L had been quite slow getting into this EXERCISE, but now, after a month, he was usually remembering himself as he went into and out of doors. Sometimes, when he went into a place, he had a habit of having something go through his mind. For example, when he entered the music studio, he talked to the Muse, in the way it was once a practice, in Ancient Greece, to have an Invocation to the Muse at the start of a play. That would remind him of the exercise, and spur him on in the attempt to be aware as he went through that door. As time had gone on during the month, it had made him a bit more self-aware than he otherwise would be. It was one of those triggers during the day which helped one remember oneself.
H had been really interested in this exercise, and he was trying to remember to practice it, but he never remembered the door except once - coming in, coming out. Mostly he remembered when he was sitting in the kitchen, or out in the tube, or something like that.
Practicing self-remembering, he invariably found what before he would have called an attitude, but now it was like a demonic kind of character. By doing the exercise, the word demonic didn't mean just a word. It was like something else that had happened to him recently. The word shanti was just a word before, but then he experienced peace. In the same way, seeing this demonic thing through self-observation made him realise he wasn't that thing, otherwise it could be quite frightening. It showed that if you were practicing self observation you could see things that you never thought you would. Most people thought, when they practiced self-observation, that they were observing some sort of nothing, and calling it nothing, but if you observed the mind more carefully, you saw it was not nothing - there were things behind and behind and behind.
RG had tried to self-remember when she entered the door and was coming out of the door but, like H, it was easier for her to remember herself more when she was walking in the street or going on the tube. She concentrated on walking. She tried to acknowledge her presence with each step she was taking - that was her self-remembering. The self observation is something that can be done after we remember ourself, but the tricky part, the most important thing, is to remember ourself first. and then we pass to the self observation.
C had remembered opening and closing doors about a third of the time. The big question was what was it we were looking for when we were self-remembering, and the only thing he could understand from it was that we were looking for our pure essence, because that was what we brought into the world with us, nothing else. Since then the personality had taken over and tended to dominate ourselves, and the essence had fallen back, and back, and back. He was trying desperately to remember, to still the mind, make the mind really at peace and remember who he really was and what he really came into the world as.
T used to leave lots of things behind when she left the house, and remembered them during the day. Oh my God, I have forgotten to bring that.
So she had started a checklist before she left the house, which got longer and longer, as to what she had to remember to take with her, and to do before she left, and a few months before she had added at the bottom of the list, one minute silence at the front door, timed. So she was thinking - I'm going to do this exercise every day - but she realised, after about a week, that it was cheating. But what was actually happening, when she did the minute, was that she would remember lots of other things she had forgotten, which made it very hard for her to stay at the door - she hadn't turned the heating off, or hadn't closed the window - and she realised that what she was experiencing when she was at the door, just being there, was being back in the body, and all the other times, she was doing something, and the body was a servant to the mind, sadly.
D's guilt was that he always forgot the exercise, but what he noticed, just trying to remember himself, which he kept doing as much as possible, because it gave him peace, a sense of presence, was that the space created by not doing things mechanically engendered boredom. The boredom, from what he could gather, was the mind, was thoughts, and the only way you stopped boredom was to get back in your body. This space between the thoughts, which C called essence and D called presence - was there any difference or was it the same thing? - was causing a bit of a problem.
J said that so far we were all describing the process. We were getting a bit closer. The space between the thoughts, the presence, the essence, there were a lot of ideas there. The main issue he'd found, so far, on this exercise, was that the difficulty came in describing, not the process by which we were trying to reach the essence, but the essence itself, and he was wondering at this point how easy or how possible it was through the use of language? Were we concentrating on something which we were not going to be able to describe? We each understood it in our own way, though we could not know whether our own way was the same as everybody else's way. He wondered if he could go to the next step, or whether it was a doomed exercise.
As RM had done the exercise, walking in and out of the door and being present, it created initially a vacuum, and he knew that nature abhorred a vacuum - as soon as there was a vacuum it tried to fill it with something. That was why the thoughts suddenly rushed in to fill this vacuum. So he allowed himself to ponder things like, what is time?
Agreeing with D, C said the mind was always bored. When you were in meditation, the mind wanted to take you out, it wanted to do something else, it didn't want to sit there and just be. He thought that was where we needed to arrive at.
J said there was an attention span, with a movie, with a television programme, or with anything you liked. The question wasn't so much whether one would get bored watching that day in day out, doing nothing else, but how long one could keep one's attention on this, and the fact that after a certain point one got bored, was not in itself so significant.
It was if one got bored in the first few instants and one got absolutely nowhere, and one didn't want to do it. There was an amount of time you could devote to that sort of question before your normal sensations and preoccupations kicked in. So part of the exercise was in extending that amount of time that you could not be bored, and concentrate or focus. Were any of us either wanting to, or had any of us described, in a revealing sort of way, in words, what we had seen or focused on? It was the process of focusing that we were discussing.
T said that the focus during the month was to remember yourself when you left the front door. That was the thing without words - to be in that position even if it was just for a second, because remembering yourself could happen in a second, and then be gone. The exercise was about experiencing something through the month, then trying to express that and to have some consensual language, because it was such a difficult path to do on your own.
Responding to C, RG said she believed our objective was to find our essence. This was the most difficult thing, in her opinion. In fact she was very intrigued to discover what was this essence, and she had been researching on the Internet, and reading quite a lot of books recently, and what she had come across, was that the essence was to discover what we really were, not what we thought we were. In order to do that, we had to let go all the prejudice we had, the ego and so on. In order to achieve this, self-observation came into play.
H said RG would be very unlikely to discover her real, true self - that would be self-realisation, and what Gurdjieff was calling self-remembering was not really remembering your true self. It was a state where you brought yourself into focus, but mentally, not physically. You did not necessarily remember your physical body - that may be an initial step - then you had to remember this feeling of what you were, and it wasn't a kind of nothingness. It was a sense of self that you had all the time, and it was your non-self mostly. That was what he had found. on almost every occasion that he remembered his non-self, which was a negative thing in his case, and he supposed in everybody. He imagined that for everybody at this Meeting, there was this opposing force, this negative thing that somehow dominated us all the same.
Responding to D's contribution which talked of being bored in the space between the thoughts, L wondered if it was the ego that was bored. We often saw a spider in the middle of web, or expanding it. That spider never got bored, but perhaps it didn't have an ego.
J said this was probably a debate that was not going to be resolved. We were all trying to discover, through one part, one essence, or one remembered self - but what if there were several selves you could remember, several essences, and they were all possibly equally true, and one of the selves was saying I don't want to, and another was saying I do want to. T said, that was Me, Myself and I. J said that the danger in all this, was that in wanting to get rid of ego, we made ourselves more self-important.
D said, that was thoughts - there were so many thoughts there, thoughts. All those thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, and we were doomed. That was the problem.
J said that this indicated that we shouldn't be trying to get at what our essence was, or our remembered self was, through thoughts.
C drew attention to the philospher David Hiume's analysis of this issue. He was looking for the permanent self, but did not find it. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he wrote when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
It seemed to "R" that D had produced the moment of question, which was really important, it had energy. If you had labels for everything, end of story, but to be in question was really valuable, and that could lead to a real wish to be aware and to find a new way which was based in the body. All these little arguments were resistance, and that was an important force as well, which we needed, otherwise we wouldn't have an incentive.
For T, J's question about egos brought up the dilemma between the tribe, the community and the individual. You had to survive together, but then, when you were an adult, you could have time alone, and that was when the question arose, Who am I?, when there were no people around, when you were on a desert island or in a room on your own. RG said that often people were themselves when they were alone. T had the image of a democracy. It was not just three selves, it was millions of selves. Who was in charge? Was there a government, was there a parliament? Were you allowed to speak? Did the selves have to speak to each other, and was there violence, or was there measured dialogue about difficult issues, in the person?
H said that apart from all these separate things, different identities, there was an I that made real efforts, not pretend efforts, and that was the situation, this I that made the effort, but all these other I's were based on something we did not really know, but presumably what Gurdjieff called the Chief Feature. You could call it ego if you liked, but all these were just words until you experienced them in some way or another.
Following the contributions and responses, the reading continued from Chapter 23 of Beelzebub's Tales.
The three-brained beings of your planet who became members of this society actually did a great deal in respect of approaching objective knowledge which had never been done there before and which perhaps will never be repeated.
And here it is impossible not to express regret and to repeat that to the most great misfortune of all terrestrial three-brained beings of all later epochs, it was just then—when after incredible being-labors ... that, in the heat of it all, certain of them constated, as I have already told you, that something serious was to occur to their planet in the near future.
For the purpose of discerning the character of the anticipated serious event, they dispersed over the whole planet and shortly afterwards, as I have already told you, the aforesaid second ‘Transapalnian perturbation’ occurred to that ill-fated planet of yours.
J said it was often the case you would assume, as in this passage, that before you reached Nirvana, there would be a cataclysm that would get in the way when you were almost there, and this was a common and often repeated idea.
...Such a suitable place they found in the valley of the large river flowing on the north of the said continent and there indeed they all migrated together with their families to continue in isolation the attainment of the tasks set by their society.
"R" said they were looking for a location where, they could continue, with their families but in isolation, the attainment of the tasks. J said it was surprising they would want to go with their families. They would surely want to go with people who were like minded.
This definite part of the surface of the continent which the Pythoness indicated, lay just at the source of the said large river Nipilhooatchi where the beings of our tribe existed all the time the said second Transapalnian perturbation lasted, as well as later when everything had gradually resumed its relatively normal state and when most of the surviving beings had then almost forgotten what had happened and had again formed—just as if nothing had occurred to them...
L said this paragraph described how quickly we forgot ourselves after we became aware. It said the members of the tribe went back to how they were before, "... just as if nothing had occurred to them", which they had thought to be a high state.
Although the expectations that I had formed from all that our countrymen had told me concerning the mentioned new observatory there, before I had seen it with my own eyes, were not justified, nevertheless, the observatory itself and also the other constructions of the beings then of that region proved to be exceedingly ingenious and provided data for the enrichment of my common presence by a great deal of productive information for my consciousness.
J said this was one of the rare occasions, as far as he could see in Gurdjieff, where he was actually being rather positive, as opposed to slating the idiocies he saw all around him, and awaiting the doom-laden end.
D said he was using everyday language, presence and consciousness, which he did not do very often.
And later, ... Great Nature was compelled ... also to degenerate the functioning of their organ of sight ... then thereafter they were able to perceive the visibility of their great as well as their small concentrations situated beyond them only when the sacred process ‘Aieioiuoa’ proceeded in the Omnipresent Active Element Okidanokh in the atmosphere of their planet, or, as they themselves say—according to their understanding and their own perceptions—‘on dark nights’.
L said that Gurdjieff was using an advanced concept. He was talking about an observatory, which could mean a sophisticated way for people to observe themselves. GC asked, why only on dark nights. L said that it was metaphor. When was it easier to see the stars?
T said it was suggesting that there was a sight or a sense that we had lost, or never attained. We did not need this contraption of a telescope, if only we were more sensitive, and in our bodies and our beings.
H thought it was something to do with this three-brained being becoming a two-brained being.
H had been really interested in this exercise, and he was trying to remember to practice it, but he never remembered the door except once - coming in, coming out. Mostly he remembered when he was sitting in the kitchen, or out in the tube, or something like that.
|
EXERCISE
Every time you go in or out of your front door, remember yourself. |
RG had tried to self-remember when she entered the door and was coming out of the door but, like H, it was easier for her to remember herself more when she was walking in the street or going on the tube. She concentrated on walking. She tried to acknowledge her presence with each step she was taking - that was her self-remembering. The self observation is something that can be done after we remember ourself, but the tricky part, the most important thing, is to remember ourself first. and then we pass to the self observation.
C had remembered opening and closing doors about a third of the time. The big question was what was it we were looking for when we were self-remembering, and the only thing he could understand from it was that we were looking for our pure essence, because that was what we brought into the world with us, nothing else. Since then the personality had taken over and tended to dominate ourselves, and the essence had fallen back, and back, and back. He was trying desperately to remember, to still the mind, make the mind really at peace and remember who he really was and what he really came into the world as.
T used to leave lots of things behind when she left the house, and remembered them during the day. Oh my God, I have forgotten to bring that.
|
D's guilt was that he always forgot the exercise, but what he noticed, just trying to remember himself, which he kept doing as much as possible, because it gave him peace, a sense of presence, was that the space created by not doing things mechanically engendered boredom. The boredom, from what he could gather, was the mind, was thoughts, and the only way you stopped boredom was to get back in your body. This space between the thoughts, which C called essence and D called presence - was there any difference or was it the same thing? - was causing a bit of a problem.
J said that so far we were all describing the process. We were getting a bit closer. The space between the thoughts, the presence, the essence, there were a lot of ideas there. The main issue he'd found, so far, on this exercise, was that the difficulty came in describing, not the process by which we were trying to reach the essence, but the essence itself, and he was wondering at this point how easy or how possible it was through the use of language? Were we concentrating on something which we were not going to be able to describe? We each understood it in our own way, though we could not know whether our own way was the same as everybody else's way. He wondered if he could go to the next step, or whether it was a doomed exercise.
As RM had done the exercise, walking in and out of the door and being present, it created initially a vacuum, and he knew that nature abhorred a vacuum - as soon as there was a vacuum it tried to fill it with something. That was why the thoughts suddenly rushed in to fill this vacuum. So he allowed himself to ponder things like, what is time?
Agreeing with D, C said the mind was always bored. When you were in meditation, the mind wanted to take you out, it wanted to do something else, it didn't want to sit there and just be. He thought that was where we needed to arrive at.
J said there was an attention span, with a movie, with a television programme, or with anything you liked. The question wasn't so much whether one would get bored watching that day in day out, doing nothing else, but how long one could keep one's attention on this, and the fact that after a certain point one got bored, was not in itself so significant.
Source: signspecialist.com |
T said that the focus during the month was to remember yourself when you left the front door. That was the thing without words - to be in that position even if it was just for a second, because remembering yourself could happen in a second, and then be gone. The exercise was about experiencing something through the month, then trying to express that and to have some consensual language, because it was such a difficult path to do on your own.
Responding to C, RG said she believed our objective was to find our essence. This was the most difficult thing, in her opinion. In fact she was very intrigued to discover what was this essence, and she had been researching on the Internet, and reading quite a lot of books recently, and what she had come across, was that the essence was to discover what we really were, not what we thought we were. In order to do that, we had to let go all the prejudice we had, the ego and so on. In order to achieve this, self-observation came into play.
H said RG would be very unlikely to discover her real, true self - that would be self-realisation, and what Gurdjieff was calling self-remembering was not really remembering your true self. It was a state where you brought yourself into focus, but mentally, not physically. You did not necessarily remember your physical body - that may be an initial step - then you had to remember this feeling of what you were, and it wasn't a kind of nothingness. It was a sense of self that you had all the time, and it was your non-self mostly. That was what he had found. on almost every occasion that he remembered his non-self, which was a negative thing in his case, and he supposed in everybody. He imagined that for everybody at this Meeting, there was this opposing force, this negative thing that somehow dominated us all the same.
Responding to D's contribution which talked of being bored in the space between the thoughts, L wondered if it was the ego that was bored. We often saw a spider in the middle of web, or expanding it. That spider never got bored, but perhaps it didn't have an ego.
J said this was probably a debate that was not going to be resolved. We were all trying to discover, through one part, one essence, or one remembered self - but what if there were several selves you could remember, several essences, and they were all possibly equally true, and one of the selves was saying I don't want to, and another was saying I do want to. T said, that was Me, Myself and I. J said that the danger in all this, was that in wanting to get rid of ego, we made ourselves more self-important.
D said, that was thoughts - there were so many thoughts there, thoughts. All those thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, and we were doomed. That was the problem.
J said that this indicated that we shouldn't be trying to get at what our essence was, or our remembered self was, through thoughts.
C drew attention to the philospher David Hiume's analysis of this issue. He was looking for the permanent self, but did not find it. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he wrote when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
It seemed to "R" that D had produced the moment of question, which was really important, it had energy. If you had labels for everything, end of story, but to be in question was really valuable, and that could lead to a real wish to be aware and to find a new way which was based in the body. All these little arguments were resistance, and that was an important force as well, which we needed, otherwise we wouldn't have an incentive.
For T, J's question about egos brought up the dilemma between the tribe, the community and the individual. You had to survive together, but then, when you were an adult, you could have time alone, and that was when the question arose, Who am I?, when there were no people around, when you were on a desert island or in a room on your own. RG said that often people were themselves when they were alone. T had the image of a democracy. It was not just three selves, it was millions of selves. Who was in charge? Was there a government, was there a parliament? Were you allowed to speak? Did the selves have to speak to each other, and was there violence, or was there measured dialogue about difficult issues, in the person?
H said that apart from all these separate things, different identities, there was an I that made real efforts, not pretend efforts, and that was the situation, this I that made the effort, but all these other I's were based on something we did not really know, but presumably what Gurdjieff called the Chief Feature. You could call it ego if you liked, but all these were just words until you experienced them in some way or another.
Following the contributions and responses, the reading continued from Chapter 23 of Beelzebub's Tales.
The three-brained beings of your planet who became members of this society actually did a great deal in respect of approaching objective knowledge which had never been done there before and which perhaps will never be repeated.
And here it is impossible not to express regret and to repeat that to the most great misfortune of all terrestrial three-brained beings of all later epochs, it was just then—when after incredible being-labors ... that, in the heat of it all, certain of them constated, as I have already told you, that something serious was to occur to their planet in the near future.
For the purpose of discerning the character of the anticipated serious event, they dispersed over the whole planet and shortly afterwards, as I have already told you, the aforesaid second ‘Transapalnian perturbation’ occurred to that ill-fated planet of yours.
J said it was often the case you would assume, as in this passage, that before you reached Nirvana, there would be a cataclysm that would get in the way when you were almost there, and this was a common and often repeated idea.
...Such a suitable place they found in the valley of the large river flowing on the north of the said continent and there indeed they all migrated together with their families to continue in isolation the attainment of the tasks set by their society.
"R" said they were looking for a location where, they could continue, with their families but in isolation, the attainment of the tasks. J said it was surprising they would want to go with their families. They would surely want to go with people who were like minded.
This definite part of the surface of the continent which the Pythoness indicated, lay just at the source of the said large river Nipilhooatchi where the beings of our tribe existed all the time the said second Transapalnian perturbation lasted, as well as later when everything had gradually resumed its relatively normal state and when most of the surviving beings had then almost forgotten what had happened and had again formed—just as if nothing had occurred to them...
L said this paragraph described how quickly we forgot ourselves after we became aware. It said the members of the tribe went back to how they were before, "... just as if nothing had occurred to them", which they had thought to be a high state.
Although the expectations that I had formed from all that our countrymen had told me concerning the mentioned new observatory there, before I had seen it with my own eyes, were not justified, nevertheless, the observatory itself and also the other constructions of the beings then of that region proved to be exceedingly ingenious and provided data for the enrichment of my common presence by a great deal of productive information for my consciousness.
J said this was one of the rare occasions, as far as he could see in Gurdjieff, where he was actually being rather positive, as opposed to slating the idiocies he saw all around him, and awaiting the doom-laden end.
D said he was using everyday language, presence and consciousness, which he did not do very often.
And later, ... Great Nature was compelled ... also to degenerate the functioning of their organ of sight ... then thereafter they were able to perceive the visibility of their great as well as their small concentrations situated beyond them only when the sacred process ‘Aieioiuoa’ proceeded in the Omnipresent Active Element Okidanokh in the atmosphere of their planet, or, as they themselves say—according to their understanding and their own perceptions—‘on dark nights’.
L said that Gurdjieff was using an advanced concept. He was talking about an observatory, which could mean a sophisticated way for people to observe themselves. GC asked, why only on dark nights. L said that it was metaphor. When was it easier to see the stars?
T said it was suggesting that there was a sight or a sense that we had lost, or never attained. We did not need this contraption of a telescope, if only we were more sensitive, and in our bodies and our beings.
H thought it was something to do with this three-brained being becoming a two-brained being.
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