Notes From the Underground: 1992

Notes From the Underground: 1992

From Krishnamurti: “Time is illusion… through time mutation is not possible. Understanding demands self-knowing, which is not an affair of the moment; learning about oneself is endless and the beauty and greatness of it is that it is endless. But, self-knowing is from moment to moment; this self–knowing is only in the active present; it has no continuity as knowledge.”

Unless you become as a child again, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. You must return to something that you once had as a child. The one thing that a child can do is let go. We must experience the inner and outer without thought, letting go of fear and anger, we must be one with the world. What is it that we must return to in remembering ourselves? What is it that the little child has that we must return to? The little child has conscious love instead of self-love. The little child has unconditional love for the entire world. We must die to our self-love, and return to the unconditional love of the little child.

First you must awaken, remember your self, empty yourself of your self. Then comes death of all self, thought, feeling, time-space. You must die to everything that you have accumulated in your entire life. Then you are reborn into a higher state of consciousness.

False personality usually gives one a better picture of ones self. But, it can sometime give a worse picture like when I think of myself as a klutz.

Will is some force separate from our different centers. Gurdjieff says, “The chief cause of our weakness is our inability to apply our will to all three centers simultaneously.”

The Unknowable is spirit, which can be transformed into words as in revelation. But, the word is not the Unknowable.

Each man is a hero, the myth creator for his entire species, as he enters the unknown in the eternal search for Truth.

The illusion of time is that there is a beginning and an end, a yesterday, and a tomorrow. What is is right now, the eternal moment.

The first aim of my work is to become, or be more fully conscious of the Unknown, the inner darkness that is beyond the self. All other aims lead to this. As Gurdjieff said, all real work is preparing lower centers, making them ready so that they can receive the messages from the higher more internal centers. What keeps me from making the leap for mi… to fa…? What special effort must I make to enter more deeply into the Unknown? I ask myself.

To free oneself from the mechanical habits that one has acquired in a lifetime is no easy task.

Joseph Campbell says, “ God is not outside separate from mankind not the creator of the world, but the substance the world, (and man) is made of.”

“Self Remembering means that you separate from and cease to identify with something that is getting hold of you,” says Maurice Nicoll.

Once the money problem is solved, man can work on his real problems, says Henry Miller. But, the money problem must be solved. We must be able to support our material existence. The money problem is secondary, but it takes super effort to solve it.

In order to know yourself, you have to know how your machine works, how you stand, how you talk, how you feel. The hardest thing in the world is to be conscious of your own actions and feelings. We see the faults of others, but we never see our own faults.

What is time? Psychological time is not the same time as that of the material world where time-space separates. With the knowledge of good and evil, man gained knowledge, thought, and time. But, when he ate of the forbidden fruit, he separated himself from the oneness where there is no time. To return to the Garden of Eden man must step outside of time-thought and still be conscious. Krishnamurti says that your attention does not melt into the void as it does in the religions of the East. It exists as a Cosmological Eye, a nerve ending of the Ultimate.

It is not easy to be a whole man. You have to make super effort to reach full manhood. You have to go as deeply into yourself as the distance from the star that you came from. Our real self is light years within.

Self-love is sown in man to bring him to a certain point in his evolution. Once he reaches the point of good householder, once he is able to provide for his material existence, he can rise to the level of Self Remembering, which will allow him to become balanced man. In order to reach this level, in order to be born anew, he must like a seed die to self-love. He can only be born anew if he dies to his ego self.

We have an image of ourselves in everything we do, and with thought we fit our selves to that image. The image created by thought is imprinted in our brain by our participation in the social structure that we are brought up in.

“In every myth the hero descends deeply within himself and brings back something for the psyche of his time. A boon like fire comes when the hero descends deeply within and destroys the chains of reflection that hold us prisoner within the collective,” says Joseph Campbell.

Our life exists on the cellular level. DNA chemicals carry the genes of all of our ancestors. As Krishnamurti says, “You are the accumulated result of many centuries of man, his hopes and desires, his guilt and anxieties, his beliefs and goals, his fulfillments and frustrations, you are all that and more additions to it in recent times.”

What Gurdjieff calls real I is not the brain. It is not the body. It is not thought. Real I is a part of ones self that is beyond time. When time and thought cease to exist real I can come into being. Real I can use the body, the brain, and thought to maneuver in the every day world. But, it is this very use of these fragments of consciousness that trap man unless he remembers himself.

The field of education suffers from the same weakness that permeates every segment of our society. In business, government, medicine, and science the individuals who run the profession are all functioning at a level of consciousness that is far below their potential. Until we increase our level of consciousness we will continue to function at the level of mediocrity at which we now function.

The sense of failure that I carry deep within my unconscious has governed my life from childhood. It is reflected in my relationship with others. We can never see the unconscious burden that we carry throughout our lives. To catch those little pangs of failure is to take time photographs of your self. The sense of failure, shame, guilt, whatever your sorrow might be permeates each of your lower centers. One must die to these pictures in the same way that one must die to self-love.