S01E16 – I Am This Or I Am That – The Polarity of Identification

Introduction

Welcome back to Martfotai, a direct path to wholeness, inner freedom, and becoming.

This podcast explores the deeper waters of presence, awareness, and the natural unfolding of consciousness. It’s a practical way of transformation built on direct experience, rooted in the Work of G.I. Gurdjieff, and refined for those ready to integrate swiftly and completely.

And today we enter entirely new territory.

In our last episode, “I Am Two Worlds,” we explored living between the inner and outer realities – aware of both the seen and the silent. We discovered what it means to walk in two worlds at once, bridging presence with daily life, navigating the third totality that emerges when consciousness learns to hold both external pressures and internal compulsions without being dominated by either.

Today, we begin The Great Unweaving. This is where we see through the most fundamental illusion – of selfhood, and of choice itself.

You’ve been told you have freedom. You can choose. Look closer at the choices you actually make:

React or suppress. Please others or disappoint them. Be perfect or be rejected.

Even when no external authority is present, you still operate within predetermined frameworks.

The real trap goes deeper than any external limitation. You’ve internalised this binary thinking until you do it to yourself.

‘I am spiritual OR I am practical.’ ‘I am successful OR I am authentic.’ ‘I am strong OR I am vulnerable.’

Welcome to the polarity of identification – where true choice has been replaced by the endless, exhausting swing between inherited options.

What we’re going to discover today transforms everything. The either/or trap is how consciousness itself gets colonised by false binaries that serve power while masquerading as freedom.

Breaking free from this trap opens the door to something extraordinary – the infinite field of conscious choice that was always available, hidden behind the noise of false alternatives.

Section 1: The Prison of False Choice

True Choice vs Binary Trap

Real choice begins with “A or not-A” – where “not-A” is infinite possibility.

From birth, we’re trained to see only “A or B” – both limited options.

Think about it. When did you last encounter a true choice? A selection between predetermined alternatives, or an open field where you could create something entirely new?

Most of what we call “choosing” is just picking our favourite cage.

The voting booth offers Conservative or Labour. Both operating within the same economic framework, both accepting the same basic assumptions about how society functions, both offering variations on established themes rather than genuinely new possibilities.

The job market presents employee or entrepreneur. Both roles within existing economic structures, both accepting that your life energy will serve systems you didn’t design or necessarily agree with.

Relationship advice reduces love to pursue or let go. Both approaches assuming love is about action toward another rather than presence and conscious response.

Even spiritual choices get reduced to binaries: transcend the world or engage with it, meditate or act, individual awakening or collective service.

The framework limits the options from the start. You select between what’s available, and this gets called freedom.

The Anatomy of False Choice

Listen to how binary choices get presented:

“You can be a patriot or a traitor.” “You can work hard and succeed or be lazy and fail.”

Notice the pattern? Every false binary eliminates the real alternatives whilst making you feel like you’re choosing freely.

Here’s what’s truly insidious: you learned to do this to yourself.

“I can be spiritual or practical.” Why these would be opposites?

“I can be successful or authentic.” What authority convinced you these couldn’t coexist?

“I can be independent and isolated or connected and social.” Based on what law of nature?

The either/or trap didn’t just capture your external choices – it colonised your consciousness.

Did You Really Choose? The Inheritance of False Identity

Here’s the question that changes everything: Did you really choose?

Much of what we think we “chose” was inherited – our language, beliefs, values, even our religion.

You didn’t choose to speak English. You absorbed it. You didn’t choose your early political views. You inherited them from family dinner conversations, school environments, media consumption patterns that were already in place before you could think.

You didn’t choose your concepts of success, love, or spirituality. They were programmed into you by others – parents who were themselves programmed, teachers repeating inherited curriculum, culture transmitting unexamined assumptions.

Yet now you defend these positions as if they were conscious choices. You take sides in debates you never consciously entered. You fight for beliefs that were installed in you by others, arguing passionately for programming whilst thinking you’re expressing freedom.

The polarity trap has you defending inherited positions as personal choices, mistaking conditioning for consciousness.

This is why identification with “I am this or I am that” feels so urgent and important. You’re defending an entire inherited identity structure that feels like it’s you yet was actually constructed by forces completely outside your essential nature.

Section 2: The Diamond of Being – Where Choice Disappears at Both Ends

Here’s something that will change how you see everything about choice, consciousness, and development.

Picture a diamond – two pyramids joined at their bases, one standing atop another. The horizontal axis represents “amount of choice experienced” and the vertical represents “level of being or consciousness.”

At the bottom extreme: Pure mechanism. The person always grabs the same spot on the stick – completely predictable, entirely programmed.

In the middle ground: Maximum choice and maximum confusion. The endless swing between polarities where most of us live. Infinite options without the capacity to see clearly.

At the upper extreme: Pure consciousness. Only what serves the moment is apparent. The person sees the whole stick – or drops it entirely when appropriate.

The paradox: both the mechanical person and the fully conscious person experience “choicelessness” – from opposite ends of the spectrum.

The mechanical person has no choice because they’re entirely programmed. The conscious person needs no choice because only right action is apparent.

Gurdjieff’s Aphorism 29: The Three States of Soul

Gurdjieff captured this perfectly in his twenty-ninth aphorism, one of the most profound statements ever made about human development:

“Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, yet woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.”

Let me break this down:

“Blessed is he who has none”: The mechanical person – blessed in their unconscious simplicity. No inner conflict. They just react, and that’s that. There’s a strange peace in complete unconsciousness. No agonising decisions, no identity struggles, no spiritual seeking. Just automatic response to whatever life presents.

“Blessed is he who has a soul”: The fully developed being – blessed in their conscious unity. Choiceless clarity. Only right action appears. Again, a kind of peace, this time from the opposite direction. Conscious simplicity where the optimal response emerges naturally from clear seeing.

“Woe and grief to him who has it in embryo”: The developing person – maximum suffering  as consciousness emerges … yet hasn’t unified. This is you, this is me, caught between mechanism and mastery.

The Pendulum of the Middle: Where We Get Stuck

Most spiritual and psychological work happens in this confused middle zone – the “embryo” state.

This is where binary thinking feels necessary because options seem overwhelming. Where the endless swing between “this or that” feels like an attempt to manage emerging consciousness.

“Should I be more assertive or more accepting?” “Should I focus on inner work or outer service?” “Should I trust my intuition or my rational mind?”

These questions torture the developing soul because consciousness is awakening to possibilities yet hasn’t developed the capacity for clear discrimination.

Polarity provides false simplicity when the soul is partially developed yet remains whole. It’s easier to swing between two extremes than to develop the subtle capacity for moment-by-moment discernment.

The either/or agony is a developmental stage. You’re experiencing the birth pangs of consciousness, the inevitable confusion that comes when awareness awakens yet hasn’t stabilised in unity.

This understanding completely reframes the spiritual journey. The goal is to transcend choice entirely – moving from unconscious choicelessness through conscious choice-making to conscious choicelessness.

Section 3: The Bezos Paradox – When Business Understands Choice Better Than Consciousness

Here’s something fascinating that reveals how wisdom appears everywhere when you have eyes to see it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, developed a framework: Type 1 decisions are “one-way doors” – irreversible and requiring careful deliberation. Type 2 decisions are “two-way doors” – reversible experiments you can adjust with 70% of the information.

His insight: Most decisions are Type 2, yet we treat them like Type 1.

Now apply this to your life.

The False Urgency Trap: Type 2 Decisions Disguised as Type 1

Most of your identity struggles are actually Type 2 decisions – experiments you can adjust as you learn more about yourself and life.

Career changes? Usually reversible. Skills transfer, networks develop, experience accumulates regardless of the specific path.

Relationship choices? Most are experiments in intimacy and growth rather than permanent commitments to specific forms. Every person you’ve ever known – including yourself – maintains a perfect record of relationships ending, yet each new connection begins with the assumption of permanence. This unconscious recognition that nothing lasts makes relationship decisions inherently experimental, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Spiritual practices? You can explore meditation for a year, then add or subtract elements based on what serves your development.

Creative pursuits? You can write poetry, then switch to painting, then combine both without losing anything essential.

Yet you torture yourself treating these like Type 1 decisions – as if choosing to explore your creative side permanently eliminates your practical nature, or choosing vulnerability permanently excludes the possibility of strength.

Cultural messaging presents reversible choices as irreversible, creating false pressure:

“Choose your degree now – it determines your whole life.” Reality: most people change careers multiple times throughout their working lives.

“Pick your political party – you can’t see issues from multiple perspectives.” Reality: you can think independently about each situation.

“Choose your spiritual path – you must commit completely to one tradition.” Reality: wisdom appears in many forms and can be integrated consciously.

“Decide who you are – and be consistent.” Reality: consciousness can express itself differently in different contexts while maintaining essential coherence.

The relief that comes from recognising most life choices as Type 2 – reversible experiments rather than permanent identities – dissolves the either/or panic immediately.

You don’t have to choose perfectly. You just have to choose consciously, with awareness that you can course-correct as you learn more.

This recognition alone begins to crack open the false urgency that keeps you trapped in binary thinking. When the pressure to choose correctly diminishes, space appears for something far more creative than selecting between predetermined alternatives.

Section 4: The Multiplicity Hidden in “Not-A”

Every real choice opens infinite alternatives, beyond just two.

When someone offers you “A or B,” the real choice is “A or not-A” – and “not-A” contains unlimited possibilities.

Here’s how choice develops through consciousness:

Mechanical reaction: Always the same spot on the stick. Someone criticises, you defend. Someone praises, you inflate.

Formatory correction: Swinging to the opposite end. If you usually defend, you try accepting. Still binary, just the other extreme.

Conscious response: You see the whole stick – infinite places to choose from. Funny, serious, compassionate, strategic, playful, firm, silent, curious.

Pure response: Dropping the stick entirely when that serves the moment.

The Plethora of Responses: Beyond Binary Reaction

With practice, you develop what we call a “plethora of responses” to any situation.

Instead of swinging between angry or withdrawn when someone disappoints you, you can consciously choose: curious about their perspective, patient with their development, firm about boundaries, compassionate about their struggle, humorous about the human condition, strategic about how to proceed, or simply witness their pain without taking it personally.

Instead of oscillating between aggressive or passive in conflict, you can respond: directly yet kindly, firmly yet flexibly, clearly yet gently, strategically yet authentically.

Instead of choosing between trusting completely or not trusting at all, you can trust appropriately – giving trust where it’s earned, protecting yourself where it’s warranted, remaining open to people changing while being realistic about current patterns.

Each moment offers infinite ways to respond when you’re free from either/or programming.

Presence multiplies options while reactivity reduces them to mechanical swings.

This is what distinguishes conscious choice from mechanical reaction: the mechanical person has one or two responses, the conscious person has access to the entire spectrum of human possibility.

Section 5: Choice as Consciousness vs Choice as Illusion

Here’s the deeper teaching that transforms everything.

Mechanical Choice vs Conscious Choice

Mechanical choice: Reacting to pre-selected options. Someone offers “A or B,” you pick one based on conditioning, and think you’ve chosen freely. The choice is made by programming, preferences, fears, desires – rather than by consciousness.

Conscious choice: Creating new possibilities from impartial awareness. You see “A or B,” recognise the trap, and ask: “What else is possible here? What would serve the actual situation rather than my conditioning?”

Impartial choice: After awakening to choice as consciousness, “it’s all based on your choice.” Who you are and how you manifest can be chosen moment by moment from clear seeing rather than identification – compassionate, reverent, humorous, impartial, fierce, gentle, whatever serves the unfolding of life.

This transforms polarity from prison into playground. You’re creating your response from infinite possibility rather than being trapped in “this or that.”

Recognising Choice Patterns

Here’s a simple way to explore whether you’re trapped in habitual responses or free to choose consciously.

Notice your automatic patterns in familiar situations. When someone criticises you, do you always defend? When praised, do you always deflect? When stressed, do you always withdraw or always push harder?

True choice becomes available when you can see these patterns clearly without being driven by them. Not to force yourself into opposite behaviours, which would just be another form of programming, but to recognise that you have options beyond your usual response.

If you typically defend when criticised, you might discover the possibility of curious listening. If you always withdraw when stressed, you might find the option of staying present whilst taking care of your needs.

This isn’t about performing different personalities. It’s about discovering that what you thought was “your nature” might actually be learned patterns that can become conscious choices.

The goal isn’t to master opposite behaviours. It’s to develop awareness of your automatic responses so that consciousness, rather than conditioning, can inform your actions.

When you can see your patterns without being imprisoned by them, something new becomes possible – responses that serve the actual situation rather than serving your familiar identity.

The Freedom Paradox: When Laws Are Lifted

Notice what happens when you drop the “shoulds.” Do you collapse into selfishness, or does clarity appear by itself?

When external restrictions disappear, conscious people often choose more discipline, rather than less. True freedom reveals our natural tendency toward what serves life, growth, consciousness, love.

Real freedom is terrifying to the personality because it eliminates all the familiar excuses and places the responsibility for life directly in consciousness.

Section 6: Conscious Direction: Choosing Your Guide

Without conscious choosing of guidance, polarity pulls you into reactive sides and inherited identities. You bounce between influences – this teacher, that method, whatever seems compelling in the moment.

With conscious choosing of direction, you align with what serves your development rather than being pulled by the loudest voice.

Take a practical example: You’re drawn to meditation, yet also pulled toward activist work. Without chosen direction, you swing between them, feeling torn. With conscious guidance – perhaps from someone who integrates both – you can see how contemplative practice deepens engaged action.

Or in family life: Your child misbehaves. Without direction, you swing between being too strict (control) or too permissive (avoiding conflict). With conscious guidance about what actually serves their development, you can be firm when boundaries serve, gentle when understanding serves.

When you know your direction, you can see through attempts to limit your choices to predetermined alternatives.

Hope and Human Choice: Impartial Focus in Dark Times

Even amid suffering and injustice, you can choose where to place your attention – impartially.

This doesn’t mean choosing optimism over realism, or hope over facts. It means choosing where to place your energy from presence, rather than from identification with either pole.

You can focus on human potential whilst remaining realistic about current conditions.

You can hold hope without being driven by either naive optimism or cynical pessimism.

You can work for justice without being consumed by anger about injustice.

You can see clearly what’s wrong whilst also seeing clearly what’s possible.

This kind of impartial choice – made from consciousness rather than conditioning – transforms both inner and outer reality because it’s based on seeing what actually is rather than reacting to emotional projections.

When you choose hope impartially rather than desperately, when you choose action from clarity rather than compulsion, when you choose focus from wisdom rather than fear, your choices become genuinely creative rather than merely reactive.

Section 7: Practical Integration – The Sacred Pause

Interrupting Binary Programming

The most practical tool for breaking free from polarity traps is the sacred pause before any either/or decision.

When someone offers you a binary choice, when you feel pulled to take a strong position, when the mind starts swinging between extremes – pause.

Breathe space into the false urgency.

Ask: “Who benefits if I choose quickly between these options?”

Ask: “What would someone who is free from identification with either side do here?”

Ask: “Is this actually a Type 1 decision that requires careful deliberation, or a Type 2 experiment I can adjust later?”

Most importantly: “What’s the third option they didn’t mention?”

Finding Creative Options

Here’s a concrete scenario: You’re at work, and your manager gives contradictory feedback. They want more initiative, yet criticise when you take it. Your usual response is either to comply (losing your edge) or rebel (creating conflict).

Pause. Breathe space into the false urgency.

Ask: “What else might be possible here?”

Perhaps curiosity: “Help me understand how to balance initiative with alignment.”

Perhaps timing: Taking initiative in some areas whilst seeking guidance in others.

Perhaps clarity: “I want to serve the team well. What would that look like in practice?”

Notice how this dissolves the either/or trap immediately. Creative alternatives often serve the situation more effectively than the binary options you first considered.

Section 8: The Deeper Recognition – What’s Really Happening

What we’re really exploring in this episode is how consciousness itself gets trapped in false limitations.

The either/or trap is about recognising that most of what you thought were choices were actually programming activation, rather than about making better choices.

When you swing between “I am spiritual or I am practical,” you’re being chosen by conditioning that says these must be opposites, rather than choosing.

When you struggle with “I am independent or I am connected,” you’re being decided by inherited concepts that split wholeness into fragments, rather than deciding.

When you agonise over “I am successful or I am authentic,” you’re being selected by cultural programming that makes natural human qualities seem mutually exclusive, rather than selecting.

The real choice is whether to continue participating in this programmed fragmentation or to step into the unified field of conscious response where all qualities can be embodied as they serve the moment.

This is what Gurdjieff meant by moving from “man in quotation marks” – the mechanical person bouncing between programmed reactions – to real individuality where responses arise from consciousness rather than conditioning.

The polarity trap keeps you mechanical even when you think you’re being spiritual or psychological or self-aware. Because you’re still just reacting to predetermined options rather than creating new possibilities from clear seeing.

Breaking free means recognising that you are the consciousness that can see beyond all binaries and respond from wholeness, rather than the roles you play, the positions you take, or the sides you choose.

Section 9: The Infinite Field of Real Choice

What happens when you step outside the either/or game entirely?

You discover that most conflicts were artificial. Most choices were false. Most problems were created by the binary thinking itself.

“Should I be more spiritual or more practical?” becomes irrelevant when you see that consciousness can be practical when practicality serves, spiritual when spirituality serves, both simultaneously when integration serves.

“Should I trust or protect myself?” disappears when you see that appropriate trust and appropriate protection both arise from clear seeing of what each situation actually needs.

The either/or questions that tortured you were based on false premises. When the premises dissolve, the questions become meaningless.

This doesn’t mean you stop making decisions. It means your decisions arise from a completely different source – from seeing what serves life rather than from managing internal conflicts between artificial opposites.

Choice as Creative Expression

When you’re free from binary thinking, choice becomes creative expression rather than problem-solving.

Instead of trying to choose between predetermined roles, you can express consciousness differently in each moment based on what the situation calls for.

You might be fierce with someone who needs boundaries, gentle with someone who needs comfort, humorous with someone who needs lightening, direct with someone who needs clarity, mysterious with someone who needs to think for themselves.

You’re free to embody any quality consciously because you’re identified with consciousness itself rather than with any particular expression of it.

This is what Gurdjieff called “conscious labour” – work that arises from seeing, rather than from should or shouldn’t, from love rather than from fear, from wholeness rather than from fragmentation.

Conclusion: The Journey Ahead

This episode opens the door to The Great Unweaving – four movements that will take us from the prison of false binaries to the unlimited field of conscious choice.

Next week, Episode 17: “I Am Both This And That” – where we refuse to choose against ourselves and learn to hold paradox without splitting. We’ll explore how maturity means learning to hold tension rather than resolving it, how to embody apparent opposites simultaneously, and what happens when you stop making internal war between aspects of yourself.

Then Episode 18: “I Am Neither This Nor That” – where we discover the freedom of stepping outside all positions entirely. We’ll explore what remains when you stop identifying with any role, any quality, any stance, and how this emptiness becomes the most creative space of all.

Finally, Episode 19: “I Am None of That at All” – where we find what remains when even choice itself dissolves into pure presence. We’ll explore what cannot be touched by thought, label, or form, and how this recognition completes the journey from fragmentation to wholeness.

Everything begins here, with seeing through the either/or trap that has colonised your consciousness.

The Recognition That Changes Everything

Real choice begins when you refuse both options and ask: “What else is possible here?”

What if every either/or you’ve ever faced was just a distraction from the unlimited creativity that belongs to conscious choice?

You are the consciousness from which both “this” and “that” appear.

And that recognition changes everything.

Next time on Martfotai: “I Am Both This And That” – Holding Two Truths Without Splitting

To hold tension is maturity. To balance opposites is clarity.

Thank you for walking this path with us. I’m Gary Eggleton and this is Martfotai.

Visit martfotai.com for our weekly newsletter, guided practices, and premium extended teachings.

Beyond every false binary lies the field of infinite possibility.