“Objective knowledge, the idea of unity included, belongs to objective consciousness. The forms which express this knowledge when perceived by subjective consciousness are inevitably distorted and, instead of truth, they create more and more delusions.”

— G. I. Gurdjieff

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: Objective knowledge, the idea of unity included, belongs to objective consciousness. The forms which express this knowledge when perceived by subjective consciousness are inevitably distorted and, instead of truth, they create more and more delusions. With objective consciousness it is possible to see and feel the unity of everything. But for subjective consciousness the world is split up into millions of separate and unconnected phenomena. Attempts to connect these phenomena into some sort of system in a scientific or philosophical way lead to nothing because man cannot reconstruct the idea of the whole starting from separate facts and they cannot divine the principles of the division of the whole without knowing the laws upon which this division is based.

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G. I. Gurdjieff62

influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, compos… 1866–1949

Roger Corless (1938–2007) English theologian and academic

"Towards a queer dharmology of sex," Culture and Religion, vol. 5, no. 2 (2004)

“Ouspensky records a conversation in St. Petersburg during the summer of 1916 in which Gurdjieff discussed the problem of communication, and the impossibility of conveying in our ordinary language ideas which are intelligible and obvious only for a higher state of consciousness. Speaking of the unity between man, the Universe, and God, he said that the objective knowledge by which alone this unity is to be understood can never be expressed in words or logical forms. At this point, Gurdjieff made a statement which is a key to the understanding of his own subsequent writings. He said:

Realising the imperfection and weakness of ordinary language, the people who have possessed objective knowledge have tried to express the idea of unity in ‘myths,’ in ‘symbols,’ and in particular ‘verbal formulas,’ which, having been transmitted without alteration, have carried on the idea from one school to another, often from one epoch to another.

In All and Everything Gurdjieff makes extensive use of these three forms, that is, symbol, myth, and verbal formula….”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Gurdjieff’s All and Everything (1950)

“We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

common statement in 'The New York Times', 8 July 1945
1940's

“During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XII

“There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

As translated at Gallery of Russian Thinkers … selected by Dmitry Olshansky (2005) http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/nikolay_berdyaev.html <br class="br">Dream and Reality (1949) <br class="br">Context: There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.

“Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic — Book III : Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Notion (December 1914) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch03.htm#LCW38_212a; Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 85-241. <br class="br">1910s

“Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Concluding Paragraph
On Practice (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 通过实践而发现真理，又通过实践而证实真理和发展真理。从感性认识而能动地发展到理性认识，又从理性认识而能动地指导革命实践，改造主观世界和客观世界。实践、认识、再实践、再认识，这种形式，循环往复以至无穷，而实践和认识之每一循环的内容，都比较地进到了高一级的程度。这就是辩证唯物论的全部认识论，这就是辩证唯物论的知行统一观。