If man is mechanical, if he has no single ‘I’ or self, then what is it that remembers?
The short answer to this question is that it is our accumulated ‘being’ that remembers. But it is difficult to see the long body of our being. Our being is usually fragmented by lying, imagination and identification.
Lying. Ouspensky called man a ‘lying animal.’
As it is understood in ordinary language, lying means distorting or in some cases, hiding the truth, or what people believe to be the truth. This lying plays a very important part in life, but there are much worse forms of lying, when people do not know that they lie. ~ P. D. Ouspensky
We lie because we live our lives in a state where it is impossible to know the truth. This state (the second state) is dominated by personality. Personality forms a mask over the reality not only of the world but also of our being. It separates us from our self. Especially in the beginning of inner work, seeing our being means seeing that we are asleep. It means seeing that we act mechanically, and that there are large portions of our lives where we are absent.
For a man who is not trying to awaken, these perceptions are burdensome and difficult to process. To not go mad, a man needs to lie to himself. To reinforce those lies he also tells them to other people. Much of what we think of as education and religion and culture is an unintentional conspiracy of lies. It is an agreement that people have with each other. As in, if you don’t talk about the mechanical nature of my being, I won’t point out that you live your life in sleep.
Ideas of conscious evolution threaten to expose the lies people tell themselves.
The growth of higher centers can be seen as a road that is sometimes lit and is sometimes in darkness. The road begins at birth and ends at death. Each time we experience a higher state, the events experienced at that point in the road are lit. When we are asleep, in the second state, the road is dark. When the road is dark, we see nothing, we move forward in a kind of non-existence. However, when the road is lit, we are able to see where we are in the moment as well as where it was lit in the past.
The various points of light eventually form an impression of a life, not just an impression of a single moment. And if the light becomes persistent and bright enough, it will light up the points of darkness in a way that connects consciousness to the experience of an entire life.
The self that remembers can be someone who has just discovered self-remembering and has only accidental higher states in their past. Or it can be someone who has twenty or thirty years of self-remembering behind them. It’s important to remember that self-remembering over time has a physiological effect on the body.
If we could succeed in bringing the production up to its possible maximum we should then begin to save the fine ‘hydrogens.’ Then the whole of the body, all the tissues, all the cells, would become saturated with these fine ‘hydrogens.’ ~ Gurdjieff (from In Search of the Miraculous)
The effect of this is a series of changes in being in which we become more gathered up in moments of presence. This is a little hard to describe. In a real way we continue to be present and remember ourselves in the same way we always have. Most of our moments of self-remembering will be the simple awareness of ourselves in the place where we are. This will not bring any startling perceptions or new understandings. What experience brings is a difference in the sense of self.
The more you engage in self-remembering and inner work, the more consistently you will be able to bring all of the experience of your life (your being) to the forefront of your consciousness.
In a sense, when we remember ourselves, we are exposing higher centers to the experience of our lives.
One of the ways we work on connecting to our being is by working against imagination and identification. Imagination and identification are major impediments to seeing the reality of our being. Imagination because it involves us in qualities that we do not possess and in scenarios that never happened. And identification because it blinds us to a larger picture of the world and binds us to negative emotions and contradictory ‘I’s.
Moments of self-remembering, where we see what is in front of us and hear what is around us, are the foundation of our being. If we want to become an infinite being then we must first conceive of the idea of an infinite effort. For now we are calling that effort self-remembering. But it would be ludicrous to assume that an infinite being would not eventually possess an infinite perception.
The progress of our being is mathematical. We add to its infinite nature one moment at a time. Since it is built up over time, we must not expect all of our efforts to yield infinity. We must be content when they yield the moment.
Self-remembering has the potential to connect to the deepest and most expansive parts of our being. And experiences that become memories in higher centers accumulate in a way that forms a higher self. It is this self that remembers the steps that lead us back to awakening. And it is awakening, the revelation of spirit, that can show our way forward.
For the full article by William Page, on his website BePresentFirst.org, read here: https://bepresentfirst.com/self-remembering-and-being/. For more excerpted articles in FourthWayToday.org, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/william-page/.