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8: Self-remembering

Remember yourself always and everywhere.—G. I. Gurdjieff
Remain attentive at every breath.—Gudjduvani

Self-remembering is at the centre of the System. In In search of the miraculous, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as follows:

“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.) “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?”
 
What is self-remembering? For me, it has mostly been the effort to be aware of myself as embodied in the present moment, but it is not impossible that I misunderstood the whole practice of self-remembering during my twenty-seven years in the school. So, here are some more indications from Ouspensky:

So, at the same time as self-observing, we try to be aware of ourselves by holding the sensation of ‘I am here’—nothing more.

Q. When you say ‘remember yourself,’ do you mean by that to remember after you have observed yourself, or do you mean to remember the things we know are in us?
A. No, take it quite apart from observation. To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself—‘I am’. Sometimes it comes by itself; it is a very strange feeling. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness. By itself it only comes for very short moments, generally in quite new surroundings, and one says to oneself: ‘How strange. I am here.’ This is self-remembering; at this moment you remember yourself.

Self-remembering is not really connected with memory; it is simply an expression. It means self-awareness or self-consciousness. One must be conscious of oneself.

Self-remembering does not divide you, you must remember the whole, it is simply the feeling of ‘I,’ of your own person.

Ouspensky vividly describes his first efforts at self-remembering in In Search of the Miraculous. He tries to be aware of himself while walking down the street, and succeeds until he reaches the tobacconist, and the next thing he remembers is ‘waking up’ in his flat. He says that it is something that Western psychology has entirely missed, that we do not remember ourselves.

In what follows I describe self-remembering as I understood it as a member of the Fellowship. When I joined, it was considered to be the first principle of the fourth way. In his book Self-Remembering Robert Burton says that he speaks ‘relentlessly about this dear old subject,’ yet after the introduction of the Sequence, a short mantra to be recited inwardly, he barely spoke of it at all.

From my own observation it seems to me that for almost all of my waking moments I was identified with one thing or another, and frequently drifted through life only minimally aware of my surroundings, beset by fears and imaginations. (This may or may not apply to you.) As Ouspensky points out, this very fact eludes us because if you ask someone, ‘Are you awake?’ then for that moment of course they are. We are not aware of our own waking sleep. In waking sleep (called in the System second state) thoughts move associatively just as they do in a sleeping dream (called in the System first state). The only difference is that real things intrude into our second state dream, putting an intermittent brake on the drift of associations.

To become properly aware of how much of our life is conducted in a dream, we have to make some effort to awaken. One method is self-remembering. This consists of the effort to be aware of the body at the same time as being aware of the object of one’s attention, also known as divided attention. So one might be driving a car and be aware of the road ahead. That would usually be second state, attention in one direction. But then one could become aware of one’s body in the driving seat and one’s hands on the wheel at the same time. That would be divided attention, self-remembering.

This seems almost banal until you actually try it. One loses the state very quickly. I once drove across London perfectly safely and when I got to my destination I realised I remembered nothing of the journey—that is the effect second state has—we remember very little. It is also commonplace to leave one’s house and not remember locking the front door, so one has to go back to check (or worry about it all day). Once again, one was on auto-pilot and not present to one’s surroundings.

As a new student I was advised by another student not to try to drive while practising self-remembering. The student thought this might be too distracting. Certainly when one first makes a deliberate effort of this kind there can be a tendency simply to move the focus of attention away from the road and onto one’s bodily sensations, and of course that is not what is intended. One-pointed attention is ingrained. After some years of practice I no longer feel this is a problem. I am as prone to waking sleep as ever, but if I make the effort to self-remember then I can do it (and when driving I can be more attentive and almost certainly safer).

At first self-remembering can feel like a burdensome exercise, with presence coming only for a few seconds before one loses it again. But later it can appear almost (but not quite) without effort and sometimes can arise unexpectedly. As Ouspensky remarked, efforts of this kind are accompanied by a sense of peace.

I wrote ‘one method’ because there are others. In his book On having no head, Douglas Harding points out the apparently trivial fact that we do not experience ourselves as having a head. If I pay particular attention I can be aware of two sides of my nose on each side of my field of vision, but not my head. Nevertheless I go around imagining that I am what the mirror shows me, a person with a head. I carry around an image of myself that I do not experience (although of course other people will see that I have a head). To become aware of one’s headlessness requires a similar effort to self-remembering, and carries with it a more intense awareness of one’s surroundings.

These techniques have a lot in common with the now popular idea of mindfulness. The UK National Health Service web site states: 

Paying more attention to the present moment – to your own thoughts and feelings, and to the world around you – can improve your mental wellbeing. 

Professor Mark Williams, former director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre is quoted as saying:

An important part of mindfulness is reconnecting with our bodies and the sensations they experience. This means waking up to the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the present moment. That might be something as simple as the feel of a banister as we walk upstairs.

Another important part of mindfulness is an awareness of our thoughts and feelings as they happen moment to moment.

It’s about allowing ourselves to see the present moment clearly. When we do that, it can positively change the way we see ourselves and our lives.

‘Reconnecting with our bodies and the sensations they experience’ sounds very like self-remembering. Efforts of this kind put one more closely in touch with what is actually happening, as opposed to the automatic internal monologue that passes for thought much of the time. One is no longer an imaginary picture of oneself walking through a largely imaginary world, sometimes tormented by unnecessary worries. Professor Williams again:

This lets us stand back from our thoughts and start to see their patterns. Gradually, we can train ourselves to notice when our thoughts are taking over and realise that thoughts are simply ‘mental events’ that do not have to control us.

Self-remembering does not remove suffering but it allows a different, more objective connection with it. It is possible to observe the suffering of one’s body and emotions rather than being entirely absorbed in that suffering. The pain is no less, but at the same time something observes it impartially. This is not at all to harden the heart—on the contrary one feels emotional and physical pain just as much—but it does not rule one in the same way.

In the beginning it is easier to remember to make efforts to divide attention, to self-remember, when there is suffering. But there is equally a reward in self-remembering in happy circumstances. Whatever the situation, being present to each moment means that one is more intensely alive.

The present moment is the only real moment. The past is gone, represented by fragments of memory, like a threadbare cloth that after sufficient time barely hangs together, and we tend to fill the holes with what we think must have happened. The future is a theory or a dream. Only in the present moment can we do anything or experience anything.

Even so, when used in the context of belonging to a supposed school of awakening, there is room for self-deception, a feeling of peace that is in reality a subtle feeling of superiority, setting oneself apart from others, of smugness. ‘I am awake among these sleeping beings.’ Rather, the perception that for a particular moment you happen to be more awake, more in self-control than the person in front of you, should evoke compassion. Noblesse oblige. If you are more awake, you are more responsible. And your momentary superiority is not guaranteed for the next moment.

External consideration—considering the needs of others—requires an extra effort. I was once in a tranquil state sitting next to my wife, unaware that she was distressed by my seeming emotional remoteness. One of the problems of a cult is lack of attention to the needs of those not in the cult. No real work worthy of the name should cut us off from our fellow mortals.

I have been asked, if self-remembering increases awareness, how is it that Robert Burton’s students, who have supposedly devoted their lives to practising fourth way methods, end up believing a complex system of questionable ideas, arguably remote from reality? 

The problem is not with self-remembering, nor with any other method of becoming more mindful and more grounded in the present. The problem is with a belief system in which the idea of ascending souls and multiple lifetimes takes one away from the present moment into a fantasy of immortality. It is possible to be aware in the present moment and still to have all manner of beliefs, and the state of presence has no immediate relation to whether the beliefs are true or not.

Paradoxically, the belief system of the fourth way is opposed to being here, now, because it is focussed on an imaginary future. Presenting self-remembering as a stepping stone to higher states immediately negates the value of simply being who one is, where one is.

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