Knowledge, Feeling, and Action: A Fundamental Split
A person can know one thing, feel another, and do a third. This is especially easy to notice in others — not everyone is able to see it in themselves. And this has always been the case.
Religious practices were the first to notice this phenomenon. Mystical traditions picked it up later. George Gurdjieff clearly distinguished between two dimensions of human existence: the level of knowledge and the level of being.
The Level of Knowledge and the Level of Being
The level of knowledge refers to what a person knows: information, concepts, theories, explanations, and the ability to speak “correctly.”
By contrast, the level of being refers to what a person is: the degree of inner coherence, the level of awareness, the capacity to endure tension and stress, the depth of lived experience, and the degree of “awakening.”
These two levels are not the same. They may not even overlap. From Gurdjieff’s perspective, a person may understand complex ideas, speak about personal development, and reflect on spirituality or psychology —
and at the same time remain mechanical, be driven by affects, fail to notice their own automatisms, and live under the illusion of consciousness.
When Knowledge Replaces Being
Knowledge easily becomes a substitute for being. An illusion of growth. A form of compensation. Especially within the span of a single lifetime (this matters — Gurdjieff was a mystic).
By contrast, a person with a higher level of being may need fewer explanations, show little interest in conceptual expansion, and feel no hunger for “yet another theory.” They do not “consume” TikTok or television.
Because they already experience what others try to understand. Their orientation is toward lived experience, not description. For them, knowledge is secondary to presence.
This sharply contradicts the modern cult of “development through information.”
Kundabuffer and the Illusion of Change
Gurdjieff believed that the lack of balance between knowledge and being is the result of a special device — the kundabuffer. Its purpose is to distort the perception of reality, fix the illusion of an autonomous “I,” and lock the person into a mechanical mode of existence.
Although the organ itself was removed, the consequences of its action remained — as a structural distortion of the psyche, consolidated both historically and individually.
The kundabuffer causes a person to identify with their thoughts, to be captured by emotions, and to feel certain that they “act,” “choose,” and “decide.”
In reality, the person reacts, reproduces patterns, and lives by inertia. The aftermath of the kundabuffer creates the illusion that if a person understands an idea, can explain it, and agrees with it intellectually, something in their way of being has changed.
In other words, the kundabuffer creates a substitution:
“I understood it” = “It has already happened to me.”
From Gurdjieff’s point of view, this is false.
And not only from his point of view.
This is precisely the point where Gurdjieff and psychodynamic psychology begin to intersect.
A Psychodynamic Reading of Gurdjieff
If we translate this from the language of mystical symbolism into the language of psychodynamics, the picture becomes less opaque.
What Gurdjieff described as the effects of the kundabuffer is understood in psychodynamic terms as a systemic identification with the ego. A person experiences themselves as identical to their thoughts, evaluations, intentions, and explanations. They are convinced that this is who they are. Everything that does not fit this picture is repressed, rationalized, or devalued.
As a result, an illusion of an autonomous subject emerges: “I think,” “I decided,” “I chose.” Yet on the level of lived reality, behavior is often shaped by affects, bodily impulses, early object relations, and defenses that remain outside awareness.
Dissociation from Bodily and Affective Experience
From here, a second crucial layer appears — chronic dissociation from bodily and affective experience. A person may understand perfectly well what is happening to them on the level of words and concepts, while barely feeling it from the inside.
The body lives its own life. Emotions break through as symptoms. Consciousness is occupied with explanations. Knowledge circulates in one register, experience in another, and behavior in a third.
This creates the situation mentioned at the very beginning of the article — when a person knows one thing, feels another, and does a third — no longer as a philosophical paradox, but as an observable psychological norm.
Understanding as a Defense Against Reality
The third aspect is a stable defense against lived reality. Intellectual understanding, analysis, reflection, spiritual and psychological concepts begin to serve a defensive function. They reduce anxiety, provide a sense of control, and create the illusion of movement.
At the same time, they can keep a person at a safe distance from direct experience — from pain, loss, aggression, dependency, helplessness, and shame.
This is precisely where the substitution Gurdjieff spoke about arises, now without the mystical framework:
understanding is used instead of living through experience, awareness instead of integration, knowledge without any change in how reality is actually experienced.
Psychodynamics as Demystification
This is also where Gurdjieff and psychodynamic psychology converge.
From this perspective, psychodynamics performs an important task: it demystifies an experience accumulated over thousands of years within religious and mystical traditions and translates it into the language of observable psychological processes.
Not by devaluing that experience, but by making it accessible for work, analysis, and gradual integration.
What was once described as “sleep,” “illusion of the self,” or “mechanicalness” is now understood as the action of defenses, identifications, splits, and dissociations. And the path forward appears as work aimed at restoring lost contact with the body, affect, and the reality of relationships.
Yet even after demystification — when understanding becomes easier — the path remains difficult. It requires relinquishing the illusions the ego has long relied on for support.
P.S.
I am not reducing Gurdjieff’s mystical philosophy to psychoanalysis. This text offers a practical perspective on one of its fragments.
P.P.S.
How can one assess, in practice, the relationship between a psychologist’s level of knowledge and their level of being? Be brave, ask them about their projections.