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"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
~ Lao Tzu
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Q: What is renunciation?
Ramana Maharshi: Giving up of the ego.
Q: Is it not giving up possessions?
Ramana Maharshi: The possessor too.
Talk 164
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Like a balloon, an inflated ego is always ready to pop. Like a tower of cards, someone who thinks highly of themselves is always ready to fall. This is why pride is actually neurotic. The more prideful someone is, the more they need to control everything around them. They have more to lose, more to worry about. But a humble mind is a healthy mind. It’s grounded and realistic. It’s at peace with what is. It doesn’t need to know everything.
Complex thoughts scatter our mental energy. But simple thoughts collect our mental energy. They make our minds strong and focused. And if we focus only on God, and not ourselves, we’ll eventually heal our traumatized and fractured brains. God loves us as we are. We don’t have to hide our sins from Him. The problem is, because we have pride, we can’t see ourselves as bad people. So, we hide our sins from ourselves.
We repress the memories and shove them into the subconscious, which is like a basement. And every so often, the basement floods, forcing all those memories back up at the same time, resulting in a mental breakdown. But the saints don’t have a subconscious anymore. God has reunified their broken brains with humility. Humility fills up the basement with concrete. There is no where for repressed memories to go.
This is because a humble person repents, and repentance is a light that illumines the darkest parts of our minds. The saints can clearly see all their own subconscious habits and patterns. They aren’t afraid to look at them because they accept they are sinful. And since they are watchful over themselves, they can deal with these problems right away by bringing their focus back on God. This is the whole spiritual war!
It’s against ourselves. It’s a battle for true psychological and spiritual health. It’s a fight for freedom from our own anxious egos and demanding desires. Our neurosis convinces us liberation is found in getting what we want. But this only feeds the parasite that is the false personality. This only enslaves us to ourselves even more. The demons want us to think external things are the problem. They want us distracted and delusional.
They want us puffed up so they can pop us! So, true humility isn’t self-hatred. It’s actually spiritual protection. It’s divine dignity. It doesn’t justify itself or defend itself. The only validation it needs is from God. It doesn’t beg to be understood or seen. It respects itself by respecting the image of Christ within. It doesn’t desecrate the temple and pollute itself with sin. So, holiness isn’t a religious thing either. It’s just God offering us wholeness!
The saints say man is mud that God commanded to become a god. We are made of both dirt and the divine. So, we shouldn’t get any big ideas about ourselves. But we shouldn’t doubt ourselves either. Self-doubt is fake humility anyways. It’s still too focused on itself. A healthy and humble mind is also a balanced mind! It can’t be tossed to and fro, and swayed back and forth. Like a balloon, it doesn’t get lost in the clouds. It’s not entitled. So, it can’t be disappointed. In fact, it sees itself as deserving of nothing but Hell. But it doesn’t despair either, because it hopes in God’s infinite mercy.
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The first obstacle to spiritual development is the overcoming of egotism.
And much of this egotism operates unconsciously.
We are so accustomed to measuring ourselves against others that even our spiritual development can become an extension of our desire for superiority.
We want to know more.
We want to progress further.
We want to be more advanced than those around us.
But this attitude prevents us from developing.
The development of the higher self must begin with an entirely different relationship toward our fellow human beings.
We must first cultivate an infinite trust in another person when they tell us about their experiences of a higher nature.
This does not mean blindly accepting everything another person claims to have experienced.
It means overcoming the ego's tendency to dismiss another person's experiences simply because we have not experienced the same things ourselves.
Why?
Because we must learn to seek the higher self not only within ourselves, but also in other human beings.
Our lower self experiences separation.
It compares, distinguishes and constantly measures its position against others.
But the higher self is not separate.
At the level of our higher nature, the boundaries that divide us lose their ultimate significance.
The higher self of another human being belongs to the same universal spiritual reality.
When someone stands before us who has progressed further along the spiritual path, we must overcome the feeling that this person possesses an advantage over us.
Instead, we must learn to regard that person with the same reverence with which we would regard our own highest nature.
Our instinct is often to question or find reasons why another person cannot possibly know something that we do not.
But spiritual development demands the opposite.
Try to live yourself into this feeling until it penetrates the most intimate fibers of your soul.
Until the impulse to compete with or feel inferior to another human being gradually disappears.
"Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
The child possesses something that the adult often loses:
the capacity for genuine veneration.
Not blind obedience.
Not intellectual submission.
But an openness to recognize something greater than oneself, with a reverence that arises from the innermost heart.
This is where spiritual development begins.
Not with visions, secret knowledge or the desire to acquire supernatural abilities.
But with a transformation of our relationship toward other human beings.
The overcoming of egotism.
The cultivation of trust.
And the rediscovery of reverence.
The greatest obstacle to finding our higher self is our inability to recognize it in others.
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The Mirror of the Heart
Al-Ghazali develops this idea further through another image: the heart as a mirror.
The heart also has the capacity to receive and reflect divine light. But like a mirror covered in dust and rust, it can become obscured by disordered passions, resentment, harmful habits, and attachment to worldly things.
A clean mirror reflects clearly. A tarnished mirror distorts what it receives or fails to reflect it at all.
The work of spiritual purification is to remove what prevents the heart from receiving and reflecting it.
This is the deeper meaning of the alchemy. The base metal represents the heart obscured by its accumulated impurities, while the gold represents the heart transformed through purification.
Prayer, dhikr (remembrance of God), fasting, self-examination, and the discipline of one’s appetites all contribute to this transformation.
The tradition calls this spiritual striving mujāhadah: the effort to resist the domination of lower impulses and cultivate the qualities necessary for a rightly ordered soul.
As the mirror becomes clearer, the heart becomes increasingly receptive to the knowledge of God.
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There is a phase on the spiritual path that no one talks about.
The phase where nothing seems to happen.
No visions.
No inspiration.
No revelations.
Only disciplined effort.
Most people expect spiritual development to feel rewarding.
They expect signs of progress, confirmation that the work is paying off.
But often the opposite happens.
The old sources of satisfaction begin to lose their power, while higher perception has not yet awakened.
The student finds himself between 2 worlds.
No longer fully nourished by the old life.
Not yet able to perceive the new.
The ego immediately begins asking:
Am I progressing?
Is this working?
Why am I experiencing nothing?
Yet this is often where the deepest work begins.
Dr Steiner repeatedly warns that impatience has a deadening effect on higher development.
Why?
Because impatience always demands.
It wants results.
It wants certainty.
It wants the spiritual world to reveal itself according to its own timetable.
But the student can prepare himself without being able to command the result.
Like a farmer preparing the soil and planting seeds, he can create the conditions for growth, but he cannot force the seed to sprout.
Spiritual development follows the same law.
The task is to study, meditate, observe, and refine oneself without constantly asking what will be received in return.
Eventually even the motivation must change.
The desire for experiences must give way to a genuine Love of truth itself.
Patience is not simply waiting.
Patience is remaining inwardly awake when nothing appears to be happening.
It is continuing the work when life feels completely ordinary.
Many abandon the path here because they mistake the absence of stimulation for the absence of growth.
But a seed underground appears inactive.
A tree in winter appears lifeless.
Yet both are undergoing invisible preparation.
The soul is not different.
The silence is not necessarily the absence of development.
The absence of reward does not mean the work is without value.
Higher faculties cannot be forced into existence.
They emerge gradually as the soul becomes capable of bearing them.
Do not mistake the desert for failure.
Sometimes the most important work is the work you cannot yet perceive.
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There are just two kinds of people;
The ones who think that they are the victim of the world, and those who understand that they are the world.
-Alan Watts
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I used to be a language lawyer. In the late 80s I _studied_ the ARM (Annotated Reference Manual for C++). I knew the language cold, inside and out. I could make it do backflips. I shipped a lot of code using it. A LOT.
I’ve attacked other languages with a similar intensity and depth. Until recently, that was simply the only way to become adept at building software systems.
I now consider the deep understanding of a language to be a supreme waste of time and effort. I don’t want to learn Rust, or Golang, or Typescript, or any of the thousands of other languages out there. I’ll leave that to my agents.
What I need now is to understand the high level gestalt of the system. I want to see the systems and subsystems. I don’t need to inspect the cogs. If I truly need to understand a detail at the cog level, I’ll interrogate my agents. I’m not going to pretend to be a language expert anymore.
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George Gurdjieff’s Self Remembering: An Ultimate Guide — Richard Ruach
SELF OBSERVATION: THE FOUNDATION
Self Observation is the prerequisite to Self Remembering. It is the study of the human machine and its three cylinders: intellectual, emotional, and moving.
This is Personality: the human mask shaped by heredity and the outside world. (More detail in the comments.)
Self Remembering is NOT Self Observation. It rests on a different teaching: the distinction between Personality and Essence.
ESSENCE is the “Divine spark,” the eternal element that passes from life to life. Personality is formed in this lifetime; Essence is perennial.
Self Observation is a technique. Self Remembering is a state of consciousness and being.
THE FOUR LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Gurdjieff describes four levels:
1. Sleep.
2. Ordinary, everyday consciousness.
3. The awakened state (sometimes called Self Remembering).
4. Objective consciousness.
The technique for entering Self Remembering is DIVIDED ATTENTION (see diagram in comments).
DIVIDED ATTENTION: THE KEY
Imagine someone looking at a tree. An ordinary person sees the tree, but may not notice the representations and associations arising within them.
Divided attention means remaining aware of your inner world while also attending to your surroundings. Consciousness becomes BIDIRECTIONAL rather than moving in one direction; eventually, it can become MULTIDIRECTIONAL.
For example, imagine suddenly becoming sad while walking down the street, without knowing why. Through Self Observation, you would recognize why the sadness arose.
THE SECRET THIRD THING
With sustained practice, you may sense a “secret third thing” (Essence) observing the process: the arising and entering of an impression.
This is neither thought nor emotion. You are turning away from the human machine (Persona).
RECOGNIZING SELF REMEMBERING
P.D. Ouspensky describes its “flavor” as similar to being a child visiting a place you have never been before—not nostalgia or the “inner child.”
The state is slippery: you can enter it and lose it without noticing. Someone speaks to you, and suddenly it is gone.
Do not force or manipulate it. Remain as natural as possible.
Richard Ruach offers another technique, ROLLING ATTENTION, to maintain the state. See the comments for my notes and his fuller explanation.
THE GENIUS MIND AND THE FILTER
A genius can filter out distractions and concentrate on one thought. A chess master, for example, filters out bad moves rather than calculating every possibility.
But an extremely strong filter can disconnect you from reality. Intellectual people therefore struggle with Self Remembering.
The aim is not to strengthen the filter, but to LOOSEN it, allowing consciousness to expand and experience the world. This may help explain why geniuses sometimes have breakthroughs while dreaming.
THE EFFECTS OF SELF REMEMBERING
The area of consciousness expands and more impressions enter. You notice things previously overlooked; perhaps you hear something new or the world seems more vivid.
When looking at another person, an image or reaction may arise within you. Ruach describes this as not coming from you, but as that person’s internal world. He calls it “Extra-Normal Phenomenological Perception” (like telepathy, but not exactly).
Do NOT get caught up in this. Thinking about “having telepathy” can pull you out of Self Remembering.
BEING-PARTKDOLG-DUTY: THE DEATH OF THE OLD SELF
Everything in the human machine has arrived from an external place. Through Self Remembering, you attempt to draw solar force into the machine and reorganize it into something else.
Gurdjieff calls this “Being-Partkdolg-Duty” in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson.
This is death: the old self is replaced by Essence.
It brings to mind Christ’s words:
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
— John 3:3
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Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.
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Be quiet in your mind, quiet in your senses, and also quiet in your body. Then, when all these are quiet, don't do anything. In that state, truth will reveal itself to you.
Kabir
