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COLD APPROACHING as SPIRITUAL TRAINING -GURDJIEFF
The Mechanics of the First Conscious Shock:
The First Conscious Shock is Self-Remembering at the moment of intake.
When an intense impression hits you—like stepping up to cold-approach a woman—your organism registers a threat. In an unconscious state, the impression triggers panic, your heart races, and you walk away (leaking H48). This drains your life force, burning energy mechanically.
BUT If, at that exact second, you apply Self-Remembering ("I am here, observing this fear in my chest"), you introduce a conscious shock. That shock acts as a catalyst: it transforms the raw impression (H48) into H12.
H12 represents the refined energy that fuels higher consciousness. Under normal conditions, the human organism produces H12 in minuscule amounts because self remembering goes missing during everyday life.
When you walk toward a stranger in public:
The brain registers potential social exile or rejection as physical danger. It floods your system with adrenaline.
H12 Generation:
--Conscious Path: You feel the surge of fear, acknowledge the impulse to run, and you refuse to identify with it. You raise your voice, step into the interaction, and hold your ground while your chest is burning.
The Result: The intense friction between your conscious aim and your physical fear acts as the heat source. It takes the raw, chaotic impression of fear and cooks it into H12.
When you finish the interaction—regardless of whether she responds warmly or walks away—you notice a distinct physical state: you feel hyper-present, electrified, calm, and rooted. That electricity is the presence of H12 circulating through your moving and emotional centers.
This is alchemy.
Dr Robert Gilbert on Psychadelics:
In their true form, psychedelics are clairvoyant inducing, they become hallucinogenic if the energy centers are not properly activated and balanced prior to.
People will get tired after a trip cause it’s a shock retraction of the etheric body back into the physical body.
The dose makes the poison (Paracelsus)
There is NO ESCAPE —Steiner
Escaping from the world is not his ultimate goal. He has capacity for work and industry and does not want to be a saint in the distance, but a saint in the world. It is not esoteric to go one's way, absorbed in oneself, when there is much to see, to learn and to do outside. And the work of such a person must be the outward expression of his inner being. Therefore, separation based on misunderstanding must give way to holiness in the service of humanity.
Why Initiates are hard to Find (GA 240)
When I speak again and again of a number of ancient Initiates, of teachers and priests in the Mysteries, you are bound to ask yourselves: Where are they to be found? Why are they not living among us at the present time? Now an individuality with great spiritual enlightenment in an earlier life can work in a later life only through the medium of the body and the education afforded by that later epoch. But for a long time now, the character of education has made it impossible for what once lived in these Initiate-souls to express itself. They are obliged to operate in quite different forms of life and only those endowed with a power of intimate observation are able to realise that men in whom the Initiate is not apparent in the later earthly life have nevertheless passed through lives during which they reached Initiation.
—Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner on Impatience in Spiritual Training:
A particular kind of discipline must be patiently attempted. Every emotion of impatience produces a paralysing, nay, even a deadening, effect on the higher faculties latent within us. One must not expect immeasurable glimpses of the higher worlds to open out before one from day to day, for assuredly, as a rule, this does not occur. Content with the smallest attainment, repose and tranquillity must more and more possess the soul. It is conceivable, of course, that the learner should impatiently expect results but he will attain to nothing so long as he fails to master this impatience.
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It is only by repeatedly surrendering oneself to a single definite thought, and by making it absolutely one's own, that anything is really attained. One should think: “I must certainly do everything possible for the culture of soul and spirit, but I will wait tranquilly until, by higher powers, I shall be found worthy of definite illumination.” —Rudolf Steiner
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Ancient Baptism was not like today. It was a means to a near death experience.
The disciple was submerged in water, resulting in a certain separation of the etheric from the physical body; and thus he could attain to a survey of his life and become aware of the connection of this individual life with the regions of the divine-spiritual world. To make it a little clearer, we can say that when the submersion was successful it produced in the disciple the conviction: I have spirit within me; I am not just a being in this physical-material body; and this spirit within me is one with the spirit underlying all things.—And he knew in addition that the Spirit Whom he thus confronted was the same that Moses had perceived in the fire of the burning bush and in the lightning on Sinai as Jahve, as I am the I AM, as ehjeh asher ehjeh. All this was revealed to him through the baptism by John.
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diego retweeted
Every moment of experience serves as an intake of impressions (H48). Mechanical, routine situations produce low-intensity impressions that easily slide into default identification or mind-wandering.
Uncomfortable or chaotic events—sudden pain, social tension, physical confrontation, intense friction—burst with massive amounts of vivid psychological energy. If you react mechanically, that raw force converts directly into negative emotions, fear, or involuntary tension (degrading down to lower hydrogens like H96 or H192). However, if you step back inside yourself and maintain the dual awareness of I am here, experiencing this, that intense input acts as high-grade fuel, immediately transforming into H12.
Every moment of experience serves as an intake of impressions (H48). Mechanical, routine situations produce low-intensity impressions that easily slide into default identification or mind-wandering.
Uncomfortable or chaotic events—sudden pain, social tension, physical confrontation, intense friction—burst with massive amounts of vivid psychological energy. If you react mechanically, that raw force converts directly into negative emotions, fear, or involuntary tension (degrading down to lower hydrogens like H96 or H192). However, if you step back inside yourself and maintain the dual awareness of I am here, experiencing this, that intense input acts as high-grade fuel, immediately transforming into H12.
diego retweeted
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
Gurdjieff on the Absurdity of "TOMORROW"
(Beezlebub's Tales)
“Thanks to the disease “tomorrow,” the three brained beings there almost always put off till later everything that needs to be done at the moment, being convinced that later they will do better and more.”
“Thanks to the abnormal hope of theirs a very singular and most strange disease called “tomorrow” arose.”
“By putting off till tomorrow those unfortunate beings there are deprived of all possibility of ever attaining anything real.”
“This strange disease “tomorrow” has already become a hindrance for the beings of contemporary times because they have been deprived of all chance of removing the crystallized consequences of the properties of the organ kundabuffer(illusion hypnotic sleep) but it has also become a hindrance in honestly completing normal obligations of ordinary hypnotic existence.”
“By putting off till tomorrow almost all arrive at one sorrowful day of old age toward the end of their completed existence.”
