This may take a few minutes to read, however, it may be worth a gander. Self-Remembering For most people, even for educated and thinking people, the chief obstacle to their attaining the state of consciousness called Self- Remembering lies in the fact that they think they possess it already. They think that they remember themselves in everything they do and in everything they say, and they not only think that they are conscious at every moment and aware of themselves but believe that they are conscious of their inner lives also and fully aware of all the thoughts and emotions that pass through them in a continuous stream. And because they think they always remember themselves and act and speak with full consciousness and are fully aware of everything they say and do, they believe that they have real will and a permanent unchanging I and that they have the ability to do—as, for example, that they can change themselves if they really wish to, or change their lives, or change other people, or do just as they like. But of course they cannot change them- selves or their lives or other people or do just as they like, because they do not possess any real will, but many contradictory wills, nor have they any permanent I but many changing Is and when they are doing something it is not from conscious will and conscious choice but from what only can happen at that moment to them. For just as in life everything happens in the only way in which it can possibly happen, and no one really does anything at all, although it looks as if people do, so is it in the case of a single man. Everything in his life takes place in the only way in which it can possibly take place, and as long as the man remains the same, everything else will be the same. It is evident that a man will not be interested if you tell him about a state of consciousness that he thinks he already possesses. And this is one reason why people find it so difficult to understand anything about the meaning of Remembering Oneself or the state of Self-Awareness or Self- Consciousness. They ascribe this state to themselves as they are and really believe they pass their existence in a full state of consciousness. They do not realize that they cannot help doing what they are doing. They believe that all their actions are controlled by their will, that they do everything deliberately, and so on. Yet a mans ordinary state of consciousness is almost the reverse of all this. A man ordinarily does not remember himself, he is not aware of himself, he is not properly con- scious of what he does nor of what he says. Nor does he make the decisions he imagines he makes. Nor is he properly conscious of his inner life, which is actually very obscure to him. Of all the thoughts and feelings that pass through him mechanically he is scarcely conscious of a millionth part. Yet actually the state of consciousness called Self- Remembering in which a man is aware of himself and of all he sees round him, and at the same time aware of all the thoughts and feelings passing through him—this state of consciousness is Mans right. And if Man does not possess it, it is only because of the wrong conditions of his life. It can be said without exaggeration that at the present time, the state of consciousness called Self-Remembering (or the Third State of Consciousness) occurs in Man only in the form of rare flashes and it can only be made more permanent in him by a long and special training. This special training begins with self-observation. It is only by means of observing himself uncritically and over a considerable period that a man begins to understand that he does not remember himself. He realizes that most of the time he lives in dreams. He realizes that he forgets himself, forgets his aims, forgets what he was doing or thinking and so on. But this is not all that he begins to understand. He begins to realize what it means to awaken to some extent and what it means to be asleep. Through self-observation he begins to feel the taste of what it might be to be more awake, more conscious of himself. Self-Observa- tion is not Self-Remembering, but it enables a man to realize he does not remember himself and that most of the time he has no distinct and separate feeling of himself, no proper sense of I, no real consciousness of himself. From this he realizes that he lives his life in a state of sleep which people call full consciousness, almost as if in mockery, it might be thought, for it is in this so-called state of full consciousness that people behave as they do to one another and even kill each other without realizing what they are doing. Look at to-day. What is the real explan- ation of what is happening in the world? The real explanation is that people are not conscious. They are asleep and acting in their sleep. And even if they feel something of this, they do not know how to awaken from the sleep or what they must do. Yet since the creation of the world men have been told they are asleep and must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels: Awake, watch, sleep not! But people do not understand it or they think it is a metaphor whereas it is literally true. If people awakened from sleep, if they began to remember them- selves, the whole of life would change. And nothing can change in life unless people begin to awaken. It is necessary to say all this before coming to the practical side of Self-Remembering because everyone who wishes to understand this Work must have, as it were, a background of principles from which he can think about details. This Work teaches as a principle that Man is asleep and that his greatest and most important task is to awaken.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 16:30:58 +0000
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