Notes From the Underground:1987

Notes From the Underground: 1987

The kingdom of heaven cannot be taken violently. I rush myself and try to make super effort. All my attempts to enter a higher level of consciousness by my own means only show that I cannot do. I need to step back and fine tune to a more passive Do…

Nicoll says that to enter higher consciousness on must do violence to the violence in oneself.

I am beginning to understand what the formatory center is. We filter all incoming impressions through our associations and never see anything as it really is. When we remember ourselves, each center responds to incoming impressions without previous associations. All incoming impressions and the different centers responses are registered in the consciousness of any given moment.

Another chief feature is my shame of being poor which was born in my early childhood. As a result, my aim for the past ten years has been to publish my writing and grow rich.

The world that we see is an illusion because we see only through the limited vision of our senses. I focus on a flight of sea gulls and follow their northward flight until they disappear from sight. I then pick up a smaller flight that is heading south. I am no longer conscious of the flight of gulls that is flying to the north, but their journey through time-space continues. I no longer sense this same time last winter, but the I who journeyed through time-space back then is not separate from the I that I sense at this moment.

The unconscious is everything that we are not conscious of; this includes the limitations of our perception and also that part of the world that cannot be known through sensual perception. The invisible world of atoms, the world of the spirit, the world of past and future are all a part of our unconscious.

I sit on my spot trying to remember myself. A flight of several hundred sea gulls flying in groups of twelve to twenty passes overhead at about five hundred feet. Just below the gray puffy clouds at three thousand feet four wild ducks make their way southward. More gulls come into view stretching the winter sky from one horizon to the other. For an hour or more the sky is heavy with the southward movement of the gulls.

As I sit beneath the sky it strikes me that the world of man awake is of another dimension. In our self-inflicted sleep, we immediately identify and are crucified by impressions that are of such poor quality when compared to conscious impressions. There are ‘I’s in myself that doubt the truth of the Work, ‘I’s that feel that the glimpses of truth that I have are just self-induced trance. However, when you see the world with three or more centers at the same time, you know without reservation that the world beyond the normal level of consciousness is the world that we were born to experience.

“When you begin to realize that you see the truth of things in fragments… That you can only see in fragments. Then you got it.” Alex tells me.

Seeing the valley sky and my true relation to it, I appear as diamond sparkle of dew would appear to my own eyes.

You can be conscious in more than one center at the same time. That is the key, I tell myself as I sit on my spot thinking about Alex’s description of Orage’s comparison of time to a string of beads. You can be conscious of more than on bead at a time, and then time changes.

Let things be… Don’t interfere… Everything happens for the best… These were philosophical truths that guided my relationship to the world before I started reading Gurdjieff. And, it is only now that I realize that these truths that came from Henry Miller and Krishnamurti are meant for men who have already awakened. Those of us who are still asleep must become conscious of those forces that keep us in sleep. We must learn to not go with forces that keep us at this level of sleep. It is true that we cannot do at this level, but we can stop doing. We cannot go with our own conscience until we begin to hear that quiet voice.

One must awaken before one can die to all attachment. Because everyone is certain that he or she alone is awake, this first step is most difficult. All esoteric teaching says, “One must awaken… Then die… And then be born again…” “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…”

The aim in my writing should be to show a man evolving from a mechanical sleeping being to one at a higher level of consciousness, toward Awakening and Self Remembering.

My aim in the Work is to create Observing I in myself. I need to start again toward the other stool. Gurdjieff says something like; “Happy is he on the first stool. A thousand times happier is he on the other. But woe and suffering to him between stools.” When we see the world from the second stool, when we truly remember ourselves in an eternal moment, one also sees the work that we must do to remain on the second stool. We fall off the stool and go back to the struggle to become conscious of the ‘I’s that are most mechanical. You go back to work through cosmic laws that you still don’t understand.

When you reach the note Fa… you remember yourself. To get to this point, you must dismiss all the false images that you say I to. You have to give up everything, especially your suffering. You have to realize that your aim to become one with self-consciousness is the only thing that really matters.

Animals are two-dimensional beings living in a three dimensional world. They perceive all impressions without the use of concepts. Without concepts, there can be no abstractions. Each house is a separate entity for a dog. In Self Remembering, concepts direct one to go beyond the two dimensional view of the world to a three dimensional view which when one sees from three or more centers takes one out of the third dimension.

When we are identified with personality, we can never reach a true relationship with our planetary world. The artificial environment created by our mechanical ‘I’s keeps us separate from the Earth. One doesn’t have to be in touch with higher centers to sense the vastness of nature. All it takes is a moment of Self Remembering.

Sunday morning bird song fills my hearing as this frosty December morning mixes with Self Remembering. A flight of sea gulls stretches out time and the valley as it goes on and on for more than an hour from the Cardenas Straits to Salt Lake City. Gulls streak by in threes and fours spread out for a mile. Then the sky is empty for some five minutes or so. A lone gull enters the empty space at about five hundred feet. In thirty seconds five hundred gulls are in the space that the long gull rode. Fifty feet or so above the gulls fifty or so long necked geese fly in three V shaped squadrons. A single black bird whistles past my ear just above the backyard fence.

The geese bore deeper into the east and I realize that the sky world doesn’t end at the horizon. Our Earth is a part of the sky world; that empty space that is both inner and outer goes on beyond the comprehension of the senses and includes all that is.