This study work group grows out of Cynthia's challenge to take a deep dive into Fourth Way ideas and practices. Knowing that Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales for His Grandson is a heavy lift, we are aiming for a "softer and gentler" approach to Fourth Way inner practices via Maurice Nicoll's five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

This was what started me on my own Fourth Way journey. While on a five day silent retreat in a Franciscan hermitage, I had daily contact with one of the Franciscan brothers. Every day I came to his office to check in, and noticed this set of commentaries in his library. I took volume two back to my own cabin, and it lilterally exploded within me. I asked him where I could find others in my area that are working in this way, and it ultimately led me to a local group where I have been in an active Fourth Way Work group for the past twelve years. I have gone through these volumes two times already, and next year want to go through them again -- only this time, not privately, but with many of my friends in the Wisdom School network. These commentaries are ultimately what led me to find Cynthia and the Fourth Way community at Claymont where Cynthia has done a number of Fourth Way Wisdom Schools.

While working with Fourth Way practices, I wanted to know how to integrate that Work into my own Christian framework and understanding. Everybody kept saying, you've got to talk to Cynthia, but everytime I tried to sign up for a Wisdom School, it was already full. In desperation, I sheepishly caught her after a talk at Shalem in Washington DC, and asked, "If I do all the grunt work and hosting, will you come to a Wisdom School at Claymont in the Washington DC area?" She graciously accepted, and I knew I was "in" because now I was the one organizing the school!

In Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia recounts her relationship to “Rafe” — Brother Raphael Robin — the hermit monk who so profoundly influenced her life. Cynthia writes:

Like me, Rafe was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the "Fourth Way." When Rafe finally won permission to join an experimental Trappist community in North Carolina, he bumped into a copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Later, after he arrived in Colorado, someone gave him the five-volume set of Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which he read from every day, along with his Bible; these became the twin cornerstones of his spiritual work. Most of Rafe's library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff 's three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was "to have enough being to be nothing.”

I propose that we create the same study conditions as Rafe’s hermitage — weekly readings from the Bible (Gospel and Psalms) using the Ecumenical Lectionary and Nicoll’s Commentaries, with an added spice of one of Thomas’ Logion. Nicoll’s Commentaries are transcripts of the talks he gave to a weekly Work Group that he led in Britain from 1941 through 1953. Unlike P. D. Ouspensky’s book, his is not a systematic and ordered treatment of the Work ideas, but short commentaries that were given to meet the ongoing needs of the group he led. The Gurdjieff Society of Washington DC, encouraged by Mr. Hugh Ripman, produced a topical index to Nicoll’s commentaries. I propose that we use that index to topically explore some of the key work ideas, such as autopilot (“man is a machine”), three-centered knowing, attention, sensation, self-observation, identification, self-remembering, external considering, conscious labor, intentional suffering, and many others.

There are many places we could begin, but I suggest that we start with self-remembering.

So that's the deal. Feel free to call or email me if you have questions. I can't wait to start!

I have also created a private Facebook group for discussion. When you first enter the group, you will need to click the blue “Join Group" button. Since this is a private discussion group, I will need to approve your joining before you are able to ask questions or enter into discussion with others.

Weekly Lessons

• Start Here

• Week 1: The First Conscious Shock and Self-Remembering

• Week 2: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 1

• Week 3: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 2

• Week 4: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 1

• Week 5: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 2

• Week 6: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 3

• Week 7: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 4 and 5

• Week 8: The Teaching About Prayer in the Work

• Week 9: Self-Remembering

• Week 10: On Self-Remembering

• Week 11: A Short Note on Different Ways of Self-Remembering

• Week 12: Further Note on Self-Remembering

• Week 13: Further Commentary on Self-Remembering Work-Ideas

Course Resources

• About the Course

• Table of Contents

• Weekly Lectionary Reading

• The Gospel of Thomas

• Inner Work Practice

• Movement No. 39

• The First Obligatory

• Trinity Prayer: Agios O Theos

• Work Group Resources

• Discussion Group

Self-remembering is one of the core Fourth Way inner work practices. It is a term with a rich density of meaning. There are many ways to “self-remember” and it is difficult to give it a concise definition. Over the course of the next 13 weeks, we will explore this foundational practice as taught by Maurice Nicoll and recorded in his Commentaries.

We will explore many different inner practices, but for the next thirteen weeks, our default inner work exercise will be a practice adapted from Deborah Rose Longo’s “Inner Task Friday” in the Facebook Wisdom School Community with Cynthia Bourgeault’s Wisdom students.

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to myself. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

The inner exercise should only take a minute or two (or less) once familiar with the steps and will remain the same each week. Only the time we choose to engage the exercise will change. Each week we will engage this practice at a designated time — usually before or during a routine activity in the day, or while transitioning into a new activity.

This week we will do the exercise everyday at the moment when we wake up and are still lying in bed.

For those sharing a bed with a mate, a child or a pet(s) it is best to do the exercise before engaging in any communication with your bedmates. You may have to be creative and resourceful if outer influences demand your attention immediately and can not wait, as is sometimes the case with babies and some pets!

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the readings in the weekly lectionary for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Week One Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 196-200

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

On Hydrogens: IV - The First Conscious Shock and Self-Remembering

Chief obstacle to self-remembering

For most people, even for educated and thinking people, the chief obstacle to their attaining the state of consciousness called Self-Remembering lies in the fact that they think they possess it already. They think that they remember themselves in everything they do and in everything they say, and they not only think that they are conscious at every moment and aware of themselves but believe that they are conscious of their inner lives also and fully aware of all the thoughts and emotions that pass through them in a continuous stream.

And because they think they always remember themselves and act and speak with full consciousness and are fully aware of everything they say and do, they believe that they have real will and a permanent unchanging ‘I’ and that they have the ability to do–as, for example, that they can change themselves if they really wish to, or change their lives, or change other people, or do just as they like.

Our inability to change ourselves

But of course they cannot change themselves or their lives or other people or do just as they like, because they do not possess any real will, but many contradictory wills, nor have they any permanent ‘I’ but many changing ‘I’s and when they are doing something it is not from conscious will and conscious choice but from what only can happen at that moment to them.

For just as in life everything happens in the only way in which it can possibly happen, and no one really does anything at all, although it looks as if people do, so is it in the case of a single individual. Everything in his or her life takes place in the only way in which it can possibly take place, and as long as an individual remains the same, everything else will be the same.

It is evident that you will not be interested if you someone tells you about a state of consciousness that you think you already possesses. And this is one reason why people find it so difficult to understand anything about the meaning of Remembering Oneself or the state of Self-Awareness or Self-Consciousness.

They ascribe this state to themselves as they are and really believe they pass their existence in a full state of consciousness. They do not realize that they cannot help doing what they are doing. They believe that all their actions are controlled by their will, that they do everything deliberately, and so on.

Our inability to remember ourselves

Yet our ordinary state of consciousness is almost the reverse of all this. I ordinarily do not remember myself, I am not aware of myself, I am not properly conscious of what I do nor of what I say. Nor do I make the decisions I imagine I make. Nor am I properly conscious of my inner life, which is actually very obscure to me. Of all the thoughts and feelings that pass through me mechanically I am scarcely conscious of a millionth part.

Self-remembering is our right

Yet actually the state of consciousness called “Self-Remembering” in which we are aware of ourselves and of all we see round us, and at the same time aware of all the thoughts and feelings passing through us — this state of consciousness is our right. And if we do not possess it, it is only because of the wrong conditions of our life.

It can be said without exaggeration that at the present time, the state of consciousness called Self-Remembering (or the Third State of Consciousness) occurs in us only in the form of rare flashes and it can only be made more permanent in us by a long and special training.

The importance of self-observation

This special training begins with self-observation. It is only by means of observing ourselves uncritically and over a considerable period that we begin to understand that we do not remember ourselves. We realize that most of the time we live in dreams. We realize that we forget ourselves, forget our aims, forget what we were doing or thinking and so on. But this is not all that we begin to understand. We begin to realize what it means to awaken to some extent and what it means to be asleep. Through self-observation we begins to feel the taste of what it might be to be more awake, more conscious of ourselves.

Self-observation is not self-remembering

Self-Observation is not Self-Remembering, but it enables a us to realize we do not remember ourselves and that most of the time we have no distinct and separate feeling of ourselves, no proper sense of ‘I’, no real consciousness of ourselves. From this we realize that we live our life in a state of sleep which people call full consciousness, almost as if in mockery, it might be thought, for it is in this so-called state of full consciousness that people behave as they do to one another and even kill each other without realizing what they are doing.

Our need to awaken

Look at today. What is the real explanation of what is happening in the world? The real explanation is that people are not conscious. They are asleep and acting in their sleep. And even if they feel something of this, they do not know how to awaken from the sleep or what they must do. Yet since the creation of the world we have been told we are asleep and must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels: “Awake, watch, sleep not!”

But people do not understand it or they think it is a metaphor whereas it is literally true. If people awakened from sleep, if they began to remember themselves, the whole of life would change. And nothing can change in life unless people begin to awaken.

It is necessary to say all this before coming to the practical side of Self-Remembering because everyone who wishes to understand this Work must have, as it were, a background of principles from which they can think about details. This Work teaches as a principle that we are asleep and that our greatest and most important task is to awaken.

* * *

Seeing our sleep

We must first come to the realization that we are asleep and that we do not remember ourselves, before anything else can happen. And we can only gain this realization by means of observing ourselves uncritically at all times and over a long period. But in this system we are taught to observe certain particular things in ourselves which especially prevent us from beginning to awaken.

Awakening, you must understand, takes a very long time and all the first stages of the Work are to do with gradually awakening. One of the most important things to observe in oneself is the state of being identified. We cannot remember ourselves if we are identified. And the more we are identified with ourselves, the less can we remember ourselves. We are identified with pictures of ourselves, we are identified with our dreams, we are identified with every ‘I’ that for a moment takes the stage, we are identified with every mood, we are identified with every emotion, we are identified especially with our negative emotions, and we are identified with our suffering.

Identified with our suffering

And it must be mentioned here that this latter form of identifying must be struggled against from the very first moment of practical work on oneself. We must give up our suffering from the very beginning. All the thousand and one forms of identifying must become subjects of self-study through self-observation. Now if we observe that we are about to identify with, say, some negative state and at the same time remember the Work and our aim not to identify, we may separate from this state completely.

We will then probably experience a moment of Self-Remembering either then or later on. What has happened? I will try to explain. When you have practiced self-observation for a certain time, you are more conscious of your inner state and in consequence you have, as it were, a moment of choice. You can see what is going to happen before it takes place.

Bringing the Work up to the point of incoming impressions

Self-Observation clears a space in your mind so that you can see things coming in and going out. If the energy which was about to go into a negative emotion is prevented from doing so, it may pass on and may create a moment of Self-Remembering. All this means that you have brought the Work up to the point of incoming impressions.

Ordinarily impressions do not pass on because at the point where impressions enter the human machine, they fall on a network of long-established associations. After a time, at a certain age, people no longer experience new impressions. This is not because impressions are not new, for they are always new every moment but because they always “ring up”, as it were, the same associations and produce the same reactions.

Living in our associations makes our inner life empty and dead

People then live only in their associations and this makes their inner life almost empty, almost dead. If you wish to keep young in yourself you must take in the food of new impressions. That means, you must actually work on impressions as they enter and prevent certain of them from falling on the old places.

We cannot change life, but we can change the way impressions fall on us

Life is impressions coming in. You cannot change life. But you can change the way impressions fall on you. Take, for example, the question of aim. Everyone must have aim in this Work. You must think about it. Aim can be smaller and greater. But you should know what your aim is, great or small, at any one moment. It gives shape and meaning to your inner life.

Now if you bring your aim into consciousness–that is, do not forget it–at the point where life is acting on you through incoming impressions and prevents you from reacting to any of these impressions in a way that is contrary to your aim, you are then in a state of Self-Awareness. Your mechanical reaction is prevented by your conscious act.

The first conscious shock

This action belongs to the First Conscious Shock. It is, so to speak, the beginning of it. The energy which would have gone into a mechanical reaction, through mechanical associations, can now pass on and become transformed first into finer energy (Hydrogen Re 24). This is emotional. The result will be that either then or later you will “see something” or you will understand something in a new way–behind the network of associations. Impressions will, in fact, begin to fall directly on centers.

Self-remembering changes how impressions are taken in

Impressions that are taken in in a state of Self-Remembering become emotional. Even the simplest thing can become interesting or beautiful and reflect some meaning you had never perceived.

Now as regards the question: “Which self must I remember when I try to remember myself?” First, remember the self or ‘I’ that knows what your aim is. This brings all the ‘I’s in you that wish to awaken into consciousness.

Second, there is such a thing as real ‘I’ in us. But we are always being what we are not, substituting one ‘I’ after another in place of the trace of real ‘I’ that we have access to. Trying to feel the pure feeling of ‘I’ doing this, ‘I’ saying this, ‘I’ sitting here, ‘I’ being negative, and so on, can become sometimes a form of Self-Remembering. Full Self-Remembering is consciousness of real ‘I’ which stands above all the ‘I’s artificially created by life in us.

Something higher than yourself

Finally, you cannot remember yourself unless you feel that there is something higher than yourself. Unless you feel this, your Self-Remembering will always lead you into False Personality.

Many other things could be said about the First Conscious Shock, which has many sides to it, but enough has been given for discussion and questions. But you must all keep to the paper in your discussion and this will be an exercise in Self-Remembering for you.

Week 1 Self Remembering

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We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given last week, but this week will engage the practice at the close of the day, at bedtime or right before settling into bed. If you wish, continue the practice as well at the start of the day.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the next 12 weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to myself. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

In addition to this practice, this we we are introducing one of the Gurdjieff Movements, #39. Gurdjieff was a teacher of sacred dance, and many of the inner states that we seek to cultivate can best be learned through posture and body movement.

Movement #39 has simple movements, and again can be used as a form of Self-Remembering. It takes about 5 minutes to complete, if you go through two cycles of movements, and only a couple of minutes if you go through one cycle.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Two Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 527-533

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language. This is an unusually long reading for the week. You may want to work on bits of it each day, rather than in one big gulp!

Self-Observation and Self-Remembering: Part 1

Our understanding is relative to our level of being

A person’s Understanding of the Work is relative to his Level of Being. You may know the ideas of the Work. But Knowledge does not give Understanding: to know is not to understand. The Knowledge of this Work is of a kind that can act on Being and as a result give rise to Understanding. Understanding is not Knowledge and Understanding is not Being. Knowledge and Being together, in conjunction, give Understanding.

If my Being is such that it wills what I know, the result will eventually be increasing Understanding. If it does not will what I know, I will have Knowledge only. But if some ‘I’s wish to follow the Knowledge of this Work, their will to do it will pass into Understanding on a small scale compared with what would happen if the whole Being were to act as one and will as one to apply the Knowledge of the Work and live what it says.

Real Will

That would be Real Will, which is beyond us. So we have to start where we are, with all our separate and conflicting wills, and maintain an inner steadfastness amidst the confusions that take place in our mixed Being. That is, we must value the Work and keep Work ‘I’s in us alive and protect them from all kinds of crude, rough or cynical or negative ‘I’s.

No struggle, no work

Of course, unless there was this struggle, there would be no work. To work means to work: and work means effort. Work is the effort to connect one’s Knowledge of the Work with one’s Being–that is, the effort to bring what one knows into relation with what one is.

For this, self-observation is obviously necessary in order to notice what one is. And again, for this, Knowledge is necessary, to show what to observe. This is a plain and logical sequence –namely, that to know what one is one must observe oneself and in order to know what to observe one must have Knowledge.

A higher level of consciousness is possible

But the Work teaches a Knowledge not only of what we have to observe– as, for example–negative states–but what we must do–as, for example, practice non-identifying with ourselves and especially with False Personality.

But all this teaching is in view of the supreme idea of the Work and indeed of all esotericism in the past–i.e. that there is a higher level of consciousness possible for Humanity that you can reach if you clean your machine and get rid of many useless things that complicate your life and keep you in a state of sleep.

Only in the state of Self-Remembering can influences reach you

And here comes in the most important instruction given: not only must you knowand observe, but you must remember yourself. And you must do this because only in that state of consciousness called the state of Self-Remembering can influences reach you that can act on your Being, for without help you can do practically nothing, or will only effect one thing at the expense of another.

Now ‘I’s that wish to work and connect the Knowledge of the Work with their lives and feel unhappy if they do not and ill if they do not keep awake–these ‘I’s change in their Understanding. They must be fed so that they can see things in a new way. That is, one has to re-think, re-visit, re-interpret the ideas.

Merely to know one must observe or self-remember is nothing

Merely to know one must observe or self-remember is nothing: the matter must be gone over again and again. One must return to first principles again and again. So the fresh discussion of what has been discussed more than once is something absolutely necessary.

There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself

A question was asked at the last meeting held here, as to Self- Observation and Self-Remembering. This is the question:

“As I understand it there is a difference in quality between the State of Self-Remembering and an Act of Self-Remembering and many degrees of, or levels of, quality between Acts of Self- Remembering; yet the least of these is greater than–i.e. on a level above–the fullest Self-Observation.”

“There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. All work on yourself below that level is preparatory to progress towards Consciousness. Further–you can protect yourself psychologically only by Self-Remembering. “

“How can one evaluate and through evaluation increase the power to value, not for what it can give but for what it is — this state of Self-Remembering?”

The observation of oneself is not the same thing as remembering oneself

I will begin by speaking in a general way about Self-Observation and Self-Remembering. The observation of oneself is not the same thing as remembering oneself. On one occasion Gurdjieff, speaking of Self-Remembering, said: “Which self do you wish to remember?” This gives one clue to the meaning of remembering oneself.

On another occasion he said that we are sub-normal because we are not conscious at the place of incoming impressions. “At this point,” he said, “where external impressions enter, it is necessary to create something.”

Self-Observation

Let us now pass to the idea of Self-Observation and return later to the question of Self-Remembering.

We believe we have always observed ourselves

I was once asked by someone this question: “I do not understand what the Work means when it says that we do not observe ourselves. I have always observed myself.”

No doubt, it is true to say that a person to a certain extent observes himself or herself. People look into a mirror and this mirror is constructed from what they have been taught–that is, what they have acquired by their upbringing as to right behavior, correct manners, the right things to wear, the right things to say, the right people to know.

This acquired part of us is the Personality and the formation of the Personality in everybody is a question of the period, the environment in which one is born, school influences, the fashion of the day, the nation to which one belongs and the standards which it sets. Into this mirror everybody gazes–and indeed it is not only psychological but it is also the actual literal mirror.

The Work mirror is different from the Life mirror

But this mirror is not the same mirror as the Work teaches us to gaze into: the Work-mirror is something quite different. It has, so to speak, nothing to do with whether you eat peas with a knife or put your elbows on the table or wear the right tie or use the right lipstick or know the right people.

The Work-mirror refers to a quite different kind of Self-Observation. Through the Work-mirror it is possible to begin to see what one really is apart from what one appears to be and pretends to be. However, at first the Work-mirror may be all wrong. That always arises when we do not see what the Work is about and when Magnetic Center is weak. We still look at ourselves from the life-mirror and try to connect our acquired virtues, that we appreciate through our self-love, with the Work-mirror.

Some of you have reflected on the Knowledge this Work teaches from which we have to observe ourselves. If so, you will probably have felt that it seems to teach something that is remote from the life we are leading.

What we need to observe

For example, what connection is there with our ordinary life when we are told to observe the work of centers, to observe three distinct persons in us, and then to observe many different ‘I’s in us, to observe our state of sleep, to observe internal considering and the making of accounts against others, to observe negative emotions, to observe identifying, to observe our ignorance, to observe the Level of our Being, to observe how we never remember ourselves and so on?

It all seems remote, difficult to grasp; yet, from all these ideas the real Work-mirror is formed. No one can look into this Work-mirror unless he or she has acquired Knowledge of what this Work is about, and loves it.

The Work teaches us what we need to observe

The Work teaches us from what points of view we must observe ourselves. It picks out certain things that we have to notice in ourselves. Imagine being told to go into an enormous store and being told merely to observe it. You would not know what to observe. But supposing you are told to go into this store and observe a few special things only: then you will know what you have to take notice of. It is this that the Work teaches.

The Work teaches how to approach yourself, through self-observation, what to notice and what to work against. In this respect it gives very definite directions which, however difficult they may be to follow, are yet very definite. If you love the Work–that is, if you value it–then you will be able to assimilate the knowledge that it teaches, according to your level.

If you assimilate, even to a small extent, the knowledge that it teaches, you will begin to possess a mirror in which to look at yourself. For a long time we have poor mirrors that distort things. After a time, we may realize that we have wrong attitude to the Work. But it is exactly this realization that can give you a new mirror. Then you begin to see yourself better; you begin to see how you have treated the Work so far.

Self-Observation without definite knowledge as to what to observe will lead nowhere

Now I will repeat again that Self-Observation without definite knowledge as to what to observe will lead nowhere in the Work. Ordinary, mechanical self-observation may lead you into social life, but this is not the same thing. The mirror of social life is one thing and into this all people gaze. The Work says nothing against this.

But it speaks of another mirror having another quality. The ancient inscription on the Greek temple: “Know thyself,” is by itself quite ineffective. How can you know yourself?

We have to know ourselves in a new way

People all think they know themselves already but the Work teaches that we have to know ourselves in a new way and from certain angles, and the object of this particular kind of knowing of oneself is to make it possible to separate from a number of useless things that go on in us so that we can begin to touch influences coming from a higher level that will give us thoughts and feelings and understanding that we have a right to have, but with which we have lost contact owing to our state of sleep.

Awakening to finer influences

All wisdom teaching is about awakening to far finer influences–yes, here down on this Earth. Mr. Ouspensky once said: “Here now on this Earth you can be under different laws, different influences and know and understand what they mean, provided you work on yourself.”

I remember when Mr. Ouspensky said this many people were astonished because they thought that being in a better state meant being in a better world, that no doubt they might reach after death. As you all know, the general idea taught in the Gospels that one must die to be re-born is taken to mean physical death and being born into some other world called heaven.

The Work and the Gospels teach, however, that if we can reach higher influences that are already playing on us now we will be in a different state of understanding. For example, the Work says that we will no longer be under the Law of Accident–and negative emotions especially put us under the Law of Accident. However, this belongs to another talk.

Higher centers exist in us fully formed

To continue: the whole Work is about putting our ordinary centers into a right state so that they can transmit intelligently the influences of higher centers which exist in us fully formed and are continually at work, but to which we cannot respond.

“Why,” asked someone, “is this so?” “Because,” Mr. Ouspensky said, “we are continually identified with a thousand and one useless things both in life and in ourselves.” Mr. Ouspensky always especially emphasized the importance of working on the negative part of Emotional Center.

We identify with our negative emotions more than with anything else

He said on one occasion in so many words: “We identify with our negative emotions more than with anything else. It seems as if we felt we had a right to be negative whereas I teach you the very reverse–i.e. that we have a right not to be negative.”

When we are negative it is as if we had a blood-vessel cut, pouring out our blood. As long as the negative part of our Emotional Center, which we were not born with but have acquired from others, is allowed to exist unchallenged, so long is it impossible for our Emotional Center to feel the influences of the Higher Emotional Center.

The observation and separation from our negative states

For this reason the observation of our negative states and the separation from them is one of the most important sides of practical work. The transformation of negative emotion belongs to the Second Conscious Shack and here the whole Work comes in and the whole evaluation of it.

You may be negative but you must feel that it is not you that is negative but It. This is the beginning of inner separation, of not identifying with negative states, of not identifying with oneself.

To resume what we were speaking about–you can understand that to be taught the knowledge that you are taught in this Work about negative emotions is one thing, but as mere knowledge it is useless. It remains theoretical only–in the memory.

You must connect the knowledge of this Work with Self-Observation

You have to apply the knowledge to yourself and this is only possible through observing yourself. Unless you connect the knowledge of this Work with Self-Observation, nothing can happen to you. The Work will remain purely theoretical and not practical. The function of Self-Observation, therefore, is something that can be understood quite logically. Its object is clear.

Life mirror and work mirror get mixed up

However, at first Self-Observation is very crude, very irregular, and mixed up with life-observation of oneself–that is, the Work-mirror is mixed up with the life-mirror, and this is inevitable. In fact, for a long time, the Work-mirror is little else than the life-mirror. It is, as it were, connected with the neutralizing force of life and not the neutralizing force of the Work, which latter force comes from an entirely different source.

As the evaluation of the Work deepens the two mirrors become separated and in that case where you may derive a great deal of flattery and self-delight from the one mirror you do not see the same image in the other, and this causes inner trouble. Yet I say the two mirrors are not antagonistic. They reflect different aspects of oneself.

Both in Work and in life

In the 4th Way, which is this Work, we have to be both in the Work and in life, and the 4th Way does not make a contradiction between life and Work. Some sides belong to life and others to the Work. It is more like making a right arrangement of the different ‘I’s and putting them in their right place and having the strength not to see merely opposites. It is the distinction of ‘I’s by inner taste. We need both the Work and life, and from both we can get force. It is like two rooms, quite distinct, and yet opening into one another, both being part of the same house of oneself.

No one is told in this Work to cut oneself off from life, to go into a monastery or into the desert. And yet the two are entirely different and their force comes from two different sides altogether.

Gurdjieff once said in so many words: “Everything this Work teaches you will help your life and help you to attain your life-aim.” Just imagine a person in the Work who could pass into the affairs of life and through inner work had learned not to identify–you can understand that such a person might attain some aim in life far more easily than a mechanical negative individual.

Evaluation of the Work

But in order to do so you would continually have to feel the Work to such an extent that your evaluation of the Work was far more intense and real to you than anything you valued or attained in life.

Now we identify through the unobserved petty feelings of ourselves which cause us to make endless internal accounts and build up endless negative systems in us. These negative systems, once formed, are very difficult to deal with. On this level we do everything in a pseudo way, from our self-love, our self-liking, to advance ourselves in some way, to merit praise, and so we are very easily hurt and dejected.

Remove this stimulus and we scarcely exist, and may seem to have no objective. This is being a machine. All this basis of self-feeling does not lead far in the Work eventually. It is only vanquished by a sense of something greater than ourselves.

Self-Remembering

You must remember yourself but cannot remember yourself

This brings us to the question of Self-Remembering which is so much emphasized in this Work as the constantly necessary accompaniment to self-observation. “You,” said Gurdjieff, “should always remember yourself but as you are you have not the force and even cannot remember that you have to remember yourself.”

On another occasion Mr. Ouspensky said at the beginning of his teaching in London when people were continually badgering him with questions as to what they should do–whether they should smoke or not, eat or not, and so on.

The most important thing is to remember yourself

“The most important thing is to remember yourself. You can do what you like so long as you remember yourself.”

This sounded very strange to many of us. It seemed to mean that you could do anything you liked — yes, as long as you remembered yourself. Supposing you give way to your appetites and become identified, say, with your food, and then tell yourself that you are allowed to do anything–the Work says so.

But does it say it like that? It says you can do anything you like as long as you remember yourself and it is obvious enough that if you are identified with your food you are not remembering yourself.

Self-Remembering puts us into a different state of consciousness

Self-Remembering puts us into a different state of consciousness. In that state of consciousness you cannot do certain things without going to sleep at once and you can see it happening–that is, you can see yourself becoming identified.

Or, to put the matter differently, if you do certain things and remember yourself at the same time, you will do them in quite a different way. When you begin to understand the subtlety of this remark: “You can do what you like as long as you remember yourself,” you will see that it really means that you cannot do what you like, at least in the ordinary way that you do it.

One form of Self-Remembering is feeling the sense of “I doing this”

One form of Self-Remembering is feeling the sense of “I doing this” or “I saying this”. If when you are angry and speaking internally or externally in a bad way you feel the sense of ‘I’ saying this, it will completely change the situation. You realize that “It” is saying it–your machine.

Now let us once more go through the things said about Self- Remembering.

I am not Bob

Let us say to ourselves: “I am not me”. It will be best if I take my own case–suppose I can say: “I am not Nicoll and Nicoll is not me” or say that Mr. Bob Sabath says to himself: “I am not Bob and Bob is not me” or Ms. Cynthia Bourgeault says: “I am not Cynthia and Cynthia is not me”.

If we can say this to ourselves rightly it will give us a very strange feeling as to who we are. Certainly this feeling is connected with a sense of the dissolving of one’s Personality. Yet as you know this is one of the objects of this Work expressed in the great formulation that Personality must be made passive so that the real part of one–the Essence–can grow.

What is Bob up to?

But it can only be through a long gradual process of insight. I remember Mr. Ouspensky saying to me: “Why don’t you say sometimes: ‘What is Nicoll up to?'” Now supposing I could always say to myself: “What is Nicoll up to?” and Bob could say “What is Bob up to?” and Cynthia: “What is Cynthia up to?” and all of you could say correspondingly the same thing in some real way occasionally, it would mean then that there was some degree of inner separation, some awareness that one is not the same as one’s acquired Personality, with all its acquired prides and buffers–this artificial figure that life has built up, and that one takes as oneself, not knowing any better.

The beginning of Self-Remembering

Such a feeling, such an inner sense, is the beginning of Self-Remembering. When I try to remember myself I do not remember Nicoll: I do not wish to remember Nicoll, but of course he is always there. But if I have no feeling that I am not Nicoll (although actually I am a slave to Nicoll) when I remember myself I will simply remember Nicoll. Of course, Nicoll will always remember Nicoll mechanically and certainly Nicoll is satisfied with Nicoll and no doubt regards him as a marvelous person.

Remembering the wrong self

In that case, Self-Remembering would only increase one’s self-satisfaction–that is, it would enhance Personality. But this is not Self-Remembering, or, let us say, it is remembering the wrong self. It is not a conscious act but a mechanical act.

Do you notice how you always justify yourselves? It is not a reaching up to something else, but an intensifying and justifying of what one is already. So it cannot lead to a change in the level of Being. It has nothing to do with Self-Remembering in the Work-sense.

It usually means there is not real self-observation–that is, self-observation done through the mirror of the Work. The Work has not yet begun to break up the Personality. One is simply taking the Work from the Personality as something added to one’s own merits, like a medal. Of course this is not the Work. The Work cannot start from the fullness of the Personality.

The realization of one’s own utter nothingness

The Work can only start when you realize you are not what you thought, not what you pretend to be. You have only to read the Sermon on the Mount to see what is meant. When the Work really strikes home, this house of cards that one takes as oneself begins to fall to bits. You know the Work speaks about the necessity of coming to the point where one realizes one’s own utter nothingness.

You cannot pretend to be nothing

This, however, is mercifully delayed and it is not something you can artificially realize. You cannot pretend to be nothing. It is very painful to see a person pretending that he or she is nothing.

Full Self-Remembering

Now Self-Remembering is connected with all this. To remember yourself simply as you are now is not Self-Remembering. Self- Remembering comes down from above and full Self-Remembering is a state of consciousness in which the Personality and all its pretenses almost cease to exist and you are, so to speak, nobody, and yet the fullness of this state, which is really bliss, makes you, for the first time, somebody.

Week 2 Self Remembering

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There are many ways to self-remember and there is a difference between an act of self-remembering and a state of self-remembering.

If you are new to this work, I know that the readings will be a challenge. There is a very precise vocabulary and language that the Work uses, and it will take a while to become familiar and comfortable with the language itself. In addition, the work of self-remembering is never fully defined in the work in an exact way. We are learning inductively about self-remembering from clues given in the commentaries.

So be patient and kind to yourself as you plunge into the deep end of fourth way teaching and inner practices. Take as much as you can understand and try to work with it in a practical way.

I think of self-remembering as a kind of “centering prayer” done in the cell of my daily life. The core gestures are going away, returning and surrendering. In a daily sit, I do this with my thoughts and feelings — I disappear in my thoughts, I let them go, and I come back. In daily life, I also see this rhythm: I notice that I have “gone way” and am not inhabiting myself. I see this and come back to myself and to the Holy One.

One of the paradoxes of this work is that seeing our sleep is one of our first acts of waking up. Noticing that we have “gone away” and are not self-remembering, seeing our inability (or even desire) to self-remember, paradoxically is one of the first acts of self-remembering.

So let’s experiment with the many ways we can self-remember this week. We go way. We come back. We befriend this rhythm of our life as holy and lawful. Maybe we celebrate our coming back with the core inner practice that we have been working on for the past two weeks, or just one part of that practice like a conscious breath or two. Or maybe we just take a gesture from movement #39 and bow our head silently or cross our arms. Maybe we just say aloud or to ourselves, “There goes Bob again.” Or just say to ourselves “I am not Bob” or “What in the world is Bob up to again!” (Of course, you are using your own name here!)

We need to come back with all three centers — and feel the coming back to ourselves in our whole body. When we see that we are “gone”, we “re-inhabit ourselves” and come back. Not just once, but many times during the day. We breathe our lives throughout the day — in and out. We need to notice our dispersion, see what has taken us, and feel and sense our return.

Inscribed in a special script above the walls of the study house in Prieure France where Gurdjieff worked with his students in the early 1900’s are thirty-eight aphorisms which begin:

1. Like what “It” does not like.

2. The highest that we can attain is to be able to do.

3. The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, provided you remember the work.

4. Remember yourself always and everywhere.

5. Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself—only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.

6. Here we can only direct and create conditions, but not help.

7. Know that this house can be useful only to those who have recognized their nothingness and who believe in the possibility of changing.

A full state of self-remembering, at least at this point in my understanding, does not mean that we do not ever “go away.” We don’t breathe just with an in-breath. There is an inhalation and an exhalation. A state of self-remembering is consciously breathing our daily life in the constant act of returning and surrendering to what life brings, and befriending this holy coming and going — using our falling as fuel for inner work. We will go more into this in Week Four.

In reality, we are all beginners, and we need each other. This is not just inner work that we do for our own private entertainment or inner transformation. It is Work for the sake of others as well. It is not just our own lives that depend on this Work, but the lives of those we care most about and are most deeply connected to.

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week, but this week will engage the practice in the middle of the day, at lunch time or while we begin to prepare for lunch or during lunch preparation. If you wish, continue the practice as well at the start of the day and at the end of the day as well.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the next 12 weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

Continue to practice Movement #39 if that helps you. Parts of Movement #39 can be used as a bodily form of Self-Remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Three Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 534-538

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Self-Observation and Self-Remembering: Part 2

In this second paper we come to answering the question that was quoted in the last paper. I will repeat the first part of this question:

“As I understand it, there is a difference in quality between the state of Self-Remembering and an act of Self-Remembering, and many degrees of, or levels of, quality between acts of Self- Remembering; yet the least of these is greater than–i.e. on a level above–the fullest Self-Observation . . .”

The act of Self-Remembering is different from the State of Self-Remembering

The act of Self-Remembering is a conscious effort made in order to remember oneself. The state of Self-Remembering is the result of the act and the quality of the state of Self-Remembering depends on the quality of the act–i.e.: the quality of the effort made to remember oneself.

Let us try to illustrate this in an easy way. The act of taking my guitar and striking notes on it is different from the state of being able to play music on it. However, I will have to make an effort to take the guitar and play on it before I can reach the state of being able to play music.

Again, if I want to behave better or have better manners the act of trying to is not the same as being in the state of having better behavior or manners. If I make right effort, I may reach the state that I wish to attain, and the result will be according to the quality of my effort.

The Act of Self-Remembering

The act of trying to remember myself is to endeavor by trial and failure to reach some new state of oneself called the State of Self-Remembering. If already I know how to reach this state then the act or effort that I make will put me into this state. But I cannot expect at first by performing the act of Self-Remembering to reach the State. It will only be by long work, by innumerable acts, that I gain any success in reaching the state that I aim at reaching.

No progress unless and until you remember yourself

Now let us take the second parts of the question in which it is said:

“There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. . .”

Unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help

I think that it would be best to say here that unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help, and that unless you receives help you cannot reach a different level of being. But at the same time unless you prepare yourself by means of Self-Observation and trying to separate from what the Work teaches are wrong functions, you cannot receive the influences coming from Higher Centers.

You have to prepare your lower centers so that they can hear the voices of Higher Centers which are always speaking to us and always trying to change us but which we cannot hear.

Feeling the absence of Higher Centers

I do not mean that the Higher Centers are trying to change us exactly, because they are neutral, not violent or accusatory. You feel the absence of Higher Centers in the general feeling of uncomfortableness as if you had forgotten something you once knew. Unless lower centers can begin to hear Higher Centers there is no possibility of getting help for evolution.

Real ‘I” belongs to Higher Centers

Remember, you are created a self-developing organism, but you must receive help from wisdom teaching in order to evolve. You are disconnected from Real ‘I’ which belongs to Higher Centers and can transmit their meaning. Real ‘I’ understands the language of Higher Centers but false ‘I’ does not. Real ‘I’ is what you are and why you exist: or, rather, why you exist is to come into contact with Real ‘I’.

In one of the wisdom writings of India it is said: “If you fail to reach God you are continually re-born into existence. And so you go round and round in the whole cycle of possible births until you understand why you exist.”

Everyone is created with a possibility of making contact with Real ‘I’

Since everyone has Real ‘I’ in them but at a higher, that is, a deeper, level than that from which they ordinarily live and think and feel, everyone is created with a possibility of making contact with this Real ‘I’ of which they are nothing but a foolish reflection or imitation.

Everyone has an eternal center of gravity, but, being swayed by the senses, by the feeling that they are nothing but their bodies and by the impact of impressions coming from external life, they get far away from this center of gravity.

Self-Remembering is the beginning of the attempt to bring us back into ourselves

Self-Remembering is the beginning of the attempt to bring us back into ourselves and so into our real center of gravity. That is why a very external person who is simply governed by the effect he or she makes on other people has a very great difficulty in understanding what Self-Remembering means, and indeed what this Work means.

On one occasion G. said: “Behind Real ‘I’ lies God.”

The way back to our real origin starts with Observing ‘I’

But the beginning of all this way back to our real origin starts with Observing ‘I’. This means of course that it starts with the Work itself, for Observing ‘I’ must know about what to observe and do it from what the Work teaches.

If you have a wrong mirror, a wrong Observing ‘I’, some social ‘I’, it is not in the Work-sense Observing ‘I’. But if you can establish in yourself a point of observation from what you understand of what the Work teaches you to observe, you are on the first rung of the ladder that reaches ultimately to Real ‘I’.

Establishing Observing ‘I’ is a very difficult matter with long struggle and a great deal of failure

People think it is easy to establish Observing ‘I’ in this real Work-sense. I would say it is a very difficult matter and requires a long struggle, a great deal of inner sincerity and a great deal of failure. When this Observing ‘I’ is established it collects other ‘I’s round it that wish to work, that wish to understand better, that wish to find the secret of one’s existence.

Everyone really has this secret feeling about themselves but they do not put it into operation; they do not know what to do and so it simply becomes a source of negative emotion. When Deputy-Steward is formed it may attract Steward and finally Real ‘I’.

The ladder of the Work

But these are words of very great density of meaning. To understand anything of this ladder of the Work takes a very long time and very deep reflection. For example, it needs a great deal of thinking what the Work is about, and re-thinking about it and seeing the state of one’s being and re-seeing it.

It requires a great deal of inner realization, it requires continual access of valuation, continual renewing of valuation, a continual re-understanding of what one understands, a seeing of where one is and what one is.

Even the simplest sayings of the Work transform themselves into deeper and deeper meanings

And in this connection I might say that all of you who are following the path of the Work, and have long ago understood that it is not something on the blackboard, will find that even the simplest sayings of the Work transform themselves into deeper and deeper meanings. You will find, in short, that this Work and all its brief formulations could only come from a source that knows and understands far more than we do.

Now as regards the passage in the question we are discussing: “Yet the least of these (acts of Self-Remembering) is greater than–i.e. on a level above–the fullest Self-Observation.”

An act of Self-Remembering is greater than an act of Self-Observation

I find some difficulty in answering it. It means to begin with that an act of Self-Remembering is greater than an act of Self-Observation. I would say, to begin with, that speaking of fullest Self-Observation is beside the point. Full Self-Observation could only come with an enormous increase of consciousness and in that sense would be the same as that increased consciousness of the State of Self-Remembering, Self-Awareness, Self-Consciousness. To be fully aware of oneself would correspond to the Third State of Consciousness.

An act of Self-Remembering for us, as we are, is a very weak thing

An act of Self-Remembering for us, as we are, is a very weak thing. An act of Self-Observation may be more distinct. The two are not on the same level, but a state of full Self-Observation would belong to the level above us. But how could we at our level of consciousness expect to observe everything fully in ourselves? How could we, for example, fully observe the whole of our lives, altogether, or indeed how could we observe at our level of consciousness all that is going on in every part of a center?

At the point of death we may pass into a different state of consciousness

You know there are many stories of people who when partially drowned remember the whole of their lives. I think these stories are probably quite true. I believe that at the point of death we may pass into a different state of consciousness. In the terms of this Work we would call this the Third State of Consciousness–i.e. the State of Self- Remembering, Self-Consciousness, or Self-Awareness.

Then, no doubt, you would have full observation of yourself–yes, and full observation of yourself in a way you never dreamed of. But, as we are, Self-Observation is a very small thing, but quite essential, like carrying a tiny light through a big dark house and seeing one thing after another.

Taking inner photographs of yourself

After a time memory–that is, Work-memory–or memory created through conscious effort in Self-Observation–may connect together all these separate small illuminations into something bigger. This means that you begin to take photographs of yourself–that is, you begin to observe yourself over a period of time, altogether.

You begin to see patterns in the carpet of your life

From this moment you can begin to catch a glimpse of your Chief Feature; you can begin to see strands running through your life. You begin to see patterns in the carpet of your life. You notice that in the three definitions of the Third State of Consciousness the term Self-Awareness connects with full Self-Observation.

The Work will never allow a person to see more than he or she can stand

I find this part of the question difficult to answer because it assumes that full observation is a possibility at our level of consciousness. If you at your present level of consciousness had a moment of full observation you would probably go mad, because it would mean that you saw all the inner contradictions in yourself. To reach such an insight requires long work and the Work will never allow a person to see more than he or she can stand.

We cannot attain a higher degree of consciousness just in a moment

I think we all make a mistake in thinking we can attain a higher degree of consciousness just in a moment. Consider how long it took you to learn to read or write. One hears the Work for a long time, just as a child sees his letters for a long time, but it takes many years before it can speak or write. A curious thing here, if I may add, is that suddenly a child finds it can read and just in the same way in the Work suddenly you find you understand something you have heard time after time. This means you are ready for it, you have earned it.

You can protect yourself psychologically only by Self-Remembering

Now to take the last part of the question: “All work on yourself below that level is preparatory to progress towards Consciousness. Further–you can protect yourself psychologically only by Self-Remembering.”

I have no comment to make on this part of the question but it requires to be understood. The phrasing is right. To be protected psychologically from the external scene of life one must remember oneself.

If you hold onto your story, you will not be able to remember yourself

This means that one must find something to take the place of identifying with all that goes on in life. If you take life as the whole business, and think you are nothing but your body, you will not be able to remember yourself.

If you think your eyes see, and not that something sees through them, you will not be able to remember yourself. If you think that everything you do and feel and think belongs to your body you will not be able to remember yourself. You will then be like religious people who think that heaven is something above and hell something below them, and do not understand that heaven and hell are in them–in themselves.

You take as reality the messages coming from the external senses, and no doubt you will think that Real ‘I’ is something that exists far away in the visible stars. You will not understand that it exists in you at a deeper level of your understanding and that you can only reach it by understanding all that this Work says about separating yourself from wrong activities going on mechanically every day, that keep you glued to the most external, most superficial side of yourself, that side that is governed by everything that happens to you outside, that side that depends for its well-being on how people behave towards you.

Inner Work

And this is inevitable as long as you have no inner behavior that you are following. The Work is about this inner behavior which gives you a center of gravity independent of external things, but, I repeat, if you think you are the same as your body and that your eyes see and your ears hear, and if you have no sense that it is you who see through your eyes and you who hear through your ears and that there is something different in you from your physical senses–and, in fact, something higher–then you will not be able to remember yourself.

If you are a natural person, a person who believes only in the reality that the senses show us, who believes that the natural world with all its events is the cause of everything, you will never be able to remember yourself.

Nor will you be able to understand the Ray of Creation, nor the Side-Octave from the Sun. You will never be able to understand that influences are acting on this Earth coming from a higher level and acting on yourself as well, and that you receive these influences according to the quality of your being.

Week 3 Self Remembering

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This week and over the next several weeks, we are going back to basics and will explore self-remembering as it relates to transformation:

“Some transforming agency must be formed at the place of the intake of impressions. This is the First Conscious Shock and it is given the general description of remembering oneself.”

There are many ways to “remember ourselves.” Gurdjieff introduced movements as work exercises. Though normally practiced in groups, there are some that are suitable for private, individual work. This week I want to introduce the First Obligatory. This is a movement that we can work with for the rest of this class. As you will see from the notes, this movement is almost the exact opposite of Movement #39.

As we begin to learn the gestures of this movement, we can experiment with taking fragments of the movement to help us “come back to ourselves” when we notice that we are gone — a simple arm gesture, head gesture, or leg gesture. If we make these gestures as part of our “returning to ourselves” we must not make them in a way that other people notice.

An added benefit of working with the First Obligatory is that combining arm, leg, and head movements cannot be done without Self-Remembering and getting all three of our centers involved in the movement.

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week, but this week will engage the practice as we begin to make a transition into the morning work for the day. If you wish, continue the practice as well at the other times as well, start of day, middle of day, end of day. Practice abbreviated forms of the practice — but enough so that all three centers are involved, and you sense and feel emotionally your presence and need for higher help. Don’t let the words get in the way. If Lord is problematic for you, use another of your choosing.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the next 10 weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

Continue to practice Movement #39 if that helps you. Parts of Movement #39 can be used as a bodily form of Self-Remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Four Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 50-53.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

The Idea of Transformation in the Work: Part 1

Psychological transformation

As some of you know, it has been suggested by Mr. Ouspensky that this work might be called by the name Psycho-transformism. The idea of the work is psychological transformation–the transformation of oneself.

Transformation means the changing of a thing into a different thing. Chemistry studies the possible transformation of matter. There are well known transformations of matter. For example, sugar can be transformed into alcohol, and alcohol into vinegar by the action of ferments: this is the transformation of one molecular substance into another molecular substance. In the new chemistry of the atoms and elements, radium slowly transforms itself into lead.

The language of alchemy

As you know, the transformation of base metal into gold has always been dreamed of as possible by the alchemists of the past. But this idea did not always have a literal meaning, because the language of alchemy was sometimes used by secret schools of teaching as referring to the possibility of the transformation of an individual into a new kind of person.

An individual as he or she is–that is, mechanical individual serving nature and grounded in violence–was represented as base metal and the transformation of base metal into gold referred to this possible transformation latent in them. In the Gospels, the idea of mechanical individual as a seed capable of growing has the same significance, as has also the idea of re-birth, of a person being born again.

We are a three-story factory

As you know, in this system of teaching, we are regarded as a three-story factory, taking in three foods–ordinary food on the lower floor of the factory, air on the second floor, and impressions on the third floor.

The transformation food

The food we eat undergoes successive transformations. The process of life is transformation. Every living thing lives by transforming one thing into another. A plant transforms air, water and salts from the earth into new substances–into what we call potatoes, beans, peas, nuts, fruit, and so on–by the action of sunlight and ferments. The sensitive living film spread over the earth, which conducts force from the universe–that is, organic life–is a vast transforming organ.

When we eat food it is transformed successively, stage by stage, into all the substances necessary for our existence. This is done by that mind called instinctive center, which controls the inner work of the organism and of course knows far more than we do about it. We can understand that when food is taken, digestion begins.

Digestion is transformation. The food is changed into something different in the stomach. This is only the first stage of the transformation of food and is designated in the work as the passage of coarse matter into finer matter (Do 768 to Re 384). It will be sufficient to use this first stage as an example without going further. It is a stage everyone can understand without difficulty.

Everyone can see that the food taken into the lowest compartment of the three-story factory–namely, the meals we eat–undergoes transformation. Now suppose the food passed into the stomach and nothing happened — what then? The body, which is like a huge town, will make no contact with it. How can an undigested piece of meat or a potato enter the blood stream and supply the necessary fine substance, say, to the brain?

The food of impressions

This situation is more or less the case, however, in regard to the third food, the food of impressions. They enter and remain undigested –that is, there is no transformation here. Impressions come in with a certain energy (as Do 48) and stop. Save for a very small amount of transformation, nothing takes place. There is no adequate transformation of impressions.

It is not necessary for the purpose of nature that we should transform impressions. But we can transform our impressions ourselves, if we have sufficient knowledge and understand why it is necessary.

Life comes in as impressions

Most people think that external life will give them what they crave and seek. Life comes in as impressions. The first realization of the meaning of this work is to understand that life, coming in as impressions, must be transformed. There is no such thing as “external life”. What all the time you are receiving is impressions.

You see a person you dislike–that is, you get impressions of this nature. You see a person you like–that is, you get impressions once more. Life is impressions, not a solid material thing such as you suppose and believe is reality. Your reality is your impressions.

I know this idea is very difficult to grasp. It forms a very difficult crossing-place. You are, perhaps, sure that life exists as such, and not as your impressions. The person you see sitting in a chair wearing a blue suit, smiling and talking, you think is real. No, it is your impressions of him that are real for you. If you had no sight, you would not see him. If you had no ears, you would not hear him.

The First Conscious Shock

Life comes in as impressions and it is here that it is possible to work on oneself–but only if you realize that what you are working on is not external life but the impressions you are receiving. Unless you can grasp this, you will never understand the meaning of what in the work is called the First Conscious Shock.

This shock relates to these impressions which are all we know of the outer world, that we are taking in, that we take as actual things, actual people. No one can transform external life. But everyone can transform their impressions, namely, the third and highest food taken in by the three-story factory.

It is necessary to create a transforming agency at the point of intake of impressions

For this reason this system of teaching says that it is necessary to create a transforming agency at the point of intake of impressions. This is the meaning of the work regarded in the light of psychological transformation and this is the point at which work begins.

It needs a conscious effort

It is called the First Conscious Shock because it is something not done mechanically. It does not happen mechanically–that is, it needs a conscious effort. A person who begins to understand what this means, at the same time begins to be no longer a mechanical individual, serving nature, someone asleep and merely used by nature for its own purposes.

Transforming impressions and the results of impressions

If you now think of the meaning of all you are taught to do in the way of effort, beginning with self-observation, you will see beyond any doubt that everything on the practical side of this work relates to transforming impressions and the results of impressions.

Work on negative emotions, work on heavy moods, work on identifying, work on considering, work on inner lying, work on imagination, work on difficult ‘I’s, work on self-justifying, work on states of sleep, and so on, is all connected with transforming impressions and the results of them.

Remembering yourself

So you will agree that in a sense work on oneself is comparable to digestion in the sense that digestion is transformation. Some transforming agency must be formed at the place of the intake of impressions. This is the First Conscious Shock and it is given the general description remembering oneself.

Taking life as work

If you can, through the understanding of the work, take life as work, then you are in a state of self-remembering. This state of consciousness leads to the transformation of impressions–and so of life as regards yourself. That is, life no longer acts on you in the old way. You begin to think, and to understand, in a new way. And this is the beginning of your own transformation. For as long as we think in the same way we take in life in the same way and nothing changes in us.

To transform the impressions of life is to transform oneself

To transform the impressions of life is to transform oneself, and only an entirely new way of thinking can effect this. All this work is to give you an entirely new way of thinking. Let me give you one example. You are told in the work that if you are negative it is always your own fault. The whole situation as recorded by the senses must be transformed. But to understand this, it is necessary to begin to think in an entirely new way.

Changing our reactions to life

You all can understand that life is continually causing us to react to it. All these reactions form our life–our own personal life. To change one’s life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one’s reactions. But unless we can see that outer life comes in as impressions which cause us to react in stereotyped ways, we cannot see where the point of possible change comes in, where it is possible to work.

Beginning to live more consciously

If the reactions that form your own personal life are mainly negative, then that is your life. Your life is chiefly a mass of negative reactions to the impressions that have come in every day. The transformation of impressions so that they do not always provoke negative reactions is then one’s task, if one wishes to work on oneself. But for this, self-observation at the point where impressions enter us is necessary. Then one can let the impressions fall in a negative mechanical way, or not. If not, then that is to begin to live more consciously.

Preventing impressions from having their full mechanical effect

If one fails to transform impressions at the moment of their entry, one can always work on the results of these impressions and prevent them from having their full mechanical effect. All this requires a definite feeling, a definite evaluation of the work, for it means that the work must be brought forward, as it were, to that point where impressions enter and are being distributed mechanically to their customary place in personality to evoke the old reactions.

We will speak later much more about transformation, but it can be added that no higher level is possible of attainment unless there is transformation, and the very idea of transformation is based on the fact that different levels exist, and refers to the passage from one level to another level of being. No one can reach a higher level of development without transformation.

Week 4 Self Remembering

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“You cannot transform life, but you can begin to transform the way you take life. The first conscious shock means work on yourself in general. The point of this work is to try to give oneself this shock. Everything that is taught in this system, on the practical side, belongs to the first conscious shock … This may lead to a real moment of self-remembering.”

We are continuing a short series on transformation and self-remembering. In particular, we are noticing the kinds of acts or moments of self-remembering that we are discovering this week.

Continue to work on Movement #39 and the First Obligatory. I know for most of us there will be an initial dislike of the First Obligatory. Practice only small pieces at first, just the arms, or even just start with the right arm. Or practice the head alone this week. Take a fragment of the head movement, like tilting the head down, as an embodied way of coming back to yourself at some point during the day.

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week. It might be profitable to note any “boredom” with a practice that we engage over a period of weeks. Try to find ways to make this practice alive for yourself. Be playful and experiment, but see if you can set at least one intentional time during the day where you practice this way of coming back to yourself — maybe a transition time during an afternoon work period. Experiment with abbreviated forms of the practice — but enough so that all three centers are involved, and you sense and feel emotionally your presence and need for higher help. Don’t let the words get in the way.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the next 9 weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

We also might want to practice this exercise from G.I. Gurdjieff’s Paris Meetings 1943: “Each thing that you do, you know that you are doing it. Five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening. You spend the rest of the day as usual. If you make all your efforts during these five minutes, you will see that you will obtain a result.“

Beginning tomorrow morning, for five minutes try to do everything consciously. Get dressed consciously; wash your face consciously while remembering that you are washing, get dressed consciously. Then let everything go until the evening. When you come home, for five minutes try to do everything consciously — prepare dinner consciously, wash dishes consciously, brush your teeth consciously. Quality counts here, not quantity. For just five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening, do everything consciously with your whole self — mind, body, feeling.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Five Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 53-55.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

The Idea of Transformation in the Work Part 2

Personality and essence

The personality that we all acquire receives the impressions of life. But it does not transform them because it is dead. If impressions fell on essence they would be transformed because they would fall on centers.

Personality, which is the term applied to all that we acquire, (and we must acquire personality), translates impressions from every side of life in a limited and practically stereotyped way according to its quality and associations.

The personality is like a secretary

The personality in this respect is sometimes compared in the work with a secretary who sits in the front room, dealing with everything according to his or her own ideas. The secretary has a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias and reference books around and rings up the three centers–that is, the mental, the emotional and the physical centers–according to limited ideas. The result is that the wrong centers are nearly always being rung up. This means that incoming impressions are sent to the wrong places and produce the wrong results.

Our life depends on this secretary, who mechanically looks up things in reference books without any understanding of what they really mean and transmits them accordingly without caring what happens, but feeling only a duty to do so.

Mechanical reactions govern us

This is our inner situation. What is important to understand in this allegory is that this personality which we all acquire and must acquire begins to take charge of our lives. And it is no use imagining that this only happens to certain people. It happens to everyone. Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us.

Everyone is governed by their own set of reactions to impressions–that is, to life–whether they are a revolutionary or a conservative, or good or bad in the ordinary sense. And these reactions are their life.

Humankind is mechanical

Humankind is mechanical in this sense. You have formed in yourself a number of reactions which you take as yourself and your life experiences are the result of them. If you can relax enough physically, and drop away mentally from all ideas of yourself (which is mental relaxing) you will be able to see what I mean.

You will see that, as it were, there are a number of things below you–namely, external to you–that you keep on taking as yourself. In such a passive state you can see them dimly. At first sight they seem to be above you. Immediately you tense your muscles or begin to talk you become them. They become you or you become them, and off you go again. But you must not try to do this exercise too much at first.

The habitual ways we respond to life impressions

Actually they are like little grasping machines that insist on taking charge of you and demand that you should enter them again. They are set in motion by this “secretary”–that is, by the habitual way this secretary responds to impressions. And the reactions which follow we take as life.

We take our typical reactions to impressions as life. We take our reactions to a person as him or her. All life–that is, outer life, which is what we usually think “life” is–namely, what we see and hear– is for each person his or her reactions to the impressions coming in from it. And as I said in the last talk, it is a great mistake to think that what is called “life” is a solid fixed thing, the same for everyone.

Life is our impressions of it

No one has the same impressions of life. Life is our impressions of it and these can be transformed. But as was said, this is a very difficult idea to reach, because the hypnotism of the senses is so powerful. We cannot help thinking that it is only the senses that give us reality.

So our inner life –our real life of thought and feeling–remains dim to our mental conceptions. Yet at the same time we know quite well it is where we really live–that is, in our thoughts and feelings. To establish a point in the work, to make it more real than life, we must observe ourselves and make our inner life of thoughts and feelings a fact more powerful than any “fact” given by our senses.

This is the beginning of transforming. One cannot transform anything in oneself if one is glued to the senses. As I said, in the last talk, the work teaches that if you are negative it is your own fault. The sensory point of view is that this or that person in the outer world, that you see and hear by means of your eyes and ears, is at fault. This person, you will say, because he or she does this or talks like that, is to blame.

Your real being is in the invisible world of yourself

But actually, if you are made negative, what you have to work on, what you have to observe, is this negative emotion intruding itself into your inner life–that is, into the inner invisible “place” where you really exist. Your real being is in the inner invisible world of yourself.

Do you wish to argue this point? Well, are the thoughts and feelings and emotions and hopes and despairs you have less real to you than the tables and chairs in your dining room? Do you live, as it were, in this dining room? You may be very much identified with your particular tables and chairs, but even so, is it not your feeling about these tables and chairs that is real to you?

Suppose you are ill and feel perhaps death is near you, do you bother any more about them? Of course not. And why? Because you have no longer any feelings about them. It is your feelings and your ways of identifying that make you regard this or that thing as important. It is not the things that you see with your physical eyes.

Let us suppose that you notice that you are identified, say, with you furniture: do you think that you must get rid of your furniture in order to change? Of course not. That would be silly. What you can change is your being identified so much.

If you works on this, if you begin to transform your reaction in yourself, you can still enjoy your furniture but you will not commit suicide if it is destroyed in a fire. Do you see the difference ?

You cannot transform life, but you can begin to transform the way you take life.

You cannot transform life, but you can begin to transform the way you take life. The first conscious shock means work on yourself in general. The point of this work is to try to give oneself this shock. Everything that is taught in this system, on the practical side, belongs to the first conscious shock –non-identifying, non-considering, and so on.

This may lead to a real moment of self-remembering

This may lead to a real moment of self-remembering–as a reward. Then one has insight into what one must do, and realization of the truth of the work.

But work must be done in the spirit of the work–that is, in the sense and feeling and valuation of the work. This must enter into every effort of work, for no one can work for themselves alone, otherwise the results go only into false personality and so into merit.

We must work from love of the work. This brings finer energy (Hydrogen 12) up to the place of incoming impressions. Incoming impressions are a coarser energy (Hydrogen 48). They cannot pass to finer energy (Hydrogen 24) without Hydrogen 12 as active force. If this hydrogen is present at the place of reception of impressions– that is, at the place we are conscious–Hydrogen 48, which comes in as passive force, passes to Hydrogen 24, the triad being completed by the Carbon 12.

This finer energy (Hydrogen 12) is not present naturally at this point in the human machine. It has to be brought up to this point. If a person takes life as usual, in the ordinary way–that is, always receives impressions in the same mechanical way and speaks from them in the same mechanical way and acts from them in the same mechanical way–then nothing can change in the person.

Such people cannot evolve. They do not see where the point of working on themselves lies. They think work is something outside them. A person must bring a very powerful hydrogen to the point where impressions are coming in. This is Hydrogen 12. This is brought by the act of self-remembering.

Week 5 Self Remembering

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Some of the highlights from this week’s reading:

How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more we through right self-observation feel our own helplessness, the more we realize our ignorance, the more we see our mechanicalness and that we are a machine, the more we perceive our own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to us.

Impressions coming in through the senses fall, as it were, on a thick net of Personality which catches everything … with its strong Buffers, its fixed Attitudes, its mechanical Associations, its Rolls automatically set in motion, and its ideas that it knows and can do, with all its contradictory ‘I’s, with all the different forms of negative emotion, which it has acquired by imitation, with all its habits of identifying, considering, self-justifying, imagining and lying, centered in the False Personality.

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week, but this week will engage the practice as we begin to make a transition into the morning work for the day. If you wish, continue the practice as well at the other times as well, start of day, middle of day, end of day. Practice abbreviated forms of the practice — but enough so that all three centers are involved, and you sense and feel emotionally your presence and need for higher help. Don’t let the words get in the way. If Lord is problematic for you, use another of your choosing.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the remaining weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

Continue to work on Movement #39 and the First Obligatory.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Six Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 56-58

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language. This is the third of five parts on the idea of transformation in the work and how the work of transformation begins with Self-Remembering and the First Conscious Shock.

The Idea of Transformation in the Work: Part 3

In order to continue these talks about transformation let me take a question of this kind : “What prevents impressions from transforming themselves in us? Why does this not always happen?” Let us again study this subject.

Impressions should pass on in their octave until they reach Mi 12. You will remember that they come in as 48, but do not continue to evolve. (See Fig. 1). Remember also that the First Conscious Shock is to make impressions pass on in their evolution, namely, to Hydrogen 24 and then to Hydrogen 12. That is, by means of the First Conscious Shock, Do 48 becomes Re 24 and then Mi 12 (Fig. 2). (NOTE: If this does not make sense to you, just ignore. It is terminology used in the Food Diagram which we are not studying at this point).

Now two things must be borne in mind and clearly understood:

The First Conscious Shock is a conscious effort

(1) The First Conscious Shock does not happen to an individual asleep. It is a conscious effort requiring special knowledge and self-observation and given in connection with the incoming impressions of life and a person’s mechanical reactions to them. Roughly, it consists in seeing the object and seeing one’s reactions to it simultaneously and without being identified. This process is sometimes put diagrammatically as follows:

——–>
<——–

The First Conscious Shock gives every cell in the body a different food

(2) The First Conscious Shock to the human machine increases the energies of the machine in the form of Hydrogen 24 and Hydrogen 12. The result is actually to give every cell in the body different food — that is, higher hydrogens. In regard to this second point let me remind you here that neither our psychical nor the physical functions can be understood unless it is grasped that they can both work in different states of consciousness.

If the First Conscious Shock is applied, the Third State of Consciousness is touched, with the result that the human machine works in a different way, owing to new energies, both as regards its psychical and its physical functions.

The Third State of Consciousness is the state of Self-Remembering

The Third State of Consciousness is the state of Self-Remembering, which we should possess but which we has gradually lost because of the wrong conditions of our life. Today it can be said only to occur in the form of very rare flashes.

You can create in yourself increasing degrees of self-remembering by deliberate efforts

It is the creation of this Third State of Consciousness that forms the First Conscious Shock–that is, the first object of the work is to recover this lost state, namely, to make you remember yourself until eventually you do not merely have rare flashes of increased consciousness (over which you have no control) but can create in yourself increasing degrees of self-remembering by deliberate efforts.

These efforts, which belong to the First Conscious Shock, gradually cause the machine to work more rightly. Many wrong functions, both in the psychic and physical spheres, acquired by the wrong working of the machine in the two lowest states of consciousness–that is, in darkness–then begin to disappear of themselves.

What prevents impressions from transforming?

Let us now return to the question as to what prevents Do 48 from passing on to Re 24 and then to Mi 12. Why does not this always happen? It does happen in childhood — and to a certain extent Mi 12 is created in the body in early youth. We may remember its action.

As we grow older, impressions more and more are intercepted by Personality

But as Personality grows more and more thickly round Essence, it happens less and less. That is, impressions are more and more intercepted by Personality, which is represented in the diagram by the double line marked X.

The thick net of Personality catches incoming impressions

Impressions coming in through the senses fall, as it were, on a thick net which catches everything (save a very small part, which passes onwards and produces a very small amount of Mi 12).

This net is the Personality, with its strong Buffers, its fixed Attitudes, its mechanical Associations, its Rolls automatically set in motion, and its ideas that it knows and can do, with all its contradictory ‘I’s, with all the different forms of negative emotion, which it has acquired by imitation, with all its habits of identifying, considering, self-justifying, imagining and lying, centered in the False Personality.

Something opaque has formed itself at the place where impressions enter

All these prevent impressions from passing on in their normal transformations. In other words, something opaque, as it were, has formed itself at the place where impressions enter, and closed up the way for their passage onwards.

Now from the standpoint of Triads, impressions entering as Hydrogen 48 cannot pass to Hydrogen 24 unless Hydrogen 12 is present. Hydrogen 12 must be brought up to the place where impressions are entering. Personality is constructed mainly out of Hydrogen 48–the Formatory Hydrogen–so you have impressions 48 falling on Personality 48, and since the necessary elements of a triad are therefore lacking, no transformation is possible.

In the case of food–ordinary food–that is, Hydrogen 768–on being taken in, it meets with the gastric juices, and their active ferments, belonging to the order of Hydrogens 192, and the result is the transformation of 768 into 384.

The work itself must brought up to the place of incoming impressions to act as a “ferment”

But in the case of impressions once Personality is formed, no corresponding active “ferment” meets them (in this case Hydrogen 12). The work itself must be brought up to the place to act as a “ferment”, for the work is to make us think in a new way and to awaken us.

How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions?

What does this mean? How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more we through right self-observation feel our own helplessness, the more we realize our ignorance, the more we see our mechanicalness and that we are a machine, the more we perceive our own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to us.

The work can exist merely in Personality

The work can exist in us as Hydrogen 48. Then it is merely in Personality, as something formatory, in the memory. It can exist in us also in terms of Hydrogen 24. Then it is emotional. It can also become so valuable, so important to us, that it begins to have the intensity of meaning and significance that belong to Hydrogen 12.

In that case, False Personality will begin to collapse and we will become “as little children”. This is one meaning of the saying — ” Except ye become as little children”. If your love no longer runs always into yourself, into your habitual ideas of yourself, your strange vanity and esteem of yourself–that is, into False Personality–then the direction of your will alters–that is, the resultant of your desires alters.

The whole way in which you react to outer life changes

When the valuation of the truth of wisdom/esoteric teaching becomes stronger than self-valuation, it begins to act on you. You begin to take everything differently. The whole way in which you react to outer life changes. (Why cannot you all understand that life is impressions?)

You no longer react to impression from your mechanical personality

You no longer react to impressions from your mechanical personality by always saying the same things, feeling the same things, and so on. You begin to act from the work–that is, in quite a new way.

The work comes up to the place where life is entering you as impressions and stands beside you

The work comes up to the place where life is entering you as impressions and stands beside you. You begin to see life through the work and instead of wasting your time in hundreds of forms of useless internal considering or negative reactions, or of identifying, you seek for the power of the work to help you to change these mechanical reactions which you are now aware of by observation and to transform your habitual ways of taking things.

You begin to live more consciously at this point where life is entering as impressions.

Week 6 Self Remembering

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This week’s reading focuses on the importance of self-observation in work on oneself, and the impossibility of any real self-observation without inner separation. Seeing our identifications and attachments to all that takes place within us is part of the work of self-remembering. This week we can explore inner separation as we continue to experiment with coming back to ourselves when we notice we have “gone.”

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week. Work against getting too familiar with this practice — see if you can discover something new in it for you. Practice abbreviated forms of the practice — but enough so that all three centers are involved, and you sense and feel emotionally your presence and need for higher help. Don’t let the words get in the way. If Lord is problematic for you, use another of your choosing.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the remaining weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

The Trisagion Prayer: Agios O Theos can help develop devotion and feeling which are necessary for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Seven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 59-62.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language. This is fourth and fifth of five parts on the idea of transformation in the work and how the work of transformation begins with Self-Remembering and the First Conscious Shock.

The Idea of Transformation in the Work: Part 4 - Section 1

Work on Oneself

Let us take the idea of Work on Oneself. As you all know, by now, we take the thing which we call Oneself — that is, myself, yourself–as one thing. We think weare ourselves.

Work on Oneself is thus made quite impossible. How can you work on you, if youand you in each case are one and the same thing? But you and yourself are not the same thing. If you and yourself were the same thing, work on yourself would be impossible.

Think for a moment– if you and yourself are identical–that is, one and the same thing– how can you observe yourself? Would it not be impossible? A thing cannot observe itself. How could it do so? So if you take you as yourself and yourself as you, and think that you and yourself are the same thing, then how do you propose to begin to observe yourself?

You will try to observe you–and how can that be possible? A thing cannot observe itself. A thing identical with itself cannot see itself, because it is the same as itself, and a thing which is the same as itself cannot possibly have a standpoint apart from itself, from which to observe itself.

The difficulty of beginning to work on ourselves

I say all this in order to emphasize how difficult it is for people to begin to work on themselves. The reason is that they take themselves as themselves. If you take yourself as yourself you cannot observe yourself. Everything is yourself. You say ‘I’ to everything. And if you say ‘I’ to everything in yourself, then everything in you is ‘I’, and how can you observe yourself? How can ‘I’ observe ‘I’, if they are one and the same thing?

At one moment you are irritable and rude, at the next kind and polite. But you say ‘I’ to it all. And so you cannot see it all. It is all one to you. You cannot see it apart from yourself and you and yourself are one and the same thing to your mind–that is, to your way of thinking.

A massive stumbling block

This massive stumbling block lies across everyone’s path and long, very long overcoming of it is the task of Work on Oneself. And how long it takes before you can begin to see what it all means, and what the work is always saying.

The mistake of saying ‘I’ to everything that takes place in us

I have watched people in the work often for many years, who have not yet caught a single flash of the meaning of self-observation — that is, people who still take everything that takes place in them as ‘I’ and say ‘I’ to every mood, every thought, every impulse, every feeling, every sensation, every criticism, every feeling of anger, every negative state, every objection, every dislike, every hate, every dejection, every depression, every whim, every excitement, every doubt, every fear.

To every train of inner talking they say ‘I’, to every negative monologue they say ‘I’, to every suspicion they say ‘I’, to every hurt feeling they say ‘I’, to every form of imagination they say ‘I’, to every movement they make they say ‘I’. To everything that takes place within them they say ‘I’.

The necessity of not taking everything as ‘I’ in oneself

In such a case the work can only be something listened to externally, something they hear said to them, the words of which they remember, or not, as the case may be. But they have no idea of what work on themselves means because they have no idea as yet that there is such a thing as “themselves”.

They look out of their two eyes, and they listen with their two ears, and see and hear what is outside them. Where, in this case, is this thing called themselves? Is not everything outside them, save something they call ‘I’? Is not life a lot of things outside, and something they take for granted as ‘I’–that is, themselves?

And if this work is not about things outside, that they can hear and see and touch, what is it about really? For there is surely nothing else save outside things and something that is ‘I’.

Who can work on ‘I’ if everything is ‘I’?

At the same time they may feel the work emotionally. They may feel that it is about something strange and genuine and real. But they cannot see exactly what it is about. They continue to talk as they have always talked and say ‘I’ to it all. They continue to feel and to think as they have always felt and thought, and they say ‘I’ to it all. To all their manifestations, to all their mechanicalness, to all their inner life, they say I. And since everything is ‘I’, what is there to work on?

This is quite true. For if everything connected with a person in outer manifestations and in inner life is ‘I’, and if there is only ‘I’, if everything connected with him is ‘I’, then there is nothing to work on. For who can work on ‘I’ if everything is ‘I’? What can observe ‘I’ if everything is ‘I’?

A thing cannot observe itself

The answer, of course, is that nothing can. A thing cannot observe itself. There must be something different in it for the thing to observe itself. And in our own cases, in the case of everyone, if there is nothing in us different from ourselves, how can we observe ourselves, and work on ourselves?

For to work on oneself, it is necessary to begin to observe oneself. But if ‘I’ and ‘myself are one and the same, how can this ever be possible? I will have nothing to work on, for the reason that I regard everything I do, everything I say, everything I feel, everything I think, as ‘I’, so that if you speak to me of myself I will take it, that you are speaking of me–of what I call ‘I’–and whatever you say about me, I will take it as myself–that is, as ‘I’–for to my way of thinking ‘I’ and ‘myself’ are identical. To my way of thinking, they are one and the same thing.

The Idea of Transformation in the Work: Part 4 - Section 2

Inner separation

You have heard it said before that “unless you divide yourself into two you cannot shift from where you are.” This saying, often used in the work, refers to the beginning of the process of what is called inner separation. You must first divide yourself into two. But the further stages of inner separation are more complex than this.

Let me give you an example. It was recently said to me by someone that he had begun to see what self-observation and separation meant for the first time. He said: “I have always been taking negative emotions as a nasty bit of myself. I realize my mistake.”

Inner separation is necessary for self-observation

Self-observation will show us our negative states. But something further is as a rule necessary than mere observation of them and that is inner separation. And no one can separate themselves from anything they observes in themselves if they regard what they observe as being themselves, for then, inevitably, the feeling of ‘I’ will pass into what they observe in themselves and this feeling of ‘I’ will increase the strength and power of what they observe. You have to learn to say in the right way: “This is not me–not ‘I’ “.

Taking our negative emotions as a nasty bit of ourselves

Now if you take your negative emotions as a nasty bit of yourself, you will not be able to separate yourself from them. Do you see why? You will not be able to separate yourself from them because you are taking them as yourself and so giving them the validity of ‘I’.

And as was said in the last talk, if we give to everything in ourselves the feeling of ‘I’, if we say ‘I’ to everything we think or feel or say or imagine, nothing can alter. For ‘I’ cannot alter ‘I’. And if we practice self-observation on this basis, everything we observe will be I.

Everything in us, practically speaking, is not ‘I’ but ‘It’

Whereas the case really is that everything in us, practically speaking, is “It”–that is, a machine going by itself. Instead of saying “I think”, we should realize it would be far nearer the truth if we said “It thinks”. And instead of saying “I feel” it would be nearer the mark to say “It feels”.

What we call ourselves, what we say ‘I’ to, is actually an immense world, larger and more varied than the outer world we behold through our external senses. We do not say ‘I’ to what we see in the outer world. But we say ‘I’ to everything that takes place in our inner world.

The mistake of taking everything within us as ‘I’

This mistake takes many years even to modify a little. But sometimes we are given the clear light of understanding for a moment and we realize what it means and what the work is continually telling us. If you ascribe evil to yourself you are in the wrong position in regard to it, just as if you ascribe good to yourself and the merit of it.

Identification

Every kind of thought can enter your mind; every kind of feeling can enter your heart. But if you ascribe them to yourself and say ‘I’ to all of them, you fasten them to you and cannot separate internally from them. One can avoid negative thoughts and feelings if one does not take them as oneself– as ‘I’. But if one takes them as ‘I’, one combines with them–that is, one identifies oneself with them–and then one cannot avoid them.

There are inner states–states within us all–that we must avoid just as one avoids walking into mud in the external visible world. One must not listen to them, must not go with them, must not touch them or let them touch you. This is inner separation. But you cannot practice inner separation if you ascribe everything that takes place in your inner invisible life–where you really all live–to yourselves.

I have often been struck by people asking me about themselves in regard to thoughts that plague and worry them. For example, people who pride themselves on being what is called “clean-minded” often find themselves tortured by indecent thoughts and images; this is exactly what happens if a person insists on thinking that everything in him or her is ‘I’.

Are we responsible for our thoughts?

In this connection, I remember that after we left the Institute in France we went to Scotland, to my grandfather’s house. He had collected an immense library, among which were a great many theological and moral volumes. They were, of course, entirely formatory. But having nothing else to read I spent some of the long winter evenings there in trying to understand what they were about. There were the usual endless acrimonious arguments about the nature of the Trinity, the nature of heresy, and so on, but I noticed that one subject of debate that often came up was whether we are responsible for our thoughts.

Some of the most severe moralists insisted that we were, but a few of these now long dead theologians took the point of view that we were not. Some said that the devil sent us our thoughts. But no one of those writers whom I read took a psychological view of this question.

Not saying ‘I’ to our thoughts

At any moment the strangest thoughts and images can enter us. If we say ‘I’ to them, if we think that we thought them, they have power over us. And if we then try to eliminate them, we find it impossible. Why? I will repeat one of my own illustrations of this situation. Suppose you are standing on a plank and trying to lift it and struggling as hard as you can to do so. Will you succeed? No, because you yourself are trying to lift yourself and this is impossible.

It requires a considerable re-orientation of one’s whole conception of oneself to be able to realize what all this means. So many buffers and forms of pride and stupid ways of thinking prevent us from seeing what the situation within us is really like. We imagine we are in control of ourselves. We imagine we are conscious and always know what we are thinking and saying and doing. We imagine we are a unity, and that we have a real permanent ‘I’ and so have will, and we imagine many other things besides. All this stands in our way and before we can practice inner separation, a quite new feeling about oneself and about what one really is, is necessary

Week 7 Self Remembering

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I was recently reading a handout that Cynthia Bourgeault is going to use in an upcoming Wisdom School in April where she writes about “Jesus’ implacable opposition to any form of clinging” and the internal damage that it does in making us spiritually blind and unable to participate in “the dance of giving-is-receiving.”

She goes on to write about how this is being confirmed in contemporary neurobiology and the findings of the Institute of HeartMath:

With the help of MRI imaging, it is now possible to document that the areas of the brain involved in the perception of any stimulus in the outer world are to a significant degree a function of our inner state at the moment of impact. If we respond to a stimulus in the outer world with an initial negativity or inner constriction, the stimulus will be processed through the amygdala, the evolutionary bedrock of the human brain, governing our most primitive fight and flight responses. “Danger, danger, danger!” its alarm bells warn; the adrenaline flows, and we prepare to defend ourselves.

If we respond with an initial relaxation and can maintain an interior spaciousness, the stimulus is processed through the more evolutionarily advanced parts of the human forebrain—neo-cortex and prefrontal lobes—and amazingly, the rhythms of brain and heart come into entrainment. We move into an inner coherence which makes possible an outer coherence: a response marked by intelligence, creativity, and compassion.

Jesus may not have known this scientifically, but he was certainly profoundly aware of it at an intuitive level. The problem with hoarding—or clinging, or urgency, or any other form of interior emotional constriction—is that it clouds the field of vision and catapults us back into our small self with its insatiable sense of anxiety and threat.

To perceive the abundance that actually is there, and then to live the life of compassion that flows from it—requires that we first step out and do something about that field of perception. Then the rest will follow.

The processing of our perception of any stimulus in the outer world is a function of our inner state at the moment of impact — isn’t that what Self-Remembering is all about, the conscious “digestion” of life impressions?

Cynthia goes on to suggest a simple inner practice that we may want to take up this week as well:

See what you can discover for yourself about the relationship between inner relaxation and outer perception. As you move through your day, whenever you notice yourself tightening inside (either from a situation that causes you specific distress or simply from a mounting daily pressure of stress and irritation), make a conscious effort to stop and physically un-constrict. One way to do this is by drawing several conscious breaths. Another way is simply to be bring your attention to that part of you that feels most in a knot and simply be present to it without any mental commentary (the attention itself will do the trick.) Notice whether anything happens to your emotional state when your physical body relaxes.

We will continue with our core inner work practice that was given the first week. We can experiment with practice forms of the practice, especially giving attention to the breath at the moments of inner constriction. Work so that all three centers are involved, and that you can sense and feel emotionally your presence and need for higher help.

As a reminder, this is the core practice that we will use for the remaining weeks:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

Continue to work on the Trisagion Prayer: Agios O Theos. The chant and gestures can help develop devotion and feeling which are necessary for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Eight Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 155-159.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

The Teaching about Prayer in the Work

Self-Remembering: Part 1

Without Self-Remembering Prayer is impossible

In the teaching of the Work the idea of Prayer and the idea of Self-Remembering are so closely connected that the one cannot be separated from the other. Without Self-Remembering, Prayer is impossible. Let us look at what this means.

We as we are cannot pray. That is, we in our ordinary daily state cannot pray. In order to pray we must be in a state of Self-Remembering. To pray as one is, in one’s ordinary state, is to pray in a state of sleep, and to pray in a state of sleep is useless. Nothing can happen. Such Prayer cannot be answered, because it does not get anywhere.

IMAGE’

Four states of consciousness

Let us recall what is said about states of consciousness in the Work. Four states of consciousness are possible, but ordinarily we know and live in only two, and both are called in the Work states of sleep.

First state: sleep

The first state of consciousness or the lowest is that of bodily sleep, which is a passive state in which a person lies in bed almost without movement. In this state a man spends a third or even more of his life.

Second state: waking

The second state of consciousness is the state in which people spend the remaining part of their lives, in which they move their limbs and walk about and talk and also write books and take part in politics and kill one another, and this state they regard as active and call it “clear consciousness or the waking state of consciousness”.

It is not too much to say that the terms clear consciousness or waking state of consciousness seem to have been given in jest especially when, through your own self-observation, you begin to realize what clear consciousness ought in reality to be, and what the state in which we live and act really is. For in this so-called waking state we are neither conscious of ourselves nor conscious of another. We lives and die in darkness. And it would be better for us in one way if we remained passive in the first state of consciousness for then we could not move about and kill our neighbor.

Third state of consciousness: Self-Remembering

The third state of consciousness is Self-Remembering or Self-Consciousness or the state of Self-Awareness. It is usual to consider that we have this state already and are always aware of ourselves and that we act, think and feel with full consciousness of what we are doing.

But Western science has overlooked the fact that we do not possess this state of consciousness. And we cannot create it in ourselves by immediate desire alone, or decide that we will henceforth always live in a state of Self-Consciousness.

But this third state constitutes our natural right as we are and if we do not possess it, it is because of the wrong conditions of our life. Today this state of consciousness occurs only in the form of rare flashes and it is only by long practice, by trial and error, that we can begin to re-establish a state of Self-Remembering in ourselves.

Help only reaches to the third state of consciousness

Now help only reaches to the third state of consciousness. It cannot reach down to the darkness that people live their daily lives in and in which they are so often content to exist.

Therefore to pray from the state of sleep—to pray from the so-called waking state—is like dreaming that one is praying, for in this second state of consciousness we are also dreaming and everything is unreal, only we do not notice that we are doing everything in a dream unless we experience a moment of consciousness belonging to the 3rd and 4th states of consciousness and see the contrast.

So when you pray you must remember yourself. You must be conscious of yourself and of what you are praying for. You must feel the meaning of everything you say and feel yourself saying it. You must feel it is really ‘I’ in you that prays and not a set of frightened little ‘I’s or a set of mechanical ‘I’s formed by habit. And finally you can neither pray nor remember yourself unless you feel there is both a higher state of yourself and something higher than you are.

Fourth state: objective consciousness

We must now consider the 4th state of consciousness in connection with all that class of praying which can be called praying for enlightenment. When you pray for enlightenment you pray that you may see things as they really are, apart from your imagination and your subjective ideas.

In the religions of all nations there are indications of the possibility of such a state of consciousness, which is called “Enlightenment” and other names, but which cannot be described in words for it transcends all words.

When you pray for enlightenment you pray for Objective Consciousness. But you must first be in the 3rd state of consciousness for it is only this 3rd state that can be touched and can retain the meaning of any experience or help coming from those who are at the level of the 4th state of consciousness.

But you must realize that if you pray for enlightenment, say about yourself, you are praying to awaken and if you fully awoke to yourself and saw yourself as you really are, that is, objectively, you would go mad.

It is better to think of praying for more understanding. But of course this is useless if you make no effort to understand better for yourself. If a person in the Work works neither on the Line of Knowledge nor the Line of Being and merely prays for more understanding, their view of the Universe is very naive. They must realize the harshness of things and the price that must be paid and get rid of childish and sentimental views.

I must repeat that to pray for something you should work for and can, if you try, is quite idle. But people take idle views and cannot wake up to their own danger. You must fight for the Work and fight to keep it, and you will not keep it unless you jump and catch hold of its rope and insist on holding on to it.

THE THREE BROTHERS OR SISTERS IN OURSELVES: Part II

The next thing that the Work says of Prayer is that all three centers in us must pray. To begin with, if only the mind prays and the heart does not, there can be no response. The whole self must pray and the whole self is first of all three selves—three brothers or sisters who do not agree.

If these three centers, in the three-story house that we are, worked in harmony, we would already be in the 3rd state of consciousness. We would be sufficiently awake to receive help, to obtain a response to our requests.

The state of our centers

But these three brothers or sisters in us do not co-operate and especially today is this the case. For this reason, let us glance briefly at some of the teaching given in the Work about the state of our centers nowadays.

You know that the study of the multiplicity of our being which characterizes our level of being begins with the observation of centers. The three centers work independently owing to the abnormal conditions of modern life, which produce one-sided developments.

Every conscious perception and every manifestation of ourselves, everything taken in and given out, should be the result of the co-ordinated working of the three centers, each of which should furnish its own share of associations and knowledge and experiences.

The working of these different centers is almost entirely disconnected

In place of this, the working of these different centers is almost entirely disconnected nowadays. In consequence of this the intellectual, emotional and instinct-moving centers do not co-operate with one another and so correct and complement one another, but, as it were, travel along different roads which rarely meet.

For this reason we are very rarely conscious, and again, for the same reason, we are, to begin with, not one individual, but three distinct people that are not in harmony.

The first thinks in total isolation from the rest; the second feels in the same way; and the third acts mechanically, according to long-established habits. If development were normal these three people in us, the intellectual self, the emotional self and the instinct-moving self, would form one single self, in harmony with all the different sides of ourselves.

We are in a condition of disharmony

As it is, we are, in ourselves, in a condition of disharmony. We are first of all three people, three brothers or sisters, who rarely agree, and who indeed spend their time in frustrating one another, quarrelling with one another and each dominating the other in turn.

Any general result of their combined action, in which each of them is in agreement and each signs his name, so to speak, to the agreement, is thus very rare, but when this does happen, we are at that moment in another state of consciousness.

In a state of consciousness all three centers work together

We are, in fact, conscious, in the sense of the Work teaching, for we are in simultaneous possession of all our faculties and conscious of each. Our consciousness embraces all the centers at the same time, instead of being confined to one or another center, or a small part of it, at a time.

This extension or expansion of consciousness to include at the same time all the centers is not supernormal but is actually what a normal person should possess. This is the 3rd state of consciousness—the state of Self-Remembering or Self-Awareness—which is our right and into which we are born, but which we lose very soon owing to the effect of the sleeping people by whom we are surrounded.

It is through wrong influences, wrong education, and the wrong conditions of modern life that we have fallen away from this state of consciousness, which is our natural right, and which, if we possessed it, would make it impossible for us to act as we do today.

Part III: Prayer

I will now speak of one or two things that the Work says which indirectly bear on the subject of Prayer. The Work says that in the Lord’s Prayer, as in the parables and sayings in the Gospels, there is meaning within meaning. This is why it is said in the Work that the Gospels are a test for our level of understanding, and also that as we change, so do the Gospels for us.

The Lord’s Prayer contains the whole of the Work

In the Lord’s Prayer there are innumerable ideas. Each phrase has inner octaves. There are so many things in it to a man or a woman who has formed the ideas of the Work in his or her mind that to speak at all fully about the Lord’s Prayer is to speak about every side and every single thing in the Work itself.

To read the Prayer at times and think of all its connections, beginning with the octave from the Divine Intelligence of the Sun in which Humanity is created and of all the Work says of Humanity and our inner state and what we must do to awaken, is to use the Prayer in its real sense. To repeat the words is useless.

Praying and receiving

Now I will refer to one of the sayings of Christ quoted in the past paper on Prayer, where it is said that we must pray for a thing and have faith that we have it, and we will get it. “All things whatsoever ye pray for and ask for, have faith that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.” (Mark XI xxiv).

Now it is said in the Work that we must not wait until we have the force to do something but must act, if it is our aim, as if we had it already, and then we will attract it. To wait until you have the strength and understanding to do something-—I am speaking of the Work—makes it impossible to do it. But you must each think of this for yourselves.

Now I will add a few things. All prayer from self-pity is, of course useless. Prayer for others is only possible through understanding their difficulties and so through understanding yourself, for you understand others only so far as you understand yourself.

The higher centers are fully developed and working, but we cannot hear them

All work is the preparation of lower centers for the reception of the influences coming from higher centers. We have two centers fully developed in us and belonging to higher levels of intelligence. But though they are working all the time in him, we cannot hear them.

Their influences touch the state of Self-Remembering, but go no further. So all work is prayer: for all real prayer is to connect us with Heaven, and all work on oneself is to purify lower centers and make right order in the mind through being taught right knowledge, so that the influences of higher centers can be heard.

Different kinds of prayer

We can speak of different sorts of prayer:

1. Prayer for Enlightenment or Understanding.

2. Prayer about Temptation.

3. Prayer about oneself and about others.

As regards #2, Prayer about Temptation, this refers to temptation about the Work. It is not necessarily answered, because the Work will answer it if you fight to hold to its teaching and apply it and use it.

Remember that temptation in the Work and about it is necessary in order to change a person, and it follows that if you pray in this connection your prayer will not be answered, but if you work instead you will get a response. As I said, to pray when you should work, to expect help when you should make effort, is idle.

Three levels of work

As regards prayer about oneself, it must be about others first and oneself last. Remember there are three levels of Work—Work for the Work, Work with others, Work on oneself.

To pray only for oneself, to work only with regard to oneself and those connected by self-interests with one cannot give any result. Three forces must enter prayer, and this is too difficult to speak of at present, but you will find them in the Lord’s Prayer if you think long enough about it.

Week 8 Self Remembering

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There are a lot of paradoxes in this week’s reading: the Work says that “realization of one’s own mechanicalness is a form of Self-Remembering,” and that seeing our sleep is one of our first acts of waking up! This week’s reading also says that it is only in the state of Self-Remembering that higher help can reach us from the Conscious Circle of Humanity.

What does it mean to become a postulant to the conscious circle of humanity?

On a six week road trip last year, I took along a brief phase from Jeanne De Salzmann from The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff: “We believe we need to pay attention, when in fact we need to see and know our inattention.”

I don’t know much about the conscious circle, but I do know that it is peopled by those who see and know their own unconsciousness.

We may not think that in our current divided and scattered state of being that we belong to sit at this table of conscious humanity.

But in fact it is only those who see and know their own inner poverty and fragmentation who have a place in this conscious circle.

What is needed in this troubling time are not more spiritual giants like a Buddha or a Jesus exploding like fiery meteors on our planet, but the collective and gathered contributions of those who offer up whatever bits of fragmented presence they can muster to the pain body of this groaning planet. Maybe the question is not so much “what is mine to do” as “what is ours to do.”

Conscious work and intentional suffering are the “being duties” that release sacred substances needed for our individual, collective, and planetary growth. At least part of this work and suffering is “being remorse:” seeing and knowing and bearing our own fragmentation, not collapsing into our own private despair and self-pity, but using our own falling as fuel for awakening.

“What do you do at the monastery”, I asked Fr. Aiden the Abbot of a Benedictine monastery near my home. He quietly answered: “We fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again.”

Our Risen Master himself declared that his body of followers would do greater work than he. The planet needs a new body. All creation groans and is waiting on tip toe for the coming and awakening of this new body — the sons and daughters of the Living Masters. Can we join the dance?

We will lightly continue with our core inner work practice:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Ten Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 737-7417.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

On Self-Remembering

We should remember ourselves at least once a day. It is very important to remember oneself and in every act of Self-Remembering lies one of the great inner meanings of this Work and of all Esotericism in general.

If we cannot remember ourselves once a day then we should remember ourselves three times a day. That is to say, we should make a bigger effort.

Actors on the stage

Remembering oneself is just as if actors on the stage who had become completely absorbed in the role they were playing suddenly remembered that they were merely acting the role and that they were really somebody else and not the part they were playing. This would mean that they would wake up. They would no longer take themselves as the hero or the king or the cardinal that they were playing.

But what do we do? We are just like those actors who have forgotten that they are playing a role. We find ourselves fitted into the parts belonging to every phase of tragedy and comedy but we identify with everything. We do not see that we ourselves are something else, something different, and so we do not remember ourselves and so we are said in the Work to be asleep.

Why should we not identify?

A little while ago it was asked: Why should we not identify? It is possible to answer this question from a thousand points of view. One great reason is that if we identify we are not doing this Work.

The question is like saying: Why should we do this Work? There is absolutely no reason why we should do this Work if we do not wish to. This Work is only for people who are looking for something. If we identify we cannot remember ourselves.

Self-Remembering can only be understood when we realize we do not remember ourselves

As I said, the Work lays the greatest emphasis on Self-Remembering. It says that the most important thing we have to do is to remember ourselves and it adds that this can only be understood when we realize that we do not remember ourselves.

Degrees of identification

Now if you are identified you are not remembering yourself. There are degrees and qualities of identifying. Some slight forms of identifying are trivial and unimportant. On the other hand, some slight forms of identifying lead very speedily to bigger forms and of these one has to be careful, just as one has to be careful about all small things that start up in oneself innocently, so to speak, and very speedily lead into unpleasant places in ourselves such as very unpleasant forms of negative emotion.

Our internal world becomes visible to us through self-observation

One has to be just as careful where one walks inside oneself after a time, as where one walks in the world visible to one’s senses. Through self-observation our internal world becomes visible to us–that is, we become conscious of it and learn to recognize where we are in it and what takes us down in it and what takes us upwards in regard to our experiences and the small degrees in level of Being that we all possess. Can you afford to walk in your sleep too long?

Identifying is the enemy of Self-Remembering

Since identifying is the enemy of Self-Remembering and since Self- Remembering is our supreme task, it is clear that we have to study our forms of identifying. With what have you been identified most today? Or let me ask you another question: Have you remembered yourself today?

The best starting point for the Work is our lives just as they are

Of course, we do not take our lives in the sense of parts that we have been given to play. The Work says that we start from our lives just as they are and that this is the best starting point for the Work. We do not have to break off our lives and go into monasteries or hermitages.

We take our lives in a different way

For instance, our lives may go on just the same as before, but if we begin to understand what the Work means we take our lives in a different way. I always find this difficult to explain to those who do not yet catch a glimpse of what is meant.

You are asleep. You forget who you really are!

Suppose you were to go on a stage where there were hundreds and thousands of actors dressed up in all sorts of costumes, quarrelling and making love and murdering and so on, and you realized to your horror that they were all fast asleep and were completely identified with their parts, which means that they were taking themselves to be what they had been cast to be in the big drama–what would you do?

You would probably seize hold of the nearest one and shake him violently and try to make him wake up. You might shout in his ear and say: ” Don’t be so silly, don’t stick that knife into that person, you are asleep, you forget who you really are.” And what do you think the result would be? Probably that knife would be pushed into you !

Our lives are best suited to us to wake up from

Now if we can see that our lives are somewhat similar to parts given to actors and that each of us has a different part best suited to us, our attitude would change. What does “best suited to us” mean? It means best suited to us to wake up from. If you take your life on Earth as an end in itself you can never get to the attitude that the Work teaches. The Work takes life as a means to another end. If you take life as an end in itself can you ever cease to identify with it.

The one thing we must always remember

You know how in various myths and fairy stories and esoteric legends there is the idea that the hero is sent out into the world to seek for something, and they are warned not to forget whence they came– this is one thing that they must always remember.

Let me quote from an ancient hymn which contains a great deal of teaching. Here the son of kings is sent by his parents down “into Egypt”, into the world, to bring back a pearl. But after he had been in the world some time he forgot that he was the son of kings, he forgot the pearl and “lay in a deep sleep “. He was awakened from sleep and remembered himself.

“I remembered that I was a son of kings,” he said, “and my free soul longed for its natural state. I remembered the pearl, for which I had been sent to Egypt . . . and I snatched away the pearl and turned to go back to my Father’s house.” In this allegory you will see that the prince remembered his divine origin, he remembered that he was not what he had begun to take himself in life.

Taking our life in the wrong illusory way

Many ancient teachings speak of life as being an illusion. But this is not easy to understand. The Work does not speak about life as an illusion but it says a great deal about our taking life in the wrong illusory way and it constantly emphasizes that we must learn to take it in the right way.

Identifying with ourselves and with the events of life

In this connection it is constantly speaking about identifying both with ourselves and with the events of life. This identifying, whose direction is inwards and outwards, keeps us asleep and makes it impossible for us to remember ourselves and in consequence makes it impossible for certain influences to reach us that can help us, consisting in certain emotions, certain thoughts, certain feelings, not derived from our business affairs, our daily existence, or life as seen, as it appears to be.

The illusion of life lies in our thinking we can do, we are conscious, we are a unity

The illusion of life lies, the Work says, in our thinking we can do, in our thinking we are conscious, in our thinking that we are a unity. The Work says that in life everything happens in the only possible way it can happen. When you apparently act in life, when you apparently do something in life, you are doing the only thing that you could do. It is not you who are doing it.

Realizing our mechanicalness is the beginning of remembering ourselves

When you begin to see this, when you begin to realize your mechanicalness in this way, you are already beginning to remember yourself, you are already beginning to be separated from the machine of yourself and to approach something that lies behind the machine of yourself in the direction of Real ‘I’.

The realization of our mechanicalness is a form of Self-Remembering

This is why the Work says that realization of one’s own mechanicalness is a form of Self-Remembering. In this kind of Self-Remembering you are aware that what you are doing and saying and thinking is not really you. You become a spectator of yourself and you see that all that you have called you and your life is an illusion in the sense that it is all happening, and in that sense it is not real–it is not Reality.

When I see that a life event is entangling me

When I see that an event is entangling me and that I am reacting to this event quite mechanically, the whole business becomes unreal to me because where I thought before that I was doing, I was acting, I was seeing. I see it now as IT that is acting.

Separating from our inner thoughts

In the same way in separating from our inner fantasies and thoughts that spring from False Personality, from vanity, and so on, we may have a moment of Self-Remembering in which we escape from their hypnotic power and see that they are trying to get hold of us and that that is their real object–namely, to put us to sleep again.

Everything in life seeks to keep us asleep

You must remember that everything in life seeks to keep us asleep. In the Legend of Endymion it is related that the Moon kept Endymion asleep because this was the only way in which she could keep her power over him.

We live in a world of sleeping people

Remember that the Work teaches that we live in a world of sleeping people in which everything happens, and that we are also asleep. The only difference is that we are trying to wake up. We cannot change life. A man must begin with himself—a woman with herself. We can begin to change ourselves.

We ourselves are asleep

But this is impossible unless we begin to see that we ourselves are asleep, that we are identified with the tragic or comic parts given us in life, and that we have forgotten ourselves and that we do not even try to remember ourselves.

Are you overcome by your difficulties? Do you feel no one has ever been in such adverse circumstances? Or, on the contrary, do you feel yourself the happiest person in the world? In Self-Remembering one does not start from this situation, this state of affairs, this domestic scene, this particular event one is in.

Life becomes our teacher

Life becomes our teacher only when we understand that it offers us different circumstances, different experiences, different events at different moments, with which not to identify. Life is a series of outer events and inner states and they are always shifting and turning. If we stick at every point, then we are identified all the way round.

We take everything personally

We take everything personally, as being ourselves, like the actors who take every role they have to play as themselves. Then we are indeed asleep and being turned round like little wheels by the big wheel of life. When all traces of individuality fail, collectivity grows.

The secret lies in not identifying and in Self-Remembering

We have to struggle hard not to become only small wheels driven by life, by the circle of events. The secret lies in not identifying, and in Self-Remembering. But if you take every little upset, every domestic incident, seriously and with full identifying, how then can you work or expect to work? You do not even realize you are playing a typical role that millions of others have played or are playing, and that you will not get free from it unless you wake up and see that you are not remembering yourself.

Now we each have a circle of different ‘I’s that revolve. Each plays its role–pathetic, silly, fine, serio-comic, tragic, and various other stock parts. The trouble is that we do not play these roles but they play us.

The roles play us. We must consciously play the role.

Really to play a role in the Work-sense we must be conscious. To play a role consciously is an example of what the Work calls doing. Only a conscious person can do. As we are, roles play us. So it is a good thing to observe them and not identify with them so much–to see them acting in oneself and yet not feel that one is them–to say silently “I am not this!”

I am not this!

This is to begin to remember oneself as different from these ‘I’s. But every day we must practice Self-Remembering at first simply by stopping everything, by being not in anything, not connected with anything in life or in ourselves as life has made us.

If we are identified with ourselves we cannot remember ourselves

Now remember, a man or woman identified with themselves cannot remember themselves because they have no horizon above them. They are limited by themselves. A man who blames everybody, a woman who ascribes everything to herself, is identified with himself, with herself, and really dead.

Let us recall the first three levels of Consciousness: (1) Sleep in bed, (2) So-called waking consciousness, in which people live and also kill each other, and (3) Self- Remembering.

Only at the level of Self-Remembering can higher levels of Conscious Humanity reach us

It is only to this level–the level of Self-Remembering –that help can penetrate and actually reach us from higher levels of the Universe of Being–that is, from Conscious Humanity. That is why it is so important to practice Self-Remembering–to try to do it and gradually find the way to do it.

If the intention is sincere and the aim intelligent and based on an understanding of the Work, the way will be found.

What would happen if we saw our forms of identifying in a flash

Sometimes when you watch a person you may wonder what would happen if he or she saw their forms of identifying in a flash–their mannerisms, their dress, their intonations, their expressions, the seriousness with which they take themselves and their position. Yes, and the same applies to ourselves.

A story about forgetting to remember ourselves

I will tell you a story about forgetting to remember oneself. There was once an island on which a number of people landed from a ship in order to rehearse a play. One person was cast for the part of a villain, another was a spy, another a noble woman, another a brave man, another a miser, another a hero, another a misunderstood wife, another a misunderstood husband, another a long-suffering person, and so on.

The first day they all acted the play and enjoyed it and afterwards laughed at one another’s parts. But the island had peculiar properties. As the days went on, each time they acted this play they began to feel more and more that they were actually the parts they acted. And then everything went wrong and they remained on the island and the ship vanished, leaving only a little boat behind.

Week 10 Self Remembering

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This week’s reading challenges us to find different ways of Self-Remembering at different times of the day and in different states: “If you are in a bad state you remember yourself in one way, and when in a good state you have to remember yourself in another way and it is often more difficult.”

Maybe we can report on our different experiments with Self-Remembering, both in bad states and in good states within ourselves. Is it true for you that Self-Remembering is more difficult when you are in a good state?

This week’s reading challenges us:

“Try to remember yourself, do not merely think about it or discuss it, but try to do it privately, intimately; and if you can as yet do nothing better, try to stop your thoughts, try to separate from your inner state as it is at this moment and regard it as being of no consequence and not you. This may open something, may lift something up to the level of the 3rd State of Consciousness. Something at a higher level will then recognize you, become aware of you, as if you have stepped through a door.”

Does something at a higher level recognize and become aware of you? Have you stepped through the door?

We will lightly continue with our core inner work practice:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Eleven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 3, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 925-927.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

A Short Note on Differenet Ways of Self-Remembering

It has been said that Self-Remembering gives a shock to the whole Being and actually provides better food for the cells of the body. But we do not give this shock to ourselves ordinarily and for that reason it is called the First Conscious Shock, because it has to be done deliberately. It is not done in nature.

The natural shock that is given to the body is the act of breathing. The act of breathing gives a shock to the Food Octave starting at 768 and transforming itself successively until it reaches Si 12. This is a mechanical shock.

The most important and the most practical thing that we can do

Now the First Conscious Shock is what was always emphasized in the earlier part of the teaching as the most important and the most practical thing that we can do. We must learn what it means to remember ourselves and practice it every day at least more than once.

There are many different ways of remembering oneself

Since it is so important it is always a good thing to remind ourselves about it and once more to study it. There are many different ways of remembering oneself but in every case it means not identifying with something and so separating from something by feeling one is different from it.

There is no mechanical way of Self-Remembering.

There is no mechanical way of Self-Remembering. It is, speaking on a lower scale, like saying there is no mechanical way of self-observation. Both acts require intelligence and consciousness and vision. A monk may mutter prayers all day long and miss the mark completely. It might indeed be very much better for him if he took in impressions at a particular moment and did not mutter mechanical prayers.

The Sly One’s Pill

On one occasion, when Mr. Ouspensky was asked: “What is this pill that Sly One makes and swallow?” he said that one meaning was that a Sly One remembers oneself in different ways under different conditions.

I will quote his words. He was asked the question: “What is it that the fakir suffers years to get and the monk weeks and the yogi days?” He answered: “Understanding.” He was then asked: “What is the pill that Sly One takes?”

He said: “It is composed of many things. One must self-remember to be able to take the pill.”

What is the difference between desire and will?

He was then asked in some connection that I have forgotten bearing on the same subject: “What is the difference between desire and will?” He answered: “We can do what we desire but if we do what we do not desire this shows Will.” He then added that all Self-Remembering must have an element of Will-control. It is an act of doing–the only one we can make.

Aim must connect with Self-Remembering

Now we know that this Work teaches that the only place where we can interfere with our machine in a right way is to give it the First Conscious Shock, or the shock of Self-Remembering. That is why aim must connect with Self-Remembering. To try to carry out aim without any state of Self-Remembering accompanying it is to try to do from the wrong place, from the machine itself. I once emphasized to you that the Driver must climb up on to the box–that is, he must be on a higher level before he can control the horse and carriage. Remember yourself and then remember your aim.

Different kinds of Self-Remembering

Ouspensky said more definitely about Sly One’s pill that it was different kinds of Self-Remembering. He said: “You must find it out for yourselves gradually. It has to do with different influences, one kind for one person, one kind for another person, and so different for each person. At different hours of the day it is different for each person.”

We must learn to remember ourselves in different ways

This means that we must learn to remember ourselves in different ways. It is one and the same thing only in the sense that it means that you separate from and cease to identify with something that is getting hold of you. Only in that respect it is always the same. It is always the same because it is a lifting of oneself above the level of ordinary ‘I’s, above the stream of thoughts, pre-occupations and moods, but the direction that it takes will be different.

Self-Remembering always means a fuller state of consciousness

Self-Remembering always means a fuller state of consciousness, but you do not get a fuller state of consciousness by always looking at things in the same way, because that will either miss the mark or lead to mechanicalness. If one always looks through an eastern window, one will not see the sun all day. If you are in a bad state you remember yourself in one way, and when in a good state you have to remember yourself in another way and it is often more difficult.

Do not give full belief to your state

But in every case you do not give full belief to your state but to something you could be and indeed once were–something you have forgotten. In the act of Self-Remembering you distinguish yourself from the person you have become in life. And you distinguish yourself from your present thought and mood.

Slowly it is given you to see that all this is not ‘I’. Otherwise one simply remains one’s random foolish thoughts and useless states–a kaleidoscope–and this is being asleep in mechanical states, in typical faults. Then we are at the mercy of every set of negative ‘I’s that seek to destroy us–and of these we have enough.

Everyone is being eaten all the time by bad states

Do you realize that everyone is being eaten all the time by bad states, bad ‘I’s, by useless identification, and so feeds the Moon? In a state of Self-Remembering this is impossible. The influences of the Moon do not penetrate to the 3rd State of Consciousness. When we understand this we know we must fight to remember ourselves.

Struggle not to believe your states

We simply must remember ourselves and stop considering. Struggle not to believe your states–only the state of Self-Remembering.

We should be able to turn round in ourselves

Gurdjieff once said: “We should be able to turn round in ourselves.” Now this means that we are stuck to nothing in ourselves. When we identify we stick to things and so cannot get free and cannot turn round. It is true things matter. But non-identifying matters most. Things both matter and do not matter. It is a double feeling. Things are serious and not serious.

There are different forms of Self-Remembering at different times

People pestered Mr. Ouspensky to explain exactly what the pill of the Sly One is. They were not content with having to study it for themselves and with the hint that it was different forms of Self-Remembering at different times.

He answered: “If you would not identify with the idea of slyness, then you might understand better what is meant.” He sometimes said: “You may pass into a relative state of Self-Remembering without any direct effort. All that you notice is that you are in an unusual state and that you are not identified with anything. The whole of life and its cares is dropped away and yet you see everything very clearly.”

To identify is to cease to remember

Now when we practice Self-Remembering we can have what we want. We can have what we want as long as we do not identify with it, because to identify is to cease to remember.

All you have to do is to remember yourself

“What have I to do?” was the constant cry in the early years of this Work. And the answer was always the same: “All you have to do is to remember yourself.” Now if you think that this is a giving up of yourself you are quite wrong. It is finding yourself and losing what you took as yourself–all this mess one is.

Help can reach us

If we can get as far in this Work as to know Self-Remembering and to realize when we are not remembering ourselves we have gone a long way and reached a goal. For in this state of Self-Remembering, in the 3rd State of Consciousness, influences can reach us which cannot reach us otherwise–in fact, help can reach us. We are taught internally.

Once we know or witness this help as a personal experience we understand the Work because its knowledge has led us to this point of perceiving truth. We see what the Work means, without words, because it shows itself.

So I remind you again:

Something at a higher level will then recognize you

“Try to remember yourself, do not merely think about it or discuss it, but try to do it privately, intimately; and if you can as yet do nothing better, try to stop your thoughts, try to separate from your inner state as it is at this moment and regard it as being of no consequence and not you. This may open something, may lift something up to the level of the 3rd State of Consciousness. Something at a higher level will then recognize you, become aware of you, as if you have stepped through a door.”

Week 11 Self Remembering

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This week’s reading talks about Self-Remembering as a pill that we swallow. One way we swallow the pill is by seeing and acknowledging what is wrong with us at the moment. At any given time, what is needed may be quite different.

“Making the pill is only possible through seeing oneself by direct self-observation — that is, by personal work and formulating what one sees.”

“Give us this day our daily bread,” according to Nicoll, means this: “May we be given vision and insight and new meaning today so that we know what to do and how to work on ourselves today.”

This daily “heavenly painful bread” is given and digested when we see the truth of our impoverished state of being in the light of the Work. Swallowing the pill is not easy.

Can you make a pill and swallow it this week?

We will lightly continue with our core inner work practice:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Twelve Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 3, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 941-943.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

A Further Note on Self-Remembering

In a recent paper reference was made to the Sly Man in the 4th Way who knows how to make a pill and swallow it, instead of making all kinds of painful, prolonged efforts such as the Fakir or Monk makes.

People can make all sorts of useless and unintelligent efforts to attain a higher level of Being, by asceticism, by torturing their bodies, keeping vows of silence, starving themselves, denying themselves all pleasure, elaborate rituals, repeating prayers mechanically, constantly doing unpleasant or unreasonable things, and so on. All this is not intelligent.

Seeing what is wrong with us at the moment and swallowing it

The Sly Ones see what is wrong with them at the moment by self-observation and acknowledges it–that is, swallows it–and thereafter remember themselves in connection with it. They work personally on themselves.

Making the pill

Making the pill is only possible through seeing oneself by direct self-observation–that is, by personal work and formulating what one sees. In this way, one sees what effort is needed for oneself at a particular time in order to keep awake. What is needed by one person at a given time may be quite different from what is needed by another.

For example, the Lord’s Prayer can be seen as the Prayer of “Sly One”. Notice it is said first that it is useless to pray by vain repetitions: “In praying use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles do: for they think they shall be heard for their much speaking.” (Matt. VI 7.)

Prayer must be conscious and not mechanical

What is meant is not directly said–namely, that prayer must be conscious and not mechanical. It must be conceived by the mind and its meaning seen internally in relation to one’s state of Being. Every word must be said consciously with full meaning.

Bread from heaven

In this prayer (which we gabble in Church uselessly) we ask for daily bread: “Give us this day our daily bread.” But in the Greek it does not mean daily but “what is needful.” It also has the meaning of “trans-substantial bread” or “what is beyond ourselves.” Bread does not mean literal bread, but “bread from heaven”–that is, psychological bread, psychological insight, mental nourishment, coming from a higher level, and so showing us what is wrong and violent in our level of ourselves.

Give us this day our daily bread

To paraphrase the section: “Give us this day our daily bread” means “May we be given vision and insight and new meaning today so that we know what to do and how to work on ourselves today.”

To sincerely observe ourselves in the light of the Work and see what it is necessary to work on

So in one sense the pill is this “heavenly painful bread” that we have to swallow. It is the same as the manna in the desert. It is just as if we prayed to be able directly and sincerely to observe ourselves in the light of the Work and so through its mental illumination see what it is necessary to work on, and what has to be not identified with, etc.–and accept this flash of given insight or light –take it inwards and not argue about it or self-justify, but accept, acknowledge its truth. But most people argue about any true internal or external criticism of themselves and so do not swallow it–that is, accept it, and see it as truth about themselves.

Making a pill of what we are shown about our state of Being and swallowing it

When we are shown something about our state of Being, whether by inner perception or by an outward suggestion or hint, we do not make a pill of it–that is, formulate it–nor swallow it–that is, accept it–as truth. But if we did, this would lead to direct and intelligent effort based on understanding.

This is the way of Sly Ones –that is, intelligent Humanity–and it is incommensurably superior to breathing exercises, ritual, starvings, torturings of the body, following mechanical disciplines, and so on. The Fourth Way is based on understanding.

The Fourth Way

The Work is the Fourth Way–that is, it is not the Way of Fakir or the Way of Monk, or the Way of Yogi. In this Work understanding is the most powerful thing you can develop. Therefore it is necessary to begin to to try to understand what this Work teaches and see for oneself why it teaches it.

We must understand for ourselves what must go

What does that mean? It means in brief that you must understand for yourself why negative emotions must go, understand why self-justifying must go, why lying and deceit must go, why internal considering and grievances and making internal accounts must go. (Notice the Lord’s Prayer says: “Forgive us as we forgive others.”)

What must go

You must understand for yourself why egotistical phantasies must go, why self-pity and sad regrets must go, why hating must go, why the state of inner sleep must go, why ignorance must go, why buffers and attitudes and pictures of yourself must go, why False Personality, with its two giants walking in front of you, Pride and Vanity, must go, why ignorance of oneself must be replaced by real uncritical self-knowledge through observation, why external considering is always necessary, and finally you must understand and see why Self-Remembering is utterly and totally necessary for you at all times if you want to awaken from the great sleep-inducing power of nature and the increasing mass hypnotism of external life.

All this is the Work

All this is the Work and what it teaches –namely, what it is we have to do in order to awaken from the state of sleep in which we live.

Making a pill by seeing with uncritical self-observation

Now if you see by uncritical self-observation something, let us say, arising solely out of False Personality, out of vanity and self-love, and so out of wrong self-memory, controlling you and speaking out of you and directing all your emotions and thoughts and facial expressions and movements, and if you see it clearly and formulate it–then you make a pill.

Can you roll it between your fingers?

Yes, but can you roll it between your fingers? Is it so clear, so definite, so objective yet? No, but it can become so, as understanding of what the Work is about becomes stronger and as you become more responsible for it.

Swallowing the pill is not easy

You have then to swallow the pill– accept it–that is, see it is something in you and that you are wholly to blame because you have been identifying and saying ‘I’ to this thing in you up to now, which has been probably making you miserable and everyone connected with you even more miserable. I will not say that the swallowing of the pill is easy.

Right self-observation

Now a person has no power of right self-observation save through the force of the Work. So in the case of a person who is secretly insincere in attitude to the Work you always find a curious inability to self-observe. Such have no light to see themselves. There can be no question of making a pill or of swallowing it in such cases.

You cannot understand the Work unless you feel it

Consider what has been so often said. You cannot understand the Work unless you feel it — that is, value it. To understand in the Work-sense requires to begin with the co-operation of two centers–the Intellectual Center and the Emotional Center.

Week 12 Self Remembering

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One of the difficulties in practicing Self-Remembering is that or a long period of time we must see our sleep — our inability to Self-Remember. Seeing our inability to do this, seeing our own inner poverty and lack, is the beginning of Self-Remembering.

This week’s reading states that Self-Remembering creates new energies by the transformation of the food of impressions. How do you sense new energies in your own practice of Self-Remembering?

We have no given organ for transforming impressions. By Self-Remembering, we create an “organ” for the digestion of our life problems, our life situations, our life conundrums. How is Self-Remembering creating this new digestive agency in you? How are you learning to transform your own life impressions? Are we learning to receive life events in a new way? How do you react to your psychological life, your own problems and worries in the tumble of everyday life?

We we remember ourselves at a difficult moment, when we “eat the impression” rather than the impression eating us, we are beginning to give ourselves the First Conscious Shock. What are some ways that you are giving yourselves the First Conscious Shock this week?

Self-Remembering creates cellular changes and coats our inner being body with finer substances that allow help from Above to reach us. In the diagram at the end of this week’s reading, the mechanical or sleeping individual will have some of this finer substance created automatically (substance 12 in the diagram). When we know how to give ourselves the First Conscious Shock by Self-Remembering at the point of the intake of life impressions, more of this sacred substance accumulates.

We will lightly continue with our core inner work practice:

1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to ourselves. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, a sense of our own being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Thirteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 3, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 1136-1139.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Further Commentary on Self-Remembering Work-Idea

You are not properly conscious. To become so, you must begin by remembering yourself. But first you must through observing yourself for a long period realize that you are asleep.

COMMENTARY

The Work speaks of Self-Remembering from several different angles. The first is that we, capable of 4 States of Consciousness, know only two states, the so-called waking state, which we take as full consciousness, and sleep. However, both of these states are called sleep by the Work. For this reason it speaks of Humanity asleep, of the evils of life being incurable as long as we are asleep, and so on.

We were born to be in the 3rd State of Consciousness — Self-Remembering

It says that we should, normally, be in the 3rd State of Consciousness which it calls the State of Self-Remembering, Self-Awareness and Self-Consciousness, and were born to be in this state. But we fell asleep, through hypnotism.

Hypnotic sleep is the problem

This part of the teaching we are studying is of such importance that it must be repeated often. In observing other people, in observing the world, in observing ourselves, we gradually realize that the reason why things are as they are is because we are in hypnotic sleep. This is the real explanation. And this idea has been taught for thousands of years.

We are hypnotized into believing we are awake

But so powerful is the hypnotism playing on humankind on Earth that it is not realized. We are hypnotized into believing we are awake, fully conscious, that we have Real Being, Real Will, Real ‘I’, and that we know ourselves and can do. We cannot see that we are a machine and that everything we do the machine is doing and that we ascribe to ourselves a thousand and one things that we do not possess. “For”, as Gurdjieff said once, “this sleep of Humanity, of which I am speaking, is not ordinary sleep, but hypnotic sleep.”

Now let us speak of Self-Remembering from another angle. The question might be asked:

What is the difference between one who Self-Remembers and one who does not?

“If, as you say, the Work teaches that the normal state of consciousness in us should be that of Self-Remembering, could you express in some way the difference between one who remembers themselves and a one who does not remember themselves and lives in the so-called waking state of consciousness?”

The act of Self-Remembering creates new energies

The answer that the Work gives to such a question is: “Yes–the difference can be expressed in a very clear way. The act of Self-Remembering creates new energies which are not formed in one asleep.”

The three foods

Now to begin with, to understand what is meant, it is necessary to study the 3 foods of Humanity and the transformations of these 3 foods that take place in the human machine. I will begin, in this commentary, by asking you if you believe that a person by Self-Remembering could keep themselves alive for a longer time than another person who did not self-remember, supposing they were experiencing the same difficulties such as inadequate food, exposure, etc.

The food of impressions

From the Work point of view the answer is–Yes. Why? Because the person who self-remembers actually creates energies by the transformation of the food of impressions. The Work teaches that we live on 3 foods–not one food.

The most important food is called “Impressions”; the next important is “Air”; the least important is “Food”–ordinary food. Without impressions we cannot live for a moment. Without air we cannot live for a minute. Without food we can live for a month or more.

Everything in nature works by transformations

Now ordinary food on entering the body undergoes successive transformations into finer and finer substances. Everything in nature works by transformations. The egg is transformed, stage by stage, into a bird or snake, the seed into a tree.

It is strange how many people look on this word transformation with suspicion, not seeing that their very existence was brought about by a series of transformations in the womb, of which they know nothing, and that the fact that they are alive is due to transformations going on at every moment in their bodies.

The wonder of our own existence

They take themselves for granted and see no mystery anywhere. This is the trouble. Humanity, taking everything for granted, cannot grow, cannot develop. The sense of the miraculous is stifled. The wonder of our own existence simply does not enter our limited consciousness.

Let us speak further about transformation. The fire on your hearth is burning by transformation. The grass is growing through transformation. The grub turning into a butterfly is transformation. The thought in your mind is transformed into speech. Everything, seen psychologically, spiritually, is transformation.

Everything is transformation except at the place where impressions are received

Yes–everything is transformation save, in regard to Humanity, at one place. That place is where impressions are received. We do not transform what our eyes see and our ears hear.

Food received from the mouth is transformed first by the stomach. Air is transformed by the lungs. But impressions entering the brain are not transformed. This is the point that the Work lays such emphasis upon. Here (at the point where the entry of impressions is marked), you will notice that they do not pass on to anything finer. They remain as an energy level of 48.

The First Conscious Shock

The Work teaches that if we remember ourselves this energy level of 48 will pass on to a more refined energy of 24 and 12. At this place the First Conscious Shock is given and is called the Shock of Self-Remembering. From what has been said you will see that this shock must lead to transformation. As ordinary food is transformed for us without aid–so the food of impressions must be transformed in some similar way.

We receive our life-problems and life-situations as impressions

But as we are it is not transformed. Beef steaks, as it were, remain beef steaks. Well, if that were the case as regards ordinary food we would die. Now you receive your life-problems, your life-situations, your life-conundrums, as impressions. This aspect of life enters not as physical beef steaks, but in another form.

We are exposed to the food of literal beef steaks occasionally and we have the apparatus given us to digest–that is, transform them. But we do not–and, I notice, cannot–take in the corresponding idea that we are exposed to situations, problems, and so on psychically, spiritually.

Can you see that a situation arriving suddenly as: “How awful, X has quarreled with his wife,” or “I have lost a packet on the Gold Cup”, etc., etc., are all “beef steaks”, as it were, coming in via impressions–that is, mainly through the eyes and ears–those other mouths in our faces distinct from nose and mouth?

We have no transforming organ for impressions — we have to create it ourselves

Each aperture takes in different material. And, as was said, we have for nose and air a transforming thing called the lungs, and for mouth and food a transforming thing called the stomach. But, to repeat, we have no transforming thing for impressions–and we have to create it ourselves. This is why the Work is called psycho-transformism.

We have to learn how to transform impressions

We have to learn how to transform impressions, which are psychological. Otherwise life will remain undigested, untransformed, in which case there will be no inner development. Remember that Humanity was, according to the Work, made a self-developing organism.

To transform life it is necessary to receive impressions in a new way

Now to transform life it is necessary to receive impressions in a new way and this is called the First Conscious Shock–given the name of Self-Remembering. Now a person asleep identifies with every situation– that is, with every impression coming in via eyes or ears.

How do we react to our psychological life, our problems, our worries?

If you had no eyes or ears the situations that you suffer from all day long would not exist for you. So do you see that your psychological life, your problems, your worries, and so on, are all due to impressions entering the eyes and ears–and, let me emphasize–how you react to these impressions?

Once you begin to grasp this, once you see what is meant, you begin to enter this Work in a real sense. When you remember yourself at a difficult moment when you might easily identify with everything, you are beginning to give yourself the First Conscious Shock.

In answer to the question: “Could you express the difference between a person asleep and a person self-remembering in some way?” the difference is expressed in the two diagrams that follow:

Week 13 Self Remembering

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This study work group grows out of Cynthia's challenge to take a deep dive into Fourth Way ideas and practices. Knowing that Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales for His Grandson is a heavy lift, we are aiming for a "softer and gentler" approach to Fourth Way inner practices via Maurice Nicoll's five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

This was what started me on my own Fourth Way journey. While on a five day silent retreat in a Franciscan hermitage, I had daily contact with one of the Franciscan brothers. Every day I came to his office to check in, and noticed this set of commentaries in his library. I took volume two back to my own cabin, and it lilterally exploded within me. I asked him where I could find others in my area that are working in this way, and it ultimately led me to a local group where I have been in an active Fourth Way Work group for the past twelve years. I have gone through these volumes two times already, and next year want to go through them again -- only this time, not privately, but with many of my friends in the Wisdom School network. These commentaries are ultimately what led me to find Cynthia and the Fourth Way community at Claymont where Cynthia has done a number of Fourth Way Wisdom Schools.

While working with Fourth Way practices, I wanted to know how to integrate that Work into my own Christian framework and understanding. Everybody kept saying, you've got to talk to Cynthia, but everytime I tried to sign up for a Wisdom School, it was already full. In desperation, I sheepishly caught her after a talk at Shalem in Washington DC, and asked, "If I do all the grunt work and hosting, will you come to a Wisdom School at Claymont in the Washington DC area?" She graciously accepted, and I knew I was "in" because now I was the one organizing the school!

In Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia recounts her relationship to “Rafe” — Brother Raphael Robin — the hermit monk who so profoundly influenced her life. Cynthia writes:

Like me, Rafe was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the "Fourth Way." When Rafe finally won permission to join an experimental Trappist community in North Carolina, he bumped into a copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Later, after he arrived in Colorado, someone gave him the five-volume set of Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which he read from every day, along with his Bible; these became the twin cornerstones of his spiritual work. Most of Rafe's library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff 's three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was "to have enough being to be nothing.”

I propose that we create the same study conditions as Rafe’s hermitage — weekly readings from the Bible (Gospel and Psalms) using the Ecumenical Lectionary and Nicoll’s Commentaries, with an added spice of one of Thomas’ Logion. Nicoll’s Commentaries are transcripts of the talks he gave to a weekly Work Group that he led in Britain from 1941 through 1953. Unlike P. D. Ouspensky’s book, his is not a systematic and ordered treatment of the Work ideas, but short commentaries that were given to meet the ongoing needs of the group he led. The Gurdjieff Society of Washington DC, encouraged by Mr. Hugh Ripman, produced a topical index to Nicoll’s commentaries. I propose that we use that index to topically explore some of the key work ideas, such as autopilot (“man is a machine”), three-centered knowing, attention, sensation, self-observation, identification, self-remembering, external considering, conscious labor, intentional suffering, and many others.

There are many places we could begin, but I suggest that we start with self-remembering.

So that's the deal. Feel free to call or email me if you have questions. I can't wait to start!

I have also created a private Facebook group for discussion. When you first enter the group, you will need to click the blue “Join Group" button. Since this is a private discussion group, I will need to approve your joining before you are able to ask questions or enter into discussion with others.

Weekly Lessons

• Start Here

• Week 1: The First Conscious Shock and Self-Remembering

• Week 2: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 1

• Week 3: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 2

• Week 4: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 1

• Week 5: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 2

• Week 6: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 3

• Week 7: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 4 and 5

• Week 8: The Teaching About Prayer in the Work

• Week 9: Self-Remembering

• Week 10: On Self-Remembering

• Week 11: A Short Note on Different Ways of Self-Remembering

• Week 12: Further Note on Self-Remembering

• Week 13: Further Commentary on Self-Remembering Work-Ideas

Course Resources

• About the Course

• Table of Contents

• Weekly Lectionary Reading

• The Gospel of Thomas

• Inner Work Practice

• Movement No. 39

• The First Obligatory

• Trinity Prayer: Agios O Theos

• Work Group Resources

• Discussion Group

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• Start Here

• Week 1: The First Conscious Shock and Self-Remembering

• Week 2: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 1

• Week 3: Self-Observation and Self-Remembering - Part 2

• Week 4: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 1

• Week 5: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 2

• Week 6: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 3

• Week 7: The Idea of Transformation in the Work - Part 4 and 5

• Week 8: The Teaching About Prayer in the Work

• Week 9: Self-Remembering

• Week 10: On Self-Remembering

• Week 11: A Short Note on Different Ways of Self-Remembering

• Week 12: Further Note on Self-Remembering

• Week 13: Further Commentary on Self-Remembering Work-Ideas

Course Resources

• About the Course

• Table of Contents

• Weekly Lectionary Reading

• The Gospel of Thomas

• Inner Work Practice

• Movement No. 39

• The First Obligatory

• Trinity Prayer: Agios O Theos

• Work Group Resources

• Discussion Group

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Do you see any connections between these scripture readings for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week?

Readings for the Week

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Choose a Logion to meditate on this week

• Logion 1: Mystery

• Logion 2: Seekers

• Logion 4: Childlike

• Logion 3: Essence

• Logion 5: Hidden

• Logion 6: Sainthood

• Logion 7: Blessing

• Logion 8: Deeper

• Logion 9: Labyrinth

• Logion 10: Separation

• Logion 11: Freedom

• Logion 12: Adrift

• Logion 13: I Am

• Logion 14: The Path

• Logion 15: Homecoming

• Logion 16: Comfort

• Logion 17: Beyond

• Logion 18: Destiny

• Logion 19: Unchanging

• Logion 20: Abundance

• Logion 21: Attention

• Logion 22: Convergence

• Logion 23: Chosen

• Logion 24: Glow

• Logion 25: Excuses

• Logion 26: Humility

• Logion 27: Centering

• Logion 28: Blind

• Logion 29: Harnessed

• Logion 30: One and Only

• Logion 31:Fame

• Logion 32: Exposed

• Logion 33: Proclamation

• Logion 34: Assumptions

• Logion 35: Unbound

• Logion 36: Appearances

• Logion 37: Mask

• Logion 38: Lost

• Logion 39: Key

• Logion 40: Grounded

• Logion 41: Empty

• Logion 42: Reality

• Logion 43: Inseparable

• Logion 44: Choices

• Logion 45: Weeding (Expanded)

• Logion 46: Innocence

• Logion 47: Which?

• Logion 48: Duality

• Logion 49: Incarnation

• Logion 50: Enlightened

• Logion 51: Discover

• Logion 52: Now

• Logion 53:Clarity

• Logion 54: Poverty

• Logion 55: Escape

• Logion 56: Worthy

• Logion 57: Judgment

• Logion 58: Gratitude

• Logion 59: Inspiration

• Logion 60: Breathe

• Logion 61: Impermanence

• Logion 62: Harmony

• Logion 63: Changes

• Logion 64: Avoidance

• Logion 65: Coexistence

• Logion 66: Rejected

• Logion 67: Know

• Logion 68: Untouchable

• Logion 69: Hunger

• Logion 70: Nativity

• Logion 71: Upheaval

• Logion 72: Division

• Logion 73: Harvest

• Logion 74: Immersion

• Logion 75: Interwoven

• Logion 76: Treasure

• Logion 77: Heart

• Logion 78: Dive in

• Logion 79: Attachment

• Logion 80: Longing

• Logion 81: Power

• Logion 82: Avoidance

• Logion 83: Brilliance

• Logion 84: Interiors

• Logion 85: Preparation

• Logion 86: Home

• Logion 87: Dependence

• Logion 88: Connected

• Logion 89: Completion

• Logion 90: Perspective

• Logion 91: Recognition

• Logion 92: Seekers

• Logion 93: Conservation

• Logion 94: Knock

• Logion 95: Generosity

• Logion 96: Eternity

• Logion 97: Flow

• Logion 98: Breakthrough

• Logion 99: Family

• Logion 100: Rendering

• Logion 101: Letting Go

• Logion 102: Beware

• Logion 103: Fearless

• Logion 104: Rituals

• Logion 105: Grounded

• Logion 106: Unity

• Logion 107: Passion

• Logion 108: Drink

• Logion 109: Treasure

• Logion 110: Mastery

• Logion 111: Closer

• Logion 112: Awaken

• Logion 113: Kingdom

• Final Logion: 114

From the Gospel of Thomas Blog Spot by Diane Walker

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1. Become aware of the natural flow of your breathing for a few breaths, noting the sensation or presence of the physical body as the air comes in and goes out. Relax the body as you breathe out.

2. Let a feeling of gratitude or wonder arise. Relax into a feeling of gratitude or wonder for life or for whatever you may feel gratitude for. Do this for a few more breathes.

3. For the next few breaths, say inwardly “I”, as you inhale, breathing with the intention of taking in finer energies or substances in the air and feeling a connection to Higher help. When you breathe out say inwardly “AM”, with an awareness of your whole body physical presence.

4. Finish in three breaths with Inner words: “Lord Help Me”; “Lord Help Us”; “Lord Have Mercy”.

The exercise itself is a form of self-remembering — returning from “all these other things” back to myself. Its aim is to practice three-centered awareness — observing (seeing), sensing, feeling. Engaging all three centers and having a sense of whole body awareness is essential. Activating gratitude, wonder, our being, or our own inner poverty and need for higher help — all are good catalysts for self-remembering.

The inner exercise should only take a minute or two (or less) once familiar with the steps and will remain the same each week. Only the time we choose to engage the exercise will change. Each week we will engage this practice at a designated time — usually before or during a routine activity in the day, or while transitioning into a new activity.

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Movement #39 is the last exercise created by Gurdjieff and one of the most accessible because of the simplicity of the movements. At the same time, it keeps the core of the Fourth Way teaching.

This movement is meant to deepen our connection to our three centers, or rather, to use Gurdjieff’s words, the “three human brains”: intellectual, emotional and moving or body center. This exercise allows us to explore and experience in depth these three intelligences. One definition of “awakening” is three centers engaged and functioning. One definition of sleep is operating out of one center only.

It is best to practice this movement with the music that was written for it.

This exercise is basically composed of four postures which are coordinated with the music. The duration of each posture lasts for six beats. It’s not difficult to notice when the sixth beat ends, because after, there is a short pause in the music. Besides the four postures of the body, the main point of this practice consists of three “inner postures” on which our attention should be synchronized: physical – sensing the whole body; emotional – keeping calm with a neutral emotional state; mental – keeping the mind clear and free from thoughts.

Start by sitting with crossed legs or in a chair with hands rested on the knees, eyes open or closed, head facing forward, and back straight. During the whole sequence of movements, pay attention on what’s happening inside of you.

Four Outer Movements or Gestures:

Three “Inner Postures” or Sequences:

1. Presence of Mind: bring attention to awareness of mind, without thought.

2. Presence of Feeling: bring attention to awareness of feeling, breathing consciously into the center of chest.

3. Presence of Body: bring attention to awareness of physical body.

Note that outer movements are done in a sequence of four, while inner movements are done in a sequence of three.

For the first six beats: remain still in the above described position. Then on the first chord of each six chord series, start the outer and inner movements, like this:

1. Outer Movement #1 (right arm) with Inner Posture #1 (Mind).

2. Outer Movement #2 (left arm) with Inner Posture #2 (Feeling).

3. Outer Movement #3 (head down) with Inner Posture #3 (Body).

4. Outer Movement #4 (starting posture) with Inner Posture #1 (Mind).

5. Outer Movement #1 (right arm) with Inner Posture #2 (Feeling).

6. Outer Movement #2 (left arm) with Inner Posture #3 (Body).

7. Outer Movement #3 (head down) with Inner Posture #1 (Mind).

8. Outer Movement #4 (starting posture) with Inner Posture #2 (Feeling).

9. Outer Movement #1 (right arm) with Inner Posture #3 (Body).

10. Outer Movement #2 (left arm) with Inner Posture #1 (Mind).

11. Outer Movement #3 (head down) with Inner Posture #2 (Feeling).

12. Outer Movement #4 (starting posture) with Inner Posture #3 (Body).

Continue the inner and outer movements until the end of the music (about 5 minutes). If you lose your place in the sequence, just start at the beginning. There are 32 chord sequences, enough to go through the sequence of four outer movements 8 times.

At the end of the exercise, remain still for a while, pondering on the results gained during this exercise; you can also state some words of affirmation like: “May the results of this practice become part of my being.”

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