Saturday, October 1, 2022
5 a.m. I feel like something within me is waking up, just as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and Colin Wilson would describe. Yesterday, it slept, and I could not gear up to do anything.
Once again I am at the stage of looking around and wanting to take inventory of what I can do, should do. “Alcott’s Orphic Sayings,” for instance. And as usual I am in mind of Mark Twain’s brother whose name I can never remember, who woke up every day with new aspirations in a totally futile life.
All right, gentlemen, if you have a topic in mind, fine. If not, perhaps we can discuss sleep.
Let’s discuss your dilemma in re information from books v. information from us.
That would be highly appropriate.
You were going to ask if what you have experienced since Tuesday is indeed a form of sleep of some higher part of yourself, and you wouldn’t be nervous about asking about it if it were not that Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and Wilson had expressed not mere opinions but flat judgments on the subject.
That’s true.
You have never claimed omniscience. That goes for us as brought forth by you. If we’re “wrong,” we’re wrong. But surely our recent clarification of the nature of right and wrong ought to help ease that particular knot.
It did. Seeing right and wrong (that is, truth and error) as relative to a point of view, rather than as fixed points on a scale, did reduce the authority for me of external sources. It is as Thoreau said, it’s all hearsay to me until experience confirms it.
Then the last piece of the problem is this: You are concerned about what a given thought or discussion will reveal about your judgment. But maybe this has less to do with your judgment than with your receptivity.
It still feels a little reckless, until I remember that nobody (I hope) takes my word for it. Sparks, not gospel. So, sleep?
Since you felt it, it should be clear to you. Probably would be clear to you, if you hadn’t read it long ago.
Ironic, but true.
Just as long as you realize it, you can free yourself from that reaction. Not yours alone, of course – not by a long chalk.
I suppose I should explain that Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson picked it up too, and I picked it up from all three of them: Something within us sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, and when it sleeps, we can do no work on ourselves. (This has nothing to do with the busyness of our days.) “No work can be done in sleep.” And sometimes we can feel, we can experience, that something, waking up. So, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I functioned on one level, but was not functioning on a higher level. Which makes me ask: Am I ever talking with you while I am asleep? Am I ever prolonging my internal wakefulness by remembering to stay in touch with you? Does that internal rhythm require periodic sleep in the same way our external rhythm does?
Interrelated questions. Do you begin to suspect that you are currently awake again?
Smiling. But how about some answers?
You could answer all this, without leaning on our presumed authority.
Perhaps, but it would be easier to write it as you formulate it, than to have to do both.
Your underlying question ties to one you have been asking yourself recently and half-forgetting between asking: “What was it I wanted to accomplish, so long ago?”
It’s true. I haven’t been able to remember what I wanted to do when I was in my twenties, burning. And now, yes, I remember. I wanted to live at a higher level, to live awake, to have higher goals and pursue them. But it is so hard to do that on your own, with no school to help you, no colleagues to help you wake up when you fall asleep, no road map, no hints even, as to how to tie an external 3D life to an internal 3D life. And as I write this now, I remember, and I wonder than I ever could have forgotten. But that is exactly the problem. The million details of 3D life confuse our aim; they distract us; they set out illusions – mirages – and we get lost, pursuing them.
Yet, your situation is not hopeless, nor desperate even. Provided that you maintain unbending intent, you will return to the quest every time you wake up again. But the problem is, how do you connect the dots? How do you remember the intent after you have been asleep?
Exactly.
Well, how did you?
I didn’t do it very consistently. And decades went by without my being able to connect inner and outer. In 3D life I was one thing, doing this or that, groping through darkness, or, heavy fog, anyway. In non-3D – no, I can’t put it that way, because we’re talking about my mental structure within my 3D life only. Let’s say, internally, I was yearning for some path I could not find.
You are going to want to slow way down, to get this.
Presence I have. Receptivity, clarity, I have.
Yes, just approach this calmly. You didn’t recognize that you were actually in a state of some agitation. That does not aid clarity.
I see it as you point it out. Okay. So your question was, how did I maintain intent, to the degree that I did.
The qualifier is yours, not ours. We have no complaints about your performance.
To say it clearly:
- My internal life – careers, family, relationships pleasant and unpleasant, productive and counterproductive – were one thing.
- My internal life was something else. It touched on the external life, but it sure wasn’t identical to it.
- No wonder I had such trouble formulating ambitions or carrying them out once formulated: They were all peripheral to what I really wanted. And, I think I knew that in many ways, external success would lead away from what I really wanted.
- Only, it was so hard to realize or remember what I really wanted. Even when I remembered it, where was there any pathway to it?
- I see now, I haven’t been seeing the significance of Gateway and Monroe in the right context. I have been thinking of Gateway (accurately enough) as the beginning of my conscious life. I have been thinking of the Monroe community – the participants, more than the organization – as a community I had never had. I have been forgetting that all this is peripheral.
- The real importance of Monroe’s tapes and the programs and the shared experiences with the friends I made is that it was my only connector of my external and internal life.
That could be better phrased.
It was a pathway, of sorts. It was a way to do something as well as want something. That’s still not a very good way to say it, but if you have a better way, please provide it.
It helped you stay awake, by giving you something your 3D mind could use to remain consciously connected to your non-3D mind.
This is going to involve a redefinition, isn’t it?
It is only a nuance. We have said all along that mental processes are non-3D in nature, as opposed to 3D limitations. But surely all your life experience teaches you that you have one mind focused on the 3D world around you – your ego mind, call it (with no intent to denigrate “ego” which is a useful and necessary part of your Self) – and another mind that primarily functions in another non-3D sphere.
You, in other words.
Let’s say, that mind is how you communicate with us. But your guys upstairs are not necessarily “yours” in the sense of exclusivity. That’s a side point. The main point, the important point here, is that you have three minds – and you know this, only you have not be relating what else you know to this subject.
As you mention it, I remember, Max Freedom Long, and Hank Wesselman, and the three levels of mind, yes. It’s true, I hadn’t associated them.
Well, your one mind deals with the body, your other mind deals with body-plus-soul, let’s say, and your third mind represents your footing outside of 3D. If that third mind sleeps, your second and first mind can’t really do anything about it but wait for it to wake up.
But we don’t think of higher mind sleeping.
Well, perhaps you should begin to consider it.
You learned to live a more connected life. You didn’t know how to do it, but your intent pulled you to it. That’s what intent does, if you let it.
We’re going to have to continue this another time, I guess.
We’re here when you’re here – only, consider: Does what we discussed today shed any light on why sometimes you can’t connect? Think about that and we’ll talk about it.
All right. Today’s theme, I guess, is mindfulness, only that doesn’t seem to get it.
Try “Waking and sleeping.”
That may do. Very well, thanks for this as always. And if it is to you that I owe such continuity as I have experienced, thanks for that too.
We can talk about it.