Dear Rupert,
I saw your interview on YouTube and you mentioned that initially you put in a significant amount of time meditating. You spent time in the school of Ouspensky, who is a disciple of one of my favourites gurus, Gurdjieff. I can see that basically his teaching involves self-remembering, putting in lot of effort.
Do you think spending time and putting in effort in the initial stage helped you later? I have read in articles by some of the great mystics that exercises of body-awareness ground you and your spiritual path becomes easy, since in this journey the body adjusts itself to new or pure energy.
With regards,
Tejansu
Dear Tejansu,
Self-remembering simply means to remember our true self of present awareness.
Now, what is it that can remember the self? Obviously not thinking, because thinking only knows apparent objects, and the self or awareness has no objective qualities. The mind can tryto think of awareness but can never actually do so. It is like an eye trying to see itself; it can see everything apartfrom itself. So the only thing the eye can do is to cease looking in any direction other than itself.
Likewise, all thinking can do is to cease looking in any direction other than our true self of awareness; it cannot go directly to awareness itself. Any effort of thinking would, by definition, be directed towards an object – it is not possible to make an effort of mind without directing it towards something – and therefore no amount of effort will take you to yourself.
The best that such efforts will achieve is to thoroughly convince you of the futility of searching with the mind for an object in the future that will deliver the happiness and peace you deeply desire.
Any effort towards awareness first presumes that awareness is not present and not known. This ignorance, or ignoring of awareness, and the subsequent and inevitable search for it in the future, is the activity of the imaginary separate self.
It is not possible for the self to be found as a result of that search because it is that very search which seemingly veils the self that is being sought. The searching thought is like a fish in the ocean looking for water!
So what does self-remembering mean? The self – that is, awareness – cannot be remembered, because only an apparent object can be remembered. For the same reason, deep sleep cannot be remembered. Memory implies a past, so any idea of remembering the self simply reinforces the idea of time with which the intimate presence of awareness is seemingly veiled.
So self-remembering is a contradiction of terms. Only that which is apparently notthe self can be remembered. The self is ever-present. To remember it or to long for it is to seemingly deny its presence here and now.
And what is it that could remember or know awareness? Only awareness, of course! There is nothing else present, such as an independent entity with its own individual ability to know, that could know or be aware of anything.
Is awareness not knowing itself in this and ‘every’ moment? Are you not present now? The answer ‘yes’ comes from the knowing of your own being, that is, awareness’s knowing of itself.
Simply abide as that. Be yourself. Thatis self-remembering. No effort can take you to this presence of awareness. In fact, it would require an effort to pretend notto be this presence. And that is exactly what the imaginary entity is: the effort of pretending to be something other than this ever-presence of awareness.
Let all your efforts bring you repeatedly to this understanding until they arise less and less, leaving you at the threshold of your true nature. Simply abide there, open, silent and unknowing. That is true self-remembering.
With kind regards,
Rupert
