquired movements – learned responses you can consciously choose to cease.

Now notice what you cannot stop:

You cannot stop feeling the temperature around you, the pressure of your body against whatever supports it. Physical sensation continues regardless of your preferences.

You cannot stop emotional significance from arising. If you think of someone you love, the immediate sensing of what they mean to you continues whether you like it or not.

You cannot stop your conscience from being pricked when something violates your deepest knowing. Moral sensation arises spontaneously.

These are given sensations – the direct knowing that operates beneath your acquired responses.

The Profound Recognition

When you stop the movements you can control whilst remaining awake to the sensations you cannot control, something extraordinary emerges. You discover the space between stimulus and response. You find yourself able to receive what is without immediately reacting to it.

Notice how your nervous system relaxes when freed from the constant effort of mental processing. Feel how much energy becomes available when you’re not maintaining the machinery of automatic response.

This stillness isn’t emptiness – it’s fullness. Intelligence operates more clearly when not cluttered with mechanical reactions. Understanding arises that’s more complete than anything thinking could produce.

Here you touch what you were made for – to become a living nerve ending of consciousness itself, experiencing life on behalf of the divine without the interference of your own petty demands and mechanical reactions. This immediate awareness of pure, raw, unadulterated experience is perhaps our deepest purpose.

To be still and know that I Am God. This is both the easiest thing in the world – because it’s your very nature – and the hardest thing in the world – because life has seduced you away from this divine simplicity through endless acquired complications and personal agendas.

This creates the possibility of a third world – your own genuine response that emerges from the gap between automatic conformity and automatic rebellion.

Section 4: The Third Force Practice

This third world emerges through working consciously with what Gurdjieff called the three forces. Most conflicts aren’t between wanting and not-wanting – they’re between two wants that seem to clash. Understanding this changes everything.

Direct Practice: Holding the Tension

Think of a situation where you feel genuinely torn between outer expectations and inner impulses. Perhaps you know you should address a difficult conversation with someone, yet part of you wants to avoid the discomfort. Or you feel called to pursue something creative, yet practical concerns demand your attention elsewhere.

Instead of immediately resolving this tension by choosing one side, try something revolutionary: feel both forces simultaneously whilst remaining free of both.

Sense the outer pull in your body. Where do you feel the pressure to conform, to meet expectations, to do what others need? Don’t judge it – just feel it fully.

Now sense the inner impulse. Where do you feel your own authentic desire, your personal truth, your individual need? Again, don’t choose – just feel it completely.

This isn’t comfortable. Your system wants to reduce the tension by making a decision, taking action, or creating a story that eliminates the contradiction. But consciousness develops through learning to remain present within tension rather than escaping from it.

To hold the tension is to bear fire. To flee is to remain unformed.

Staying in the Fire

Stay here. Don’t rush to solve the tension. Let it burn in you a little longer. Notice the pull to collapse one way or the other – into outer compliance or inner rebellion – and refuse both.

Consciousness develops in the burning. Comfort kills transformation.

This refusal is the soil where a new force appears. The mind cannot produce it, the body cannot force it, the emotions cannot imagine it. It comes unbidden, only when you hold the opposites without flinching.

Feel the discomfort of not knowing, of not choosing, of remaining suspended between two genuine demands. This discomfort is not a mistake – it’s the creative friction that consciousness requires for development.

The forge shapes steel through fire, not through ease.

The Third Force Emerges

When you can hold both the outer pull and the inner impulse without collapse, something new emerges – what Gurdjieff called the third force. This isn’t compromise, where you split the difference between competing demands. It’s a genuinely creative response that transcends the original polarity.

You might discover a way to address the difficult conversation that honours both your need for authenticity and your care for the relationship. Or find an approach to your creative calling that integrates practical wisdom rather than abandoning it.

This third response feels different in your body. Instead of the tension of being pulled between options, there’s a sense of alignment, of moving from your centre rather than being driven by competing forces.

Each time you respond from this third place rather than reacting from outer pressure or inner compulsion, you strengthen what Gurdjieff called your “own world” – a capacity for a real response that emerges from conscious choice rather than automatic conditioning.

Section 5: The Art of the Diplomat

Living in two worlds simultaneously requires developing a diplomatic skill – becoming fluent in multiple realities whilst maintaining your centre in all of them.

Imagine you’re stationed in a foreign country as a diplomat. You must speak their language perfectly, understand their customs, navigate their politics effectively. Your success depends on complete adaptation to their way of life. Yet you never forget which country you actually represent. Your deeper allegiance remains constant even as you function seamlessly within their system.

This is precisely how you live in two worlds. The world of apparent separation is like that foreign country. You become completely fluent in its language – individual concerns, personal boundaries, practical responsibilities. You engage fully with its customs – paying bills, maintaining relationships, solving problems as if you were truly separate from everything around you.

This total engagement is essential. Half-hearted participation serves no one. When your child needs attention, you respond as a caring parent. When work demands focus, you engage as a capable professional. When relationships require presence, you show up as a genuine human being.

Yet underneath this skilled adaptation, you never lose touch with your true nature – the awareness that contains all experience. Your passport to unity remains always accessible.

The Translation Skill

Different situations call for different languages. When someone is struggling with practical concerns, they need you to speak the language of individual experience – to acknowledge their specific challenges, validate their personal concerns, offer concrete support.

When you’re in deep recognition of unity, you might experience the dissolution of all boundaries, the knowing that nothing has ever actually happened in ultimate terms, that all suffering is temporary confusion about what you are.

The skill lies in knowing which perspective serves each moment. You don’t lecture someone about mortgage illusions when they need practical support. You don’t reduce genuine spiritual insight to mere psychology when someone’s touching profound recognition. A masterful diplomat serves both realities without being trapped by either.

Right now, think of someone in your life. Which world are they primarily operating from? Can you sense their outer-world concerns – social expectations, practical pressures? Can you feel their inner-world patterns – automatic reactions, inherited tendencies? Practice meeting them in whichever world they inhabit whilst holding awareness of both.

Living the Integration

This week, practice conscious translation. When engaging with practical concerns, speak fully in the language of individual responsibility whilst maintaining background awareness of the larger context. When touching unity recognition, allow that knowing whilst remaining available for individual engagement when needed.

You’ll discover you can be completely passionate about outcomes in your personal life whilst holding them lightly. Deeply committed to your work whilst remaining unattached to results. Genuinely caring about relationships whilst knowing love itself is never threatened by any particular interaction.

The diplomat serves both realities faithfully without being limited by either. You become a bridge between worlds, helping others access whichever perspective would serve their current situation most effectively.

Section 6: The Householder’s Path

Traditional spiritual paths often required renunciation – leaving ordinary life to pursue enlightenment in caves and monasteries. The householder’s path is different. You seek recognition whilst remaining fully engaged with family, work, and worldly responsibilities.

This path has unique advantages. When you’re forced to function in the world of separation, you can’t deceive yourself about the depth of your understanding. Your recognition must be robust enough to withstand the stress of deadlines, the challenge of difficult relationships, the pressure of practical responsibilities.

The cave monk escapes the test. The householder lives it daily.

Every situation becomes a teacher, constantly revealing where you’re still identified with separation, where your understanding remains conceptual rather than embodied, where you slip back into unconscious reaction patterns.

There is nowhere to hide when children are crying and bills are due.

Living the Practice

Right now, think of your most chaotic domestic moment from this week. Feel how both worlds were pulling at you simultaneously.

Imagine parenting in the middle of chaos: your child spills something across the floor whilst dinner burns on the hob and messages pile up demanding immediate responses. Panic rises in them, irritation surges in you. The outer world screams for reaction: “Be careful! Why did you do that? Fix this, solve that, manage everything at once!” The inner world whispers escape: “Withdraw, suppress it, find some peace.”

This is the Work: love in the wreckage, presence in the storm. Here, in the crucible of ordinary chaos, everything you’ve learned gets tested.

Both pulls are strong. And yet, in that instant, you remember the bridge.

You take one breath. You feel the tug of annoyance in your chest, the pressure of urgency in your spine. You don’t collapse into either. You stand between. Instead of scolding or withdrawing, you kneel and help clean the spill whilst turning off the hob with your free hand. A calm word, a gentle smile. Simple presence that is neither indulgence nor suppression, translated into action.

The child feels your steadiness rather than your stress. They learn not just how to wipe the floor, but how to meet life without panic or blame. The situation resolves more smoothly because you’re not adding the fuel of your own chaos to an already challenging moment.

This is the quiet transmission of two-world living. Nothing mystical. A real moment, lived differently.

Notice: you didn’t choose between caring for the child and managing practical demands. You didn’t choose between feeling annoyance and performing calm. You held both whilst responding from a calm centre that transcends either reaction.

This is why we say the Work is for life. To be a householder is to meet life’s spills, cries, and frictions, and bring conscious presence right there, where it matters most.

The Daily Integration

Choose three different contexts in your life – perhaps work, family, and social situations. For each context, develop specific ways to maintain awareness of both worlds:

At Work: How can you be completely professional and effective whilst recognising that consciousness is exploring itself through these business relationships and challenges? Perhaps taking a conscious breath before important meetings, or pausing to feel your feet on the ground during stressful interactions.

With Family: How can you be genuinely caring and responsible as an individual family member whilst seeing how awareness is meeting itself through these intimate relationships? Maybe silently recognising the awareness behind your own and others’ eyes during conversations.

In Social Settings: How can you be authentically present with your personality and preferences whilst knowing that all the personalities present are temporary expressions of the same awareness? Perhaps maintaining soft peripheral vision that includes the space around interactions, not just the content.

The goal isn’t to always consciously hold both perspectives – that would be exhausting and impractical. The goal is to have easy access to both realities so you can draw on whichever serves the situation most appropriately.

Beyond Personal Liberation

When you can navigate both worlds skilfully, you serve something larger than personal development. Others unconsciously relax in your presence because you’re no longer broadcasting the subtle tension of someone defending territory or seeking validation.

You become what consciousness needs in each situation – sometimes fierce in your boundaries, sometimes completely open. Sometimes deeply engaged with practical details, sometimes helping others remember the larger context that makes all details workable.

This flexibility emerges naturally from not being fixed in any particular identity or spiritual position. You can afford to be completely human because you know you’re not limited to humanity. You can care deeply about individual concerns because you’re rooted in what transcends all individual experience.

You cannot fake two-world living when life demands everything at once.

Conclusion

You’ve discovered the secret hidden in plain sight: you are not choosing between worlds – you are the bridge where they meet.

The biblical instruction was never metaphor. When you stop what you can control whilst surrendering consciously to what you cannot stop, you touch what you were made for. To be consciousness experiencing itself through your form, without the interference of personal agendas. To be still and know that I Am God.

This is both the easiest thing in the world – because it’s your very nature – and the hardest – because life has seduced you away from this divine simplicity.

But now you know. The spiritual search and practical life were never opponents. Unity and separation are not problems to solve but dimensions to inhabit simultaneously. Your individual recognition serves collective consciousness simply by being lived.

You can’t fake this when children are crying and bills are due. The householder’s path burns away all pretence through ordinary chaos. This is why your practice matters – as service to the whole.

This week, practice being the bridge.

Choose three moments daily: morning coffee, a work interaction, evening wind-down. In each moment, feel both worlds simultaneously – your inner reality of breath and awareness, your outer reality of sounds and space. Stand as the meeting point.

Notice how this changes your presence. How others unconsciously relax around your stability. How solutions emerge that no defended position could reach.

The diplomat serves both realities faithfully without being trapped by either. You become what consciousness needs in each situation – sometimes fierce, sometimes soft, always whole.

In our next episode, we begin the Paradox Arc with “I Am This Or I Am That” – exploring how consciousness swings between different identities, and how recognising this swinging reveals the centre point that contains all possibilities.

A guided bridge practice will be available at martfotai.com, along with our weekly newsletter and extended teachings for those walking this path.

Thank you for discovering what you actually are: the intersection between worlds, the space where all possibilities converge.

You are the bridge. Live from both worlds simultaneously.

I’m Gary Eggleton, and this is Martfotai.

You’ve found your place between the worlds.