The definition of consciousness: beyond mechanicalness. And that has to be your work: don’t behave mechanically. Bring more and more consciousness into your acts – even small acts:walking, eating, talking, listening taking a shower. Make them more and more conscious. Do each thing deliberately with a self-remembering that you are doing it. That self-remembering is not needed ordinarily, because once you have learned to do a certain thing then there is no need to remember. Then the body has learned the way and it does it mechanically. For example, if you are learning driving; first you have to be very attentive, very alert. As you start getting the feel of it, the knack of it, you become less and less attentive. After a month, when you have got the licence, you can forget about being attentive. Now the mechanical part in the body takes over. We have a robot part in our mind which always takes over. Once you learn something... while you are learning you have to be conscious... once you have learned, the conscious gives it to the robot part, to the unconscious; then it takes charge. So the conscious again becomes free to learn something else. That’s the natural way: each thing learned becomes part of the unconscious. But this unconscious goes on growing and by and by this mechanical unconscious surrounds you from everywhere. Surrounded by this mechanical unconscious, one becomes almost a prisoner. To dissolve this mechanicalness one has to go backwards again so that each learned thing is taken back again from the unconscious, brought to the conscious. The more things start becoming conscious, the more you will feel alive. When everything is conscious, one is utterly alive. Otherwise people exist like machines. Yes, there is something in them that is still beyond the machine, but that is very tiny, very very tiny.The machine is very big and the non-mechanical consciousness is just a small flame lost somewhere in the darkness; you cannot even find where it is. That flame has to be made bigger, and to make it bigger this is the fuel – to start making your mechanical acts conscious again. Once you have reclaimed one thing from the unconscious, your- consciousness will burn bright – more fuel is available; then bring another then another.... This is the buddha’s way: the path of awareness. And when you have brought all the unconscious things back into the conscious, the unconscious disappears. That is the moment of satori – when the unconscious disappears. That’s why we call it enlightenment: one becomes light; all darkness disappears. So read something of Gurdjieff – that will be helpful – because that was his whole method: selfremembering. Read something of the Sufis, Jikr, that is their method. Read something of Buddha, particularly his method of mindfulness. And you are ready for a great pilgrimage, but you will have to go through the path of being more and more alert and aware.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 10:52:30 +0000
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