What is this wanting to remember? I saw last week that when something in me, like my self-interest, is involved it wakes me up. I was entering a room for a meeting and suddenly remembered to sense the doorknob. A task I had set and failed to accomplish a short time earlier. In the split second of opening the door while sensing my hand, I saw my perception of self-importance. It wanted to remember and so it did. It’s easy to want to do something when self-interest is involved. How about the rest of the time? How does that wanting to remember, to be present, fill me more often; become more available?
What Wants to Remember?
There is a part of me that’s been there, done that. I once had the short-lived experience of constant self-awareness. I was in a heightened state and doing it—remembering in every moment. But guess what? Time played with me. For every second that I remembered, there was a milli-second where I didn’t. My state was so attenuated that in those milliseconds of forgetting, a chasm opened. The result was a profound understanding of Gurdjieff’s dictum, “Man cannot do.” Twenty years in the work just to understand—Man cannot Do! I fell into a chasm between those milliseconds. A question was left echoing within, “Why try then?”
So here I am, years later, trying again. Only this time something needs to be different. This time I hope something is different. My approach is slower, based more on my own enquiry and experience of myself. Less on depending on the teaching. I’ve been to school; I’ve applied my lessons and now it’s time to make something of it. What can I piece-together of this Gurdjieff work that’s real, that is my own?
How Can I Work?
Which brings me back to this notion of wanting to be present. My want needs to come from a place other than self-interest. It needs to come from “all of myself” as Gurdjieff would say. I know I can’t orchestrate this, that the want must be uncontrived; organic. Like an infusion that fills me but is not identified with myself. Like a deflated lawn windsock filling up.
My sense is that this can’t be achieved directly. That an ineffable “something” must grow and solidify in me. What I see as my work now is to allow the “something” to grow, undisturbed by too much attention, while continuing to work at feeding presence. I do this by blending the feeling that I call want with my physical sensation.
I breath in: “I” awakening the feeling of wanting, calling upon a higher source “Lord.”
I breath out: “Am” connecting the word with “Have Mercy” as I sense my arm or leg.
Blending energies in the kitchen of my body with the ingredients of sensation, feeling and mental awareness, I prepare a meal to nourish the “something” that is more than myself yet requires all of myself.