Lying

How do we achieve inner transformation? When people react negatively to the necessity of inner work, it is often because the ideas of conscious evolution threaten to expose the lies they tell themselves. 

The primary lies we all tell ourselves are that we are conscious. We tell ourselves that we have will, and that we are always the same person. The problem is that we all have higher centers, and even those who think that higher states are imaginary will sometimes find themselves in a place of higher perception. In other words, we all see our sleep. And how we react to these moments is dependent on our being. Students of conscious evolution are not afraid of these perceptions. They have experienced the verification that such states are evidence of awakening. But people without any knowledge of self-remembering and higher states inevitably react to these experiences with lying, imagination, identification, and buffering. This is because their personalities, which they take as their selves, find the truths uncovered in self-observation unacceptable.

Buffering

We all have traumatic events in our lives or events where we acted in a way that we are ashamed of or would like to forget. In chapter 12 in In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky relates the attempts he and his St Petersburg group made to tell the ‘story of their lives,’ an exercise that Gurdjieff demanded of his students.

I proceeded further but almost immediately I felt a certainty that there were many things that I had no intention whatever of telling. This was a quite unexpected realization. I had accepted G.’s idea without any opposition and I thought I would be able to tell the story of my life without any particular difficulty. But in reality, it turned out to be quite impossible. Something in me registered such a vehement protest that I did not even attempt to struggle. ~ P. D. Ouspensky

There are memories that contradict the imaginary picture of who we think we are. In ordinary life, this is not usually an issue. We ignore difficult memories or buffer them. Many people can live quite happily pretending that painful events don’t affect them. But the nature of conscious evolution tends to bring such memories to the forefront of consciousness. In order to understand why this is the case, we need to understand the mechanics of higher centers, and in particular how they function in traumatic events.

Trauma and Higher Centers

In the midst of a trauma, lower centers often temporarily stop functioning. (This is being in ‘a state of shock.’) In this state, higher centers, usually the higher intellectual center, record the experience. This is because personality, which in normal circumstances stands between experience and higher centers, ceases to act as a buffer zone. This is why some people have difficulty remembering a trauma. After the trauma is over and personality again becomes uppermost in their day-to-day consciousness, there is no longer a connection to higher centers. But to be completely unaware of a trauma is rare. Most people have at least a haphazard connection to their higher centers.

In cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), traumatic memories exist in higher centers but remain undigested by lower centers. Lower centers may be unable to process a memory either because of its intensity or because the event contradicts some basic personality beliefs. Symptoms—nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks, and sleeplessness—occur because we have not transformed the experience.  People with strong personalities may be able to successfully buffer traumatic events, but generally not without some symptoms. The body remembers, even if the mind and emotional center refuse to deal with the memory.

The problem is that in higher centers, particularly in the higher intellectual center, the past and the present are essentially one. This is why it is common for a new trauma to call up old traumas. The problem with trauma arises when a person has no understanding of higher centers and is not making any efforts to connect to them. 

Students of conscious evolution typically will have a wider variety of different kinds of experiences, both positive and negative, connected to higher centers. But people without this training often connect to higher centers only in moments of danger or trauma. This can mean that they may experience the flashes of higher centers as something negative.

Transformation of Trauma

At a certain point in the development of higher centers, we need to confront and transform old traumas. In my experience, there is no need to force this process. But it will eventually become necessary in order for inner work to continue. To understand why this transformation is essential, it is probably easier to think of higher states as a place where you go, and old traumas are a permanent part of that landscape. Since they are not going to go away, we need to transform them into something that feeds back into self-remembering, like kindness or strength or humility.

In a sense, what we are doing when we remember ourselves is exposing higher centers to the experience of our lives. Much in the same way that trauma opens us to higher centers, except that we do it deliberately, in ordinary circumstances.

Imagination and Identification

When someone says about another person, ‘He forgot himself,’ or ‘She forgot who she was,’ it means they did something that was uncharacteristic, usually in a negative way. Maybe they became angry and said things they regretted. Or they acted childishly in a situation that called for maturity and strength. These expressions are good examples of how everyday language can express a deeper esoteric reality. In this case, the reality is that man is many ‘I’s and most collections of ‘I’s (personalities) do not relate to his deepest being.

Efforts to work against imagination and identification cleanse the moment and, in a sense, get it ready for self-remembering.

Belief is not part of the Fourth Way. Yet it is necessary for us to verify that higher states can connect to the deepest parts of our being. And that 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 will be our salvation.

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/.