Who & what are the demons ?

And that is the beginning of wisdom. No, being of two minds, being undecided, being able to apprehend two different gestalts of desire and decision-making within yourself, offers you the opportunity to understand better both your mind and the world. Rather, it gives you the power to follow a path chosen after careful reflection upon costs and consequences.Gurdjieff, Russian mystic/fraud, argued that free will can only be achieved through watchfulness and work, that most folks go through their lives as automatons of desire, appetite and habit.Watch yourself--what do you do, and why do you do it? Can you create and maintain observations of...you? Can you stay awake/aware enough to make your actions in the world the result of conscious analysis and reflection? Can you resist aimless drifting, pulled this way by that appetite, pushed that way by this trauma?Think, he said, of a machine upon which, by dint of study and analysis, you have some modicum of influence--shorten this piston stroke a millimeter, slow that cog an rpm. In time, he claimed, you can become a free agent in the only way that makes sense--a mind aware of its original native, naive inclinations, a disciplined mind able to act with fuller knowledge and understanding.The watchfulness exercise is a common one, an entry-level exercise in many meditative and "spiritual" disciplines; in Buddhism, it is an early practical prescription for trimming one's sails in the storm of desire and illusion. Simple to describe, it is, like avoiding the bog of confirmation bias in science, or a guy thinking only with his big head remarkably difficult to do.I appreciate Gurdjieff's ideas, not as mystical truths, but as insights into the hardware and software in my own head.Best would be a great big sack of minds: our first mind of flash decisions, our second mind of careful reflection, and a constellation of third and subsequent minds developed via other languages, cultures, disciplines, methodologies and individuals.And surely history teaches us that certainty is more demonic than doubt: It is the true believers who create hells on earth, not the doubters.