"And so on and so forth. By the time it reaches to you it has almost nothing of the original, or so little that it makes no difference. You see something only if your filters allow it, and the filters don't allow much.

"Scientists agree with the Sufis. Scientists say we see only two per cent of reality. Only two per cent! Ninety-eight per cent is missed. When you are listening to me you will hear only two per cent of what has been told, of what has been said. Ninety-eight per cent will be lost. and when the ninety-eight per cent is lost, that two per cent is out of context. It is as if you have taken two pages from a novel, at random – one from here, one from there – and then you start reconstructing the whole novel from these two pages. Ninety-eight pages are missing. You have no inkling what they were; you don't even know that they were. You have only two pages and you reconstruct the whole novel again. This reconstruction is your invention. It is not discovery of truth, it is your imagination.

"And there is an inner necessity to fill the gaps. Whenever you see that two things are unrelated, the mind has an inner urgency to relate them. Otherwise it feels very uneasy. So you invent a link, you fix those loose things with a link, you bridge them. And you go on inventing a world that is not there.

"So before we can enter into this small but immensely valuable dialogue between the master and the disciple, you will have to understand these layers, these filters.

"Gurdjieff used to call these filters 'buffers.' They protect you against reality. They protect your lies, they protect your dreams, they protect your projections. They don't allow you to come into contact with reality because the very contact is going to be shattering, shocking. Man lives through lies.

"Frederick Nietzsche is reported to have said, 'Please don't take the lies away from humanity, otherwise man will not be able to live. Man lives through lies. Don't take the fictions away, don't destroy the myths. Don't tell the truth because man cannot live by truth.' And he is right about ninety-nine point nine per cent of people."