I began asking the question, "Who Am I?" some fifty years ago when I was co-owner of the Trivia Coffee House in Trenton, New Jersey. At the Triv. everyone was writing stream of consciousness novels and poetry, or at least dreaming about doing so. More than Beat literature it was the writing of Henry Miller that opened up a whole new reality for me. I began to realize the truth of his statement, "Every thing they tell you is a lie... Everything!" Reading Miller, I began to question all the values that I had accepted since childhood. Somehow, I got turned on to Jungian and Freudian psychology during the Triv. period also.
Discovery of the personal and collective unconscious opened another avenue of investigation. When our coffee house failed, Vance and I split for Alaska deciding to go off on our own to find, "What it's all about man?" And, it didn't take us too long to discover that earning a living is what it's all about in Twentieth Century America. So, discovering who I am is put on the back burner while I begin to take classes at Oakland City College. When I earn my Master's in History and begin my teaching career in 1967, the search is pushed further back.
It is not until 1969 when I quit my first teaching job, and begin driving cab in Oakland that I get back into it. Driving cab, I begin reading Henry Miller again, and discovered poets like Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, philosophers like Henri Bergson, and spiritual teachers like Krishnamurti. Two plus years on the streets of Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco leave a mark on me that could not be erased not even after finding another teaching job and going back to my career in education.
Discovering the meaning of life once again became my reason for being.
In the early seventies, we moved to a hundred year old house in the middle of a sheep ranch. It was there that I put to practice the teachings of Castaneda. In the mid 1980's, I discovered the Gurdjieff School and began to practice Self Remembering. I continued to study Krishnamurti learning that the word is never the reality that exists outside of thought.
In the pages that follow, we will explore concepts from Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti and other teachers who state that man can reach a higher level of consciousness if he works on himself. We will discuss self-observation, and Self Remembering, and discover how the "human machine" works. We will investigate negative emotions, identifying, internal considering, conditioning, and other obstacles to awakening. We will examine the difference between personality and essence, and try to discover man's real purpose in life.
Gurdjieff maintains that man as he is is asleep, but can awaken with super effort. The greatest obstacle to awakening is the fact that we think we are awake. According to Gurdjieff, there are four levels of consciousness, sleep, waking sleep, self-consciousness, and objective consciousness. In sleep, there is very little consciousness of the out side world though there is some. In waking sleep, we think we are fully conscious, but we are so conditioned and identified that we do not see things as they really are. In self-consciousness, we remember ourselves and are aware of our relationship to the inner and outer worlds. In objective consciousness, we see things as they really are.
We begin with Self Observation. We have to develop an Observing I. This means at various times of the day we must separate, step back, and take an uncritical look at ourselves, a snap shot. We have to use different centers. Sometimes, we can think about a situation after it happens and see certain qualities, certain 'I's behaving in a way that we had not thought possible. Other times, we can experience what is happening while it is happening as if we were divided in half, one side watching, while the other side is acting. Here too, we use centers usually more than one at the same time. In Self Observation, we become conscious of the acts that we do. Maurice Nicoll, a student of The Work, says that Self Observation is observation of the inner self, what is going on inside your self.
In Self-Remembering, we separate our self from our self, we empty our self of the ego. All of our centers are quiet. We go beyond our every day self. Self-Remembering is catching the rope that lifts you out of the continuum of time into the eternal present moment, HERE AND NOW! Nicoll states that one difference between Self Remembering and Self Observation is that the feeling of Eternity enters into Self Remembering but not into Self Observation. Self-Remembering is in one way a form of meditation. It is meditating during your daily relations with life.
One of the main reasons for our sleep is that we do not understand how our machine works. What is it that controls our very sophisticated and complicated machine? We have a very complicated machine. There is the respiratory system, the circulatory system, and the nervous system. We have all these millions of nerves and neurons, billions of cells... You know, we study everything, but our human machine. We know how a car engine works, how a computer works, but we don't know how our machine works. Who is in control of our machine.
Let me tell you a little about our machine. First of all, we have seven centers, a thinking center, a moving center an instinctive center, and an emotional center. The fifth center is the sexual center, but work on that comes later. The higher thinking center and the higher emotion center cannot communicate with man until the lower centers are working correctly. Thinking Center controls thought. This is the center that we develop in school. The emotional center controls emotions, feelings. When you are bored, or angry, or happy, it doesn't come from your thinking center, it comes from your emotional center. The moving center controls your movements. You know how if you're playing basketball at first you have to think about your moves. But, once you learn to play if you think about what you are going to do thought gets in the way.... When we are driving to work, we don't think about how to drive. Once we learn to drive the moving center takes control.
In most of us one of our centers is dominant. In myself, it is the emotional center, but with all my years at school, my thinking center runs a close second. You can look at co-workers and tell what their dominant center is. As a teacher, I have observed that most P.E. teachers function from their moving centers. An art or drama teacher generally functions from his or her emotional center. Math and science teachers function from their thinking centers. Ask yourself which center do I use when I have to make an important decision. Do you do what feels right? Do you give a lot of thought to your decisions? Or do you kind of sense what is the right decision?
None of our centers are doing their own work. Because we are not conscious of our different centers, each center is doing the work of other centers. (Centers six and seven do not function at all in unconscious man.) Each center works with different energy and often one center will steal the energy of another center and work with energy that is too rich for it.
Each center is divided into three parts, moving, emotional, and thinking parts. We spend most of our time in the moving part of centers. This requires no attention so our centers operate mechanically. You can tell which part of a center you are in by the direction of your attention. If you are in the moving part of a center, there is no attention. You function mechanically. If you are in the emotional part of a center, the attention is drawn by the outside object. In the intellectual part of a center there is directed attention. If you are in the thinking part of your thinking center, you are conscious of your thoughts at this moment, and, to some extent, able to express them. To get into higher parts of centers requires conscious effort.
Another division of centers has to do with their direction. In the external division, a center is directed towards the outer world. The center is directed by the senses. This is sensual man, natural man. The Middle division directs centers either to the outer or the inner world. It can reason in two directions, or feel in two directions, etc. This is rational man. The inner division directs centers towards the inner world, the invisible world. This is spiritual man. (The invisible world does exist, as in thought, consciousness, light waves, atoms, etc.)
In the Work, we are told to take nothing on faith. If you are at all interested in changing your level of being, check out some of the concepts that I have mentioned. Are you awake? Do you have more than one center that controls your actions? Do you ever stop to examine how your machine works?
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