Let’s recap the last couple of blogs:
I had the unsettling experience of being in a dream state while awake.
What scared me, was the thought that my inner work is being done in a dream state. That I might not “wake up” until the moment of my death. Would I then die as Gurdjieff warns, like a “dirty dog?”
This possibility led me to consider the importance of “owning” my work. Which means I address what feels important to me. Own what I have come to understand. Work with the tools I have developed in this work. In other words, engage myself. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life following the dictums of what my teachers learned just because it was what engaged them.
Looking through that lens, I see that I have an aim connected to waking up. And I want to approach that in my own way. Follow my own threads. Like this thread that my recent work with dreams started. In fact, it’s led me back around to re-evaluating the Decision Exercise.
At Sherborne, we were taught this exercise in steps. The first steps I would do at night. The rest of the steps I did the next morning. The decision itself I carried out in the course of the day. I repeated these steps at night by recapping how the decision had been carried out and setting up for the next day’s decision.
The thing is, that over time I didn’t think I needed to follow all the steps. Especially the ones at night. Instead, I would do those as I was waking up. This was the reason I didn’t want to spend my waking moments remembering dreams. However, it was doing the very thing I didn’t want to do—recording dreams— that jump-started this whole line of enquiry.
The AHA From the Recap
What has suddenly occurred to me from this recap, is to wonder about the intention Bennett had when he composed the decision exercise the way he did.
Now I want to go back to setting it up the night before. I’m excited at the notion that by doing this, I am placing a conscious thought into my brain just before sleep. I can engaged this thought upon waking and connect it with all of myself throughout my “waking” day. My hope is that by working with decision, bringing intention to my “dream” states, I have a greater chance of being “awake.”
I don’t do the DEX anymore. I look around to see what needs to be done and do my best to discharge the act with presence and quality. We never run out of things to do or things needing to be done. The larger picture tends to make its way toward me no matter what. It might be borderline sacrilegious to admit as much but it is what it is and there it is. It helped me tremendously back in the day and I may one day feel a need to return to it. I’m open to the possibility.
I think once one seriously works with the DEX and it enters you, that it belongs to you. As in all things living and real, our inner work changes and grows with us. I also find it helpful to return to the basics now and then. Turns out even when we “start again” it is never from the same platform.