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Showing posts from September, 2021

15: Mantras

The effect of chanting a mantra, internally or aloud, is to displace thought. Mantras are not a feature of the fourth way as I understand it, but the silent expression of work ‘I’s, short sentences or words whose aim is to help awakening, is intended at least to replace useless thoughts with useful ones.  In the Fellowship, Robert Burton invented something called ‘the Sequence’ which was or is a string of six singlesyllable work ‘I’s strung together and works much like a short mantra. While I found it moderately useful some of the time, it would get in the way of being simply present, and its main use was to abandon it once one was in the moment. Doing exercises is not an end in itself, but being present to one’s life is. In the fourth way the central and original technique for freeing the mind from useless associations is self-remembering.  In the SES a sitting mantra meditation was used, which one does for twenty minutes twice a day. It is the transcendental meditation introduced by

Call Time

  An additional post to clear up a misunderstanding. Ironically, after I had decided to leave the Fellowship, I saw confirmation from Influence C in a number plate: "CA11TME" - Call Time on all this nonsense. The irony of course is that I no longer believed that Influence C were the disembodied spirits of past conscious beings. Here they were signalling to me about their non-existence.  Apophenia is the human tendency to see meaning where there is none.

14: You are not your thoughts

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. —1 Kings 19:12  You are not your thoughts. Anything that can be observed is not the observer.  Ouspensky wrote somewhere that we are not responsible for what we think, only for what we do. It is possible to have fears or fantasies that we might do this or that which we ourselves recognise as cruel or criminal, or self-accusatory thoughts which come into our minds unbidden and unwanted. How can we work with such thoughts?  Anyone who has had recurrent unwanted thoughts or urges will have found that trying to get rid of them simply makes them stronger. It is near-impossible to stop thoughts by an act of will: it is like the instruction to stop thinking of elephants. Even the apparently simple exercise of trying to stop thoughts for one minute is almost bound to fail.  There is indeed a place of peace when unnecessary thoughts settle like dust after the rain. You have to go about it

13: Third state, self-remembering and mindfulness

In my experience it is the case that third state exists and is accessible to anyone who wants it. It is also my experience that the ability to enter the third state improves with practice. The use of it is to be able to step back a little way from situations in which one finds oneself immersed (or better, entangled—in the term Ouspensky used, identified), to gain a little objectivity.  Third state does not abolish real pain. However it puts one into a different relation to it. The experience of discomfort at the dentist does not go away through self-remembering, but somehow the acceptance of the pain puts one a little more in control of one’s feelings about it. Just the pain without the imagination. This also applies to inner emotional pain: one acknowledges it rather than trying unsuccessfully to pretend it isn’t there or struggling with it like Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby.  Third state is also a place of peace, as mentioned by Peter Ouspensky. Some in the school used to make a disti

12: States of consciousness: first, second and third state

  ‘Higher’ states of consciousness were regularly explained and demonstrated (up to a point) in the introductory meetings I attended, and occasionally led, at the London branch of our fourth way school. Up to now I have put ‘higher’ in inverted commas because it is a commonplace that altered states can be produced, for example with alcohol, without there being anything ‘higher’ about them (other than being pleasant). The desire in humans for altered states is almost universal. Some cultures that ban alcohol permit tobacco and coffee, for example. Children sometimes play the game of spinning round until they feel dizzy, or the trick of squatting, nose-holding against expiration (Valsalva) and then suddenly standing up, to produce a momentary pre-faint. In the ’60s hallucinogens were popular with some groups of people. According to the fourth way, at any rate as I was taught it, some drugs can give you a taste of higher states but these states are not permanent, they do not belong to y

11: The mystery of consciousness

Consciousness is mysterious and occasions a lot of debate among scientists and philosophers, since on the one hand the prevailing scientific consensus is largely materialistic, and on the other there is no consensus as to how the flow of information in the brain can give rise to the sensation you have of being you. We can understand how to explain atoms in terms of hypothesised quarks, and chemistry in terms of atoms and quantum mechanics. Then we can begin to understand biochemistry in terms of chemistry and, on the next level up, the mechanisms of living cells in terms of biochemistry. But to try to explain cell biology in terms of quarks would be absurd. To explain the life of a complex animal in terms of atoms would also be absurd, since a whole new explanatory language is required at each level. Even so we accept that in principle there is a chain of relationships from life all the way down to the subatomic level. Whether we could in principle extend this chain of explanations up