If the "soul does not exist ab inizio" and has to be brought into existence by "sustained self-observation", what does that "sustained self-observation" look like?
"Self-remembering" is what that is called in "Esoteric Christianity". It can be described as "conscious self-consciousness"...the second term being my own attempt to succinctly describe what takes some real effort to learn, to understand and to practice...
While doing primal therapy with a group of men and women who had broken away from Janov, a friend of long-standing came to visit me with his other very close friend...
His close friend had been reading Tertium Organum by Ouspensky...he, in fact, ended up getting a Ph.D. in Intellectual History, and, apart from this interest in Ouspensky, was oriented toward Marxism. (Ah! But not for long...)
But, as synchonicity would have it, they ended up talking to a group of people who had an "esoteric school" in the Mission District in San Francisco. They were pupils of a man I won't name right now...were invited to come see a play and join this "esoteric school".
The school was called "The Everyman Theater"...another great coincidence for me.
I had heard about this play, "Everyman", when still in Catholic school. One Monday, in the Quaker school I attended from sixth grade on, for our school assembly, a group put on the play, "Everyman", and I got to see the whole thing acted out..
I was no longer a believer, but I have to say I really appreciated the opportunity to see this Morality Play with its "instructions" for "Everyman" as to how to get to heaven...
Anyway, my friend and his best friend ended up joining the rather expensive school and studying Gurdjieff's teachings (best chronicled by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous...hence the coincidence)....and me?
I went to an introductory meeting and apparently was so obnoxious and off-putting that I got kicked out of it...In a few months, my friends quit. The leader of that school had, in fact, a terrible reputation...(and more on that later).
But, I was intrigued by these men...who were off-putting as well...so I got a copy of Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous...
I remember the moment I got "it"...self-remembering...and it was not the first time I had run across the term. In fact, it may have been the third time.
I definitely remember reading about it in the book, The Master Game, just after I had dropped out of school.
I didn't understand it then...and I think that the second time I read about it was in the Ouspensky book while sitting in the Shambala bookstore on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley...
But, this third time, I got it...and I remember going up the street self-remembering...amazed at this new piece of psychological practice....and I began using it.
Basically, what I understood was that I had to choose, as it were, to become self-conscious, and, in that moment, I had to resolve to maintain that state. I was able to. I saw I was in a new state of consciousness.
Self-remembering intensified all my "primals"...the re-experiencing of childhood trauma with the added aspect of a full emotional "feeling" reaction to them...the kind you could never have had then...
I did eventually break through to the shocking/disconcerting view of my own warts-and-all self, as others saw me. Not pleasant at all. More on that at another time...
So, below, if interested, I have collected some of the primary quotes from Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous...and, if you are interested, you might be able to induce it in yourself....
Warning...only one person I have ever explained self-remembering to was able to get it on the first take...I needed three takes..and, sadly, one of my friends, while instrumental in getting me to this experience...never got to this at all...more on that another time as well...
So, interested in "self-remembering"? ....read away!
"Consciousness is considered to be indefinable," I said, "and indeed, how can it be defined if it is an inner quality? With the ordinary means at our disposal it is impossible to prove the presence of consciousness in another man. We know it only in ourselves." "All this is rubbish," said G., "the usual scientific sophistry. It is time you got rid of it. Only one thing is true in what you have said: that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it. And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards. I mean that when it comes again you can see that it has been absent a long time, and you can find or remember the moment when it disappeared and when it reappeared. You can also define the moments when you are nearer to consciousness and further away from consciousness. But by observing in yourself the appearance and the disappearance of consciousness you will inevitably see one fact which you neither see nor acknowledge now, and that is that moments of consciousness are very short and are separated by long intervals of completely unconscious, mechanical working of the machine. You will then see that you can think, feel, act speak, work, without being conscious of it. And if you learn to see in yourselves the moments of consciousness and the long periods of mechanicalness, you will as infallibly see in other people when they are conscious of what they are doing and when they are not.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2563-2574). . Kindle Edition.
"Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by sensation, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have-only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is."
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2574-2580). . Kindle Edition.
On one occasion at the beginning of a meeting G. put a question to which all those present had to answer in turn. The question was; "What is the most important thing that we notice during self-observation?" Some of those present said that during attempts at self-observation, what they had felt particularly strongly was an incessant flow of thoughts which they had found impossible to stop. Others spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing the work of one center from the work of another. I had evidently not altogether understood the question, or I answered my own thoughts, because I said that what struck me most was the connectedness of one thing with another in the system, the wholeness of the system, as if it were an "organism," and the entirely new significance of the word to know which included not only the idea of knowing this thing or that, but the connection between this thing and everything else. G. was obviously dissatisfied with our replies. I had already begun to understand him in such circumstances and I saw that he expected from us indications of something definite that we had either missed or failed to understand.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2583-2591). . Kindle Edition.
"Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you," he said. "That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember yourselves." (He gave particular emphasis to these words.)
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2592-2593). . Kindle Edition.
"You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still 'is noticed,' 'is seen.' ... In order really to observe oneself one must first of all remember oneself" (He again emphasized these words.) "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2593-2597). . Kindle Edition.
These words of G.' s made me think a great deal. It seemed to me at once that they were the key to what he had said before about consciousness. But I decided to draw no conclusions whatever, but to try to remember myself while observing myself. The very first attempts showed me how difficult it was. Attempts at self-remembering failed to give any results except to show me that in actual fact we never remember ourselves. "What else do you want?" said G. "This is a very important realization. People who know this" (he emphasized these words) "already know a great deal. The whole trouble is that nobody knows it. If you ask a man whether he can remember himself, he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself, he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness. If a man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the understanding of his being."
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2598-2606). . Kindle Edition.
But before making deductions, I will try to describe my attempts to remember myself. ' The first impression was that attempts to remember myself or to be conscious of myself, to say to myself, I am walking, I am doing, and continually to feel this I, stopped thought. When I was feeling I, I could neither think nor speak; even sensations became dimmed. Also, one could only remember oneself in this way for a very short time.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2608-2611). . Kindle Edition.
This last realization enabled me to come to a certain, possibly a very incomplete, definition of "self-remembering," which nevertheless proved to be very useful in practice. I am speaking of the division of attention which is the characteristic feature of self-remembering. I represented it to myself in the following way: When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe: a line with one arrowhead: I ------> the observed phenomenon. When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the line: I <------> the observed phenomenon. Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else. Moreover this "something else" could as well be within me as outside me. The very first attempts at such a division of attention showed me its possibility. At the same time I saw two things clearly. In the first place I saw that self-remembering resulting from this method had nothing in common with "self-feeling," or "self-analysis." It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavor. And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2616-2631). . Kindle Edition.
They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one's head, when one hears one's own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside. Sometimes self-remembering was not successful; at other times it was accompanied by curious observations. I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and in spite of all my efforts I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself and I turned into the street on the left having firmly decided to keep my attention on the fact that I would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line of thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy streets. I reached the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. Just round the corner on the Nevsky was a tobacconist's shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes. Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my Hat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters.Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I had changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izvostchik and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.
Ouspensky, P.D.; Gurdjieff, G.I.. In Search of the Miraculous (Kindle Locations 2631-2667). . Kindle Edition.
