Domains of Fact, Value and Realization

This is a short excerpt from J. G Bennett's book, "Gurdjieff: Making a New World" pp55/56.
In writing about the existence of an Inner Circle of Humanity, he sets the stage by referring to three different ways of looking at the world.  The material is extremely valuable since it applies to almost all of the significant parts of our lives.

"In order to put the notion of an 'Inner Circle' into perspective, we need to introduce categories that are foreign to ordinary thinking. Three areas of human experience may be distinguished:

The Area of Fact: This comprises all that is in communication with our bodies by sense perception and mechanical interaction. This is pre-eminently the domain in which science, technology and economics operate. For materialistic and mechanistic theories of the world, it is the sole reality.

The Area of Value: This includes all those intangible influences that determine our judgments and our motives. This is pre- eminently the domain of morality, of aesthetics and of jurisprudence. Its content is all that ought to be. Usually 'values' are regarded as ideas or attitudes held by human beings. We should treat them as having their own reality, independent of our experience. The domain of value is the 'ideal world', and for the idealist who regards mere fact as illusion, the domain of values is the 'real' world.

The Area of Realization: The notion of a non-factual domain in which reality is constantly being created is foreign to ordinary thinking, but it is implicit in all Gurdjieff taught and did. It is indeed the central concept of all 'work' which, by definition, proceeds exclusively by creative activity that cannot be reduced to fact and value or even to a combination of the two.

Two great illusions by which mankind is enslaved are the belief that the domain of fact is real, and the belief that values can exist without being realized. We have sense experience and we have emotional impulses from which we construct in our 'minds' pictures of the world and we take these pictures for representations of reality. Gurdjieff was never tired of denouncing as self-deception such attitudes which effectively block the way to self-realization. 'Real' men are those who can create their own 'reality', but this takes them into a domain that is incomprehensible for those who believe in facts and values as 'real' in themselves."