- A Subjective Synopsis-
The participants in the first meeting included Mr. S, Ms. C, Mr. R, and myself. After entering the ritual chamber, we sat in a circular formation. Mr. S instructed us to find an acceptable position and then sit still without moving. He next guided us through steps of relaxation and into self-attention. It was very hard for me to maintain focus on my self and the sensations of being present, as my mind was wandering on thoughts of the day’s events and snippets of songs heard earlier in the day. As I became more relaxed, I was struck deeply by the significance of the existence of the phenomenon which I was experiencing and became very aware of the presence of the others in the room. Continuing to attempt self-attention, I slowly began to be aware of my bodily sensations in between the thoughts that continued to bubble up into consciousness sporadically. Following this process, I became very involved with this struggle of focusing inward until I was jolted back by Mr. S’s voice saying “Stop!”
After the reading of a passage that described some of the ideas behind the sitting exercise such as the idea of grounding oneself in the body as a baseline to be used in analyzing one’s self-work, we discussed questions. My question was involved with the intellectual centers constant interruptions during my sitting. I was actually somewhat distracted by worrying that I was not going to be able to gain much from this exercise since I could hardly even experience a few flashes of self-attention between my intellectual centers insistence on being in the drivers seat with a constant internal dialogue. I found the questions asked by others to be thought provoking and insightful. It is worth noting that during the discussion following the first sitting exercise, I noticed that my thoughts seemed to be much slower, yet my capability for understanding complex abstract ideas such as those asked in others questions was improved. I also did not feel like moving very much, but preferred to remain in the position I had taken during the sitting. (After scratching several nagging itches, of course!) This change in my thought process lasted until I got up and began to move again. We ended the first meeting with a new exercise to work on: to try to remember the self whenever one passed through a doorway.
The new exercise seemed quite easy when I first heard it, but I noticed that I had forgotten to remember myself when leaving the ritual chamber several minutes later as I was preparing to leave. This exercise was probably one of the most useful and painful things I have ever done to myself. Throughout the week, I would have flashes where I would remember that I had walked through numerous doors without being aware of myself. This process forced me to face the extent of my mechanical nature. Realizing the degree to which I had deluded myself regarding my ‘consciousness’ was a serious system shock which has not yet finished its work on me.
At the second meeting, we entered the ritual chamber and proceeded to assume a sitting position and begin attending to our selves. I took great care to try to assume good posture as the week before I had assumed a position with one leg slightly ahead of the other which had tilted my pelvis and made the effort of not moving excruciating. I was aware of a slow unwinding of my thoughts and tensions until I reached a deep relaxation. My intellectual center was perhaps slightly less intrusive, although the internal dialogue was still never far from my attention waiting for any opportunity to assert itself. My thoughts were distracted by the fact that I had not been very successful at the exercise of self-remembering. I wondered what the others would think when I told them the extent of my observation of mechanical behavior. Speaking first so as not to have to follow up a success story, I explained the difficulties I had encountered with the exercise. I felt that the positive side of the exercise had been that when I would remember that I had just walked through many doorways without self-remembering I would experience a flash of self-awareness. As it turned out, everyone else had similar experiences with the exercise. We discussed the difficulty of the Work, and the importance of remembering the reason behind our struggle. We discussed how difficult it is to truly face oneself, and various ways in which we avoid this process. We also added a new exercise of trying to do the sitting on a daily basis for the next week.
I was successful in performing the sitting exercise at home daily during the following week. I found it easier to experience short periods of self-attention without the internal dialogue on certain days. While I made little progress towards stopping the internal dialogue, I found the exercise useful for becoming aware of the particular state that my self was in each day. I began to be more aware of days when I was energetically up or down. This was useful to keep in mind when planning my daily activities. I continued to be amazed at how robotic and mechanical I was, and how rarely I experienced moments of awareness. It also seemed that my occasional self-awareness differed in quality from time to time, and I began to wonder if there was a spectrum to individual consciousness. I resolved to bring up this question at the next meeting.
During the third meeting, I sat on the floor as I had been doing at home. During the exercise, I managed to achieve several periods of attention without the internal dialogue. One bizarre sensation that brought the ‘explainer’ online was when during a period of quiet I had the distinct sensation of floating, and ended up feeling like I was floating sideways with my base perpendicular to gravity. This was sufficiently disorienting to bring back my internal dialogue. The posture I had taken began to become very painful, and for the last of the exercise my discomfort was dominating my awareness. It felt very good to be able to shift my body when we began the discussion. Ms. C read an account of one person’s experience with the work that was applicable to the process I had been going through. I discussed my frustrations with dealing with the unexpected consequences of increased self-knowledge and the realization that I had been deluding myself about my consciousness. We discussed the need for a school, and the idea that consciousness involves all of the centers working together and is not just a process of the intellectual center. After the formal part of the exercise, we toasted the idiots and then Ms. C treated us to a preparation of Mr. Gurdjieff’s Special Salad, a blend of many vegetables without a single shred of lettuce. Attempting to focus awareness on this nebulous taste sensation, it was amazing how the varied ingredients from radishes to olives to apples to tomatoes formed such an elusive synthesis. The fact that every bite tasted slightly different made it doubly hard to get a handle on the sensation of taste. It made me think about the analogy to sensation in our daily lives where it is much harder to focus because of the distracting nature of the immense amount of sense data barraging our attentional mechanisms. This added to my understanding of the usefulness of the sitting exercise.
The last week of the exercise proved painfully fruitful to me. As Icontinued to integrate and process my new self-knowledge, I became greatly intimidated by the sheer magnitude of the challenge before me. I began to realize that I would only truly know myself when I had found the permanent and essential self. Forcing myself to try to look at myself without delusion, I experienced a burning rage at much of what I saw. This self-dissatisfaction was made doubly painful by the realization that I had never even suspected the truth while imagining all sorts of delusional fantasies. While I had been aware of the sense of a ‘desire to become more and to know myself more truly’ prior to these exercises, I was blinded to many aspects of my self that I now began to observe.
