When students work only on the first line, it is a form of identification with themselves. The idea is that “I want to wake up,” but that ‘I’ cannot wake up. Something has to take us out of ourselves and into a larger scale than “me, me, me.”
The danger of working only on the first line is that one imagines one has gained something. The second and third lines help to take us out of that imagination by promoting practical application of what one has gained.
If the first line is work for yourself, what does that mean when the only “self” you know is the one you are trying to escape from?
When we receive something, we have the responsibility to make the effort to pass it on. According to Ouspensky, this is one meaning behind the passage in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” If something is going to move, something else has to make way for it. The Universe is complete; the Absolute is complete. So we can only move if there is circulation within it. Payment is our part of that: we have to make our effort to keep things moving.
By remembering that we are here to work on ourselves, we realize that the work really begins once the machine doesn’t want to make a certain effort anymore. The third line gives us the opportunity to work on a scale that is larger than that of human machines.
How do we go beyond that to do what the machine itself does not wish to do? The machine cannot do that for itself. It requires help from outside. We encounter that help through the second and third lines. On these lines we work with other students and do what the School asks us to do.
As men numbers one, two, three or four, we are identified with a human scale. We think other people are real and that we ourselves are real. At some point, one has to change scale; one has to come to a larger sense of oneself and one’s position. The second and third lines provide a way to shift the scale of one’s work. Then one can return to the first line in a different way. Through the third line, I have experienced what is meant by the idea that you have to forget yourself in order to find yourself.
If we work on ourselves, we can create something higher. At first it is something higher within the machine. Eventually we transcend the machine and reach something that is beyond time. The machine wants to know what unity is and how it can become more unified. By being present, it turns out that we create an “observer” that is at least more consistent. With difficulty, we come to understand that the way towards unity is simply to be present and observe ourselves in the moment.
If we can really observe in the moment, then consciousness becomes a major stimulus for the machine. Since it is a stimulus-response machine, it does begin to act differently. But that only comes later. In trying to divide attention, one can train the machine to be aware of much more than one normally experiences; as a consequence, one has a machine that works better. But when we understand that through this process we are also becoming aware of ourselves, we begin to create something separate from the machine. The triad is different when we are aware of ourselves. That is what allows us to wake up rather than simply let moments of presence slip by and not accumulate into permanence in ourselves. It is a tricky place in the work. It is not the changes we experience that matter, it’s the observation that matters.
The work is upside down and backwards to life. To life, “freedom” means being able to follow whatever ‘I’s the machine happens to have. “Will” is seen as the ability to actualize any desire that comes into the machine. In reality, however, freedom and will begin from being able to separate from the machine. And this separation begins with the ability to do what the machine does not want to do.
Through self-observation, we discover areas that clearly need work—manifestations that, on a practical level at least, cannot occur at the same time as self-remembering. The expression of negative emotions provides an obvious example. Self-observation inevitably brings us to areas that need practical work.
When we are asleep everything happens mechanically; everything just goes its own way. When we experience friction, it usually means that our mechanicality has encountered some kind of denying force. What we are trying to do is to learn to use those moments to see ourselves. The machine will want to focus on the stimulus, or whatever it was that produced the friction; instead, we can learn to ask ourselves, why does this particular event or circumstance cause me friction?
Part of a man number four’s suffering is to see himself behaving mechanically and not be able to do anything about it. This suffering is a necessary payment; we have to be able to see ourselves before we can even begin to think about doing something different. There is no way to avoid the suffering of seeing one’s mechanicality. When we understand that this process leads to something else, then we know why we are making the payment.
A useful way to work with the suffering that results from seeing oneself is to ask: “Who is suffering?” It is not higher centers, nor is it essence; it is false personality that suffers. The reason that we have pain and suffering when we start to see ourselves is that we have an imaginary picture of ourselves. We are seeing that we are not what we imagined ourselves to be. This realization helps put the suffering into perspective. That, in turn, makes it easier to separate and find a level that is not connected to it. When we see ourselves, false personality dissolves and something more real gradually comes into being.
Girard Haven has been a Fourth Way author and teacher since 1974. His books are available on http://robertearlburton.org/bibliography and Amazon.com. He has written other articles for the FourthWayToday, including https://fourthwaytoday.org/will-consciousness-and-being/ and https://fourthwaytoday.org/awakening-as-the-third-state-of-consciousness/.
For more of Girard’s essays published in this magazine: