We imagine that we are just one single ‘I’—‘I’ brush my teeth, ‘I’ go to work, ‘I’ play with my kids, ‘I’ get angry, ‘I’ think, ‘I’ feel tired, ‘I’ dig the garden, ‘I’ shell peas, and so on; talking & thinking in a language with ‘ego’, we are bamboozled by the linguistic necessity of sticking a pronoun in front of a verb (action word) into thinking that the pronoun represents one identifiable entity; for instance, it appears that there’s just one active phenomenon, one ‘I’, to cover every one of the foregoing examples of possible actions. That’s not the case: every one of our actions engages a different part of our selves. We are many ‘I’s. Multiple-I’s. There’s a different ‘I’ comes into play in each context; ‘I’s are context-specific.

And what about the ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’?—without thinking, ‘we’ (all our many parts) assume that each of those is a single entity whereas, in fact, each of them, like us, is made up of Multiple-I’s—when talking to another person, some part of us rarely, if ever, speaks to the same ‘I’ twice running; they shift around inside themselves just as we do. “That’s not what you said yesterday…” “well, it was a different part of me speaking yesterday…”

Imagining that we are just one single unified ‘I’ is the source of many human tensions and screw-ups. ‘I can’t understand it… Yesterday I was on top of the world but today I feel as though I’ve fallen apart…’ Analysing this statement we can find at least four completely different ‘I’s: Not-being-able-to-understand-I, Being-on-top-of-the-world-I, Feeling-I, Falling-apart-I. You certainly would be confused if you felt that it was a single unified ‘I’ that went through so many changes in one sentence.

Controlling-I

On the other hand, would it not be useful to discover somewhere in your Being a rather, on the face of it, superior ‘I’ that was able to stand back, or stand aside, from all this confusion and gain a measure of control over it? What will we call it when we find it? A Standing-back-I, a Standing-aside-I, a Being-capable-of-exerting-a-measure-of-control-I? Not really superior at all—just standing in a different place.

‘Invent your own words,’ said Ouspensky. ‘We need a new vocabulary,’ said Gurdjieff. The old words always lock us into a system of thinking; the words we have at our disposal create the world we imagine we live in; the words we use cause us to think in particular ways—this comes out of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If we had another lot of words we would contrive things to turn out differently. Things would be different, not necessarily better; but it might give sufficient pause for choices to be made that would improve our construction of reality, make it richer, maybe.

And then, of course, whatever new words we invent become old even as they spill out over our tongues.

For instance, Gurdjieff referred to a new (now old) concept ‘Deputy Steward’, the part of us that learns to look after our unruly household (the inside of us) provisionally until the Master of the house arrives back off his (or her) long holiday. We are unable to keep control over the complexity of our Being until we achieve some level of Higher Being. Until then we are not worth the name ‘human’—we are simply ‘man’ (or ‘woman’) in quotation marks.

Until the Master arrives back from Brighton or Coney Island, or wherever she’s been, the unruly household consists of an undifferentiated collection of ‘I’s all squabbling with each other. There’s a loss of control.

Somehow or the other, while I was exploring the practical application of the Multiple-I (a key Fourth Way idea, especially in Maurice Nicoll’s Commentaries) concept for coaching, control, creativity and cognising (etc), something in me hit upon the notion of Meta-I. It no doubt came from my long experience with NLP where there’s stress on ‘going meta’—going beyond or outside of the way things appear to be in order to get a view from a higher or parallel level, wherever and/or whatever that might be. There you can gain a different perspective on a relationship, on the way language works, on the way we are programmed to behave in certain specified ways.

Standing in a different place, there’s at least the opportunity to do something different with your life.

In my practice, this would entail simply moving aside from a pattern of ‘I’s worked out on the floor with bits of paper depicting separate ‘I’s as they came up in a coaching session; once one’s squabbling, or at least hitherto undefined ‘I’s, are laid out for inspection one can literally look at them from a different vantage point. The invention of this process happened by accident. On the spur of the moment,  I asked the person I was working with to go right away from the pattern of ‘I’s we’d worked out together and see what it looked like from a distance. This was the birth of Meta-I.  I didn’t think it out at all—it just seemed to be the thing to do at that particular time.

Transatlantic Working

I worked with my friend Patrick Lowery in this way across the Atlantic rather than over a carpet. We discussed his inspired application of the concept by email over several months.

He said recently: -

Deputy Steward, Master-I, and Meta-I all resonate with me. It goes back to what Gurdjieff  and many others have said over & over again: human beings are abnormal… In G circles everything has to be verified, but we forget to do it. What does this all mean, the whole system, all the teachings, Objective Reason, Objective Conscience in our Consciousness? We try and pin things down [with names]—that is abnormal, a type of sickness. We [are inclined to think that we] can’t possibly be living in and around something so simple & pure—that would be insane. It’s abnormal [for instance] to say— show me your Meta I, but we [you and I] think it’s normal. [For us] it’s abnormal to say you’re just making that up, prove it!

We [3-brained beings] want things to be literal and true. We teach that to kids from the start by saying—No that’s not going to help you in the future. When someone comes along and does something that others don’t do we throw stones at them, but isn’t this exactly what G’s grandmother advised? [“In life never do as others do... Either do nothing—just go to school—or do something nobody else does...”] And isn’t this what happened to Christ but we turn it upside down and it becomes the word of God, nothing could be more abnormal…

You and I are swimming amongst the stars in our own unorthodox way, shambled, rough, bumping into other stars, plunging into darkness, collecting and discarding, losing our centre, but the dance and the music, and the cosmic joke IS.

The only thing that matters is what works. The rest is our own efforts and for me it’s working with the stuff found here on earth…

What’s It Like When You Go Into Meta-I?

There are some simple observations that can be made when a person directs their energy and makes an effort to enter this state of being. One thing that happens is my heart rate slows down, and this allows for more energy. The next thing is all my conflicting ‘I’s shift, and so whatever I might have been getting hung-up about is suddenly both seen and felt through a new lens, or from a new perspective, from a distance. This allows me to become more centred, and thus able to move on to the next thing, which is what I was conflicted about in the first place. Meta-I is like an emotional baggage handler, it is something in us that is able to sort out our crap with relative ease, so we can get on with life. This description is a small sample of its practical application. It also opens up our senses and sensations to where we are, and is a marvelous source for creative writing, or painting, music, etc…

If I’m imagining all this then that’s OK, but I am sure our design, our inscape, our bodies and minds, leans out in this direction. It is and should be as natural as rain, a fountain to clear things up.

So getting into Meta-I, whether there is such a thing or not, is the place to be when you want to stand aside from anything that is in some way bothersome. It’s a a kind of neutral place, a point of stasis, a place where anything can be made to happen, where things can be taken forward free from baggage and preconceptions…

Meta-I also allows for learning. My interest in these things is also part of my interest in education, and how a classroom could function if these ideas were part of the curriculum. There are so many ideas floating around in my mind about developing lesson plans based on Meta-I and so much of what we’ve talked about for the past few years. This isn’t to say this doesn’t take practice, and I haven’t stressed enough about how important the body is to all this. Is Meta-I a construct of Colin’s personality? Is personality a construct of essence? Is Meta-I a creative metaphor capable of moving us to become more resourceful in our daily affairs?

A Bit of a Mystery

I really haven’t been able to remember what got me so confidently into the notion of Meta-I; it perhaps needs some kind of respectable justification for working with it. So I’ve been doing some revision & back-tracking in order to attempt to make a respectable response to Patrick’s questions. I think the key is pages 352/3 of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous… an account which meshes with a basic presupposition of NLP and fits what Patrick says here. Viz (Gurdjieff is talking):-

It’s not possible to change the form of thinking or feeling until the repertory of postures and movements is changed… Everybody has a definite number of thinking and feeling postures and movements…

[In the ordinary course of events...] it is illusion to say our movements are voluntary. All our movements are automatic. Our thoughts and feelings are just as automatic. The automatism of thought and feeling is connected with the automatism of movement. One cannot be changed without the other. [We may focus] on changing automatic thoughts, [but] then habitual movements and habitual postures will interfere with this new course of thought by attaching to it old habitual associations. 
                                                       
In ordinary conditions we have no conception how much our thinking, feeling, and moving functions depend upon one another, although we know, at the same time, how much our moods and our emotional states can depend upon our movements and postures. When you take up a posture corresponding to a feeling of sadness or despondency, then within a short time you are sure to feel sad or despondent. Fear, disgust, nervous agitation, or, on the other hand, calm, can be created by an intentional change of posture.

To learn how to separate movement and posture from thinking & feeling the STOP exercise is recommended.

It consists in this—that at a word or sign, previously agreed upon, from the teacher, all the pupils who hear or see him/her have to arrest their movements at once, no matter what they are doing, and remain stock-still in the posture in which the signal has caught them. Moreover not only must they cease to move, but they must keep their eyes on the same spot at which they were looking at the moment of the signal, retain the smile on their faces, if there was one, keep the mouth open if they were speaking, maintain the facial expression and the tension of all the muscles of the body exactly in the same position in which they were caught by the signal. In this ‘stopped’ state we must also stop the flow of thoughts and concentrate the whole of attention on preserving the tension of the muscles in the various parts of the body exactly as it was, watching this tension all the time and leading so to speak attention from one part of the body to another.

This has to go on till another signal ends the exercise which is designed to offer at least the ‘…possibility of getting out of the circle of automatism; it cannot be dispensed with…’

Then there’s Libet’s ‘readiness potential’—advanced brain imaging demonstrates that the brain knows what you’re going to do in the split second before you do it—getting into that split second you become able to intercept action. This is detailed in Brian Lancaster Mind Brain & Human Potential (page 171). It’s where the STOP exercise which culminates in a split second learned response can help.

The STOP exercise puts you into a meta-position—momentarily observing yourself in a Nothing state, state of suspended animation, capable of making a decision to go off in a completely different direction. Becoming so aware of your self in action is called ‘self-remembering’ in the 4th Way scheme of things.

Following on from that there’s Meta-self-remembering (“Ah, there’s an ‘I’ in me that notices it’s in a state of self-remembering—‘this is me being me here and now’”) which is just an extension of that! Seems pretty obvious to me that once you’ve had an experience that could be called ‘self-remembering’, provided you treat it respectfully as being of significance, it’s in the muscle—available next time it’s needed—and all you have to do is to step aside for a moment to make it happen again and again. After the initial one trial bit of learning the habit strengthens the more you go round & round the circuit.

Round & Round the Circuit

Patrick said:-

Man, I suppose we could go on forever about this and not get tired, a good reminder of the energy contained in Meta-I, it gives us energy, especially when we are in pain!

I understand that other people may think you’ve come up with a magic stick, a nutty voodoo carrot that makes things easy or comfortable—how deeply our animal wants the easy life. Meta-I is like any tool that works: it demands something first, some honesty and some other things, and then it might say, Patrick you need to do a pendulum exercise, or, Patrick, you need to take a walk right now; Meta-I is a higher voice, part of us, yet from a distance on a nearby hill. This sounds esoteric but it is more like distilled action. I’ve been practising for a few years and when the shit hits the fan and I’m down in the dumps it isn’t easy at all, but I have to stick with it; sometimes it’s just a bunch of self-will bullshit, but even then I learn something.

This made me wonder if that’s it. We’ve simply hit upon something that operates in some kind of Higher Intellectual/Emotional Centre without realising it? Something that’s left after one’s stripped away all other ‘I’s, all taints that come from identifying, all opionating and so on. In his brilliant books this is the process Brian Lancaster describes—what’s left is some essence thing. It’s what happens when one goes through a ‘Litany’ of statements that serve to distinguish ‘I’ from all its apparent attachments :-

I have fears but I am not my fears,
I have ambitions but I am not my ambitions,
I have enthusiasm but I am not my enthusiasm
I have pain but I am not my pain,
I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts
I have feelings but I am not my feelings,
and so on and on: ‘I have… but I am not my…

and then the last question—so what am I then?

There’s an ‘I’ that can stand outside the whole rigmarole—call it Meta-I for the sake of something to label it with. A sceptic would present us with infinite regression at this point: what is the ‘I’ that gets us into Meta-I? What is the ‘I’ that gets us into the ‘I’ that gets us into Meta-I?  Stuff it! Just go to the other side of the room and step into Meta-I then you’ll know that it’s a something or other that’s just a few steps off the beaten track. Simply learn that trick. Distilled action, indeed.

Patrick:-

…to move from one ‘I’ that is buggering things up to a different more productive ‘I’ is tricky for me, but it has also been successful. Stepping into Meta-I makes it possible but one thing I have noticed is the impression of the new more productive ‘I’ takes some extra work. Meta-I must be sustained long enough for the productive ‘I’ to take shape and then act, or am I just nuts. I don’t actually think I am because it seems to work if Meta-I is sustained. The new ‘I’s
impression begins to take on an emotional or feeling pull, and one can lead oneself out of all the mess of funky ‘I’s.

Myself:-

Probably if the new ‘I’ is just an intellectual idea that Meta-I has got us into then it won’t work. If we’re doing thinking in what we think is Meta-I, then we’re not in Meta-I at all, but in Intellectual Centre, in the neo-cortex.  In what I construct as Meta-I, I find myself waiting eventually for a multi-centred sensation (thinking/feeling/doing)— I think that’s the ‘extra work’—to make it work there has to be thinking, feeling and some kind of action. Meta-I is a kind of waiting-room where we STOP operating just in our favourite Centre—one part of our brain—one that hasn’t necessarily worked in the past. The new ‘I’ has to be felt, thought and acted on—all the centres, separately first, maybe, and then in unison.

Patrick asked:-

Do you think that operating out of Meta-I is being in a state of clarity? A state when the mind and body are able to move about through time and space without any emotional interference, sensing both external stimuli and internal stimuli—a kind of airy thing, both coming and going but leaving not much of a trace on the emotional centre. Not a cold fish, as you say, but a warmer fish with a different voice.

Myself:-

I wonder what makes for lack of clarity in ordinary circumstances? Maybe it’s all the irrelevant associations, identifications that intrude; all the hares we chase after; all the ‘I’s of our unruly household that fight with each other; a focus on ‘internal considering’, incessant inner dialogue rather than ‘external considering’—looking at things as they are ‘outside of us’.

Then the question is since Meta-I is still part of us and therefore seemingly subject to all the influences that affect all the other ‘I’s, how can it attain to this kind of what I suppose Mr G would call ‘objectivity’—how can it separate itself out in such a comparatively strong way when it exists in amongst all those other squabblingly subjective ‘I’s? Is there a place inside us where we can get this clarity or objectivity? Is Meta-I a kind of ‘airy thing’ capable of sensing both external stimuli and internal stimuli both together and holding them in suspension, without judgment?

Mr G has a nice turn of phrase which might work here: Meta-I is a kind of airy ‘something or other’… Fill the quotation marks how you please…

I think what I am sure about is that when I say to somebody, “Go over there and stand in Meta-I and see what things look like…” They immediately go to a place of utter neutrality without thinking about it. Free of the Centres. Ah, maybe in Higher Emotional/Intellectual Centres. Without feeling or thinking. Without commitment… I wonder how do they do that?

How do I do it? ‘Over there’ can be depicted by standing on a bit of paper with ‘Meta-I’ written on it; when I stand on the bit of paper I find myself somehow outside all other ways of thinking/feeling/doing—all that is suspended and I can make a completely new choice and, yes, I’m outside time and space…

Patrick:-

Maybe this is connected by muscle memory only on some cellular- chemical responders located in our brains. As in a dream I had when I was walking along a straight line seemingly on a flat two dimensional field, surrounded by nothing, just one foot in front of the other along a pencil line, and then there was a voice saying,” You must see yourself from many different sides at the same time.” A sort of panoramic observation of things, but there was only emptiness. I wonder what would happen if I began to fill in that empty space with places, then add some people, then an activity, or something along my timeline?

Meta-I is first an emptiness, then it begins to fill with infinite possibilities…

Patrick asked : do you think Meta-I gives a strong exposure to the world around us, and inside us, less repellent, while single Centre working gives less exposure and a greater repellent?

My provisional answer was: I think that what happens when I imagine I get into Meta-I is that I become truly ‘conscious’—able to take (more or less) ‘everything’ into account at the same time. I accept that I may be kidding myself, of course. It feels as though I’ve left all the other ‘I’s behind me somewhere. I am not identifying with any of them—or if I am it’s only spasmodically and controllably. I may still be kidding myself!

Single Centre working, either through Intellect, or Feeling, or Doing, each on their own, staves off bits of the outside, makes us see the world as a matter of all Intellect, all Feeling, all Doing when it would be more roundly constructed by being observed in a multi-centred way. Meta-I perhaps creates the opportunity for this to happen; puts us in the position of opening up exposure to the whole of existence. Repulsion doesn’t happen then.

When I’m on Top Form (and only then), I think I’m more open to receiving what Gurdjieff calls  ‘Pure Impressions’ —things seen, heard, felt in an unsullied kind of way—those which don’t come through the usual filters—the filters of the Multiplicity of ‘I’s, of single Centres. I can ‘see’ the world in a different way from how I do when I’m identified with an A Influence, say—when I sometimes get steamed up about the New [Evil] Governmental Regime (the Power Possessors) in UK, for instance, or on the very rare occasions when I get sucked in to Facebook argument! When my Being is identified with the ‘I’s that get hooked up this way it’s no longer ‘conscious’. When I get back into Meta-I there’s an ‘I’ that becomes aware again of how limiting is our usual habitual contact with the world. That’s a useful contrast which there’s a Playful-I in me that will (very occasionally) deliberately stoke up by making provocative statements of some kind, just for the hell of it.

Patrick, is this anything like what you describe as ‘strong exposure to the world around us’?

I feel awakened to more possibilities, open to more stimuli when I’m in Meta-I. When we limit ourselves to operating out of just one Centre—identifying with its mechanisms—we seem to close down the options; we repel other angles, limit our possibilities for action, I think. It’s easy to illustrate this by being aware of what happens when we get angry (I do speak for myself!)—rage limits my capacity to figure things out, renders me incapable of taking any kind of positive action. So what happens when we get into an intellectual fix (determined to think through something logically) or become all athletic (running a marathon)?

Travelling long distance on a motorbike I find so helpful as a way of maintaining a balance of Intellect/Emotion/Moving-Instinctual Centres!

Meta-I seems to be something like an emergent characteristic of going round & round the Centre system, activating the whole brain & body.

I am aware that I invented the concept of Meta-I—as far as I know it does not occur elsewhere—at least it didn’t when I invented it. So all this is made up! The nearest thing is something in NLP called ‘meta-mirror’ which is a technique for spatially (and therefore mentally) distancing oneself from a person or situation and literally ‘taking steps’ to look at oneself and the other from a different perspective—and having done that to check out new ways of behaving. This, as I’ve said, was how I got to the idea of Meta-I… There’s nothing new really!

The key thing is to get an answer for oneself to the question—Does the concept of Meta-I add anything to one’s repertoire of behaviours in whatever way emerges?

Getting into Meta-I—How Patrick Does It…

What usually happens is I give myself a reminder or command to STOP. Then there is an inner voice, this is me here now, I begin to sense my body, my breathing, my surroundings, my eyes move around to objects, like the lamp, the box of pens, I listen to the room, I may focus on my belly, or hands, or toes, or the space my body is taking up as a whole. This may be enough, but lots of times I get up at this point and move into the kitchen, or go have a smoke. I can stand back from it all, and this gives me a different way of getting on with what I am writing or doing at the time. I cannot remember just slipping into Meta-I recently, but when I was competing in sports this would all just happen. The world slowed and a thousand opportunities opened up before my eyes (‘in the zone’, as they say) and I knew without any doubt that my opponent had no chance—it felt like real magic; then I got there in music later on; in making love; in writing off the cuff, or concentrating on longer pieces. Meta-I is the key to real change…

If Meta-I is alert while all the other ‘I’s are numb or somehow being shut off then maybe the term Meta-I is something other than an ‘I’ that allows one to step back and observe other ‘I’s.

If Meta-I is an ‘I’ that observes things as a whole, or allows a person to not give in to negative emotion, or inertia, as it is for me now, then under certain stressful conditions it would seem that Meta-I could take you into a deeper space, an open negative canvas, so we are able to fill that canvas with whatever we choose. If this space is palpable then all the centres would be going about doing what they do, and you would have a greater advantage in observing yourself and then operating within an ever-expanding system.

Or, using ‘I do not exist’ as a jumping off point, it seems very possible and beneficial to enter into this rich negative canvas, and stay there, using it as an anchor, a way of dividing attention. With one attention we sense this new Meta-I, with another attention we sense our bodies, in this way we are aware of both internal and external impressions. In this dark canvas all outside and inside stimuli become an energy that is transformative (like it always could be) but under extreme conditions slows down, and thus becomes discretionary.

Patrick referred to the extreme conditions when I was in hospital recovering from major surgery; the suspension of ordinary ‘I’s did result in my existing in some ‘dark canvas’ while in Intensive Care. It certainly did feel like that. What got me through the ordeal was using my Meta-I to navigate, as mere concepts, all the possible ‘I’s I might inhabit when I got back into working order. Conditions inside and out of me created this space.

Working with a challenging student, he said, Patrick felt his Meta-I to be under attack and he contrived to strengthen it and make it a space safe enough for him to operate in. He didn’t mean a place to hide—just the opposite, it was a place with enormous possibilities, and just where the student needed him to be.

Patrick said he felt some concern about all this because he got wind of some kind of vanity operating in him: should he indulge in anything for long periods, especially something like this where one might begin to feel ‘clever’ at working through Meta-I.  He says he’s beginning to change how he feels about this. ‘...The vanity idea is so interesting, but that is a tough ‘I’ to crack, and that ‘I’ appeared driving home from work, and was in conflict with this new canvas I was working in. All of this I’m sure needs more focus and work, especially in all sorts of different conditions and circumstances…’

Man, I Suppose We Could Go On Forever About This…

Thinking along the lines of Meta-I and its functions, it seems that this ‘I’, more than the others, needs some fine tuning at least at my end. It must contain certain properties in order for it to exist outside my own imagination, and it must belong to the life of humanity in general. It must also contain certain substances that register on some scale or chart, and if it is chemical it must also be able to change into other forms. It must also contain cosmic and psychic properties that exist on other planes, and occupy a specific place. If all this is true it must also have the ability to evolve under rigorous conditions, conditions such as near death experiences, forms of trauma, long periods of sustained work, or long periods of derangement. Also one of its features seems to be the ability to slow time, and to gather many ‘I’s into a reasonable constructional form so that our perceptions can be altered enough in order to make sensible acts, or choices.

The command STOP! must in some way trigger these operations into Meta-I By experimenting we can observe how all this happens after the command is given, as long as there is a certain amount of attention and focus given at the exact moment. I notice when I am in Being-tired-I which leads to Being-lazy-I a domino effect begins: when I go into Move-a-bit-I and then Walk-faster-I the command STOP works and other ‘I’s begin to take shape, like Writing-I or Reading-I or Doing-a-project-I and my Feeling-like-crap-I begins to dissipate. Now what would happen if I went into a extremely dangerous part of town, places I once spent lots of time in, places where there is a broad range of negative and destructive energy? If I walked around in this place in Meta-I, would it respond to its environment and go into a deeper dark positive canvas to keep the organism alive? And would this experiment be of any value? There would be no danger involved in this experiment because I know what I am doing, but there would be a definite charge of energy that I normally do not experience.

Beyond Meta-I

Patrick’s reference to the idea of Meta-I containing ‘…cosmic and psychic properties that exist on other planes…’ got me to thinking about what I’ve called Cosmic-I, an ‘I’ that’s greater than any other part of us, or, after Jung, Oceanic-I, an ‘I’ that’s aware of spreading itself across the midnight constellations. Getting to Transcendental-I does not seem to me to be any Big Deal once one’s loosened the ties of all the crap; it’s just made to seem esoteric by those with a vested interest in the promotion of Orthodoxies; I read Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart when I was 15 and that did it for me—I just knew, with heart & soul & intellect, that the experience of going to the top of a high hill and raising your arms to the firmament took you right out of your mundane self and into something which then I couldn’t define but relished above all else. Through adolescence I frequently did this as a matter of course. I lost the knack as I got sucked into the Prison House of ‘earning a living’—all the A Influence stuff—but it must have been always there underneath because now I just have to raise my arms to the sunrise to get into the feeling of Transcendental-I. After that the inevitable return to ordinary, probably unavoidable in the rush of things, Unified-I changes the way one constructs ordinary ‘reality’ forever.

It strikes me that Transcendental-I may be just another, less snappy, expression for Meta-I… Invent your own terms says Ouspensky!

People Do Things Differently

But it’s great to try what they do on for size. I can easily follow Patrick’s instructions to arrive at ‘everything feeling electric’.

…sit in the middle of a room, although outside I find more engaging, and look in any direction, when your eyes light on something move to something else, as you continue to gather things up like this, making sure your attention does not waver, a collage of images begins to build up around you, this should create a panoramic view as all things begin to mesh together. Then, going into Meta-I, things clear and a feeling of all this begins when we are present and focused. It works well for writing, but is also good going down the timeline. I think this goes along with the idea that wherever we are there are many points of view, many ‘I’s’, and it gives us relief from our myopic delusion that we have a permanent unified ‘I’. Sitting on a bench near a river, or sitting at dinner with friends and family when I practise this, everything feels electric.

In Meta-I Nature fills my senses, the sky, the grass, clouds drifting by, and the negative emotion begins to fade, I can feel and almost see that energy drifting off my body, I am again the smallest molecule joined together with everything else, from there I can move to my heart’s desire, personality dissipates and I am free, ageless, and fluid, but soon ordinary Patrick shows up once again…

Meta-I seems to lift us up a notch, lift us to see and feel all the contradictory ‘I’s that jumble around inside. The command we give ourselves seems to be an action that takes place in the moving centre, I say this because, when I enter into Meta-I, I am then able to move to the next thing with a renewed attention and vigour. Meta-I opens us to move beyond the usual restraints of our duality. It allows me to catch myself dividing things into categories of right and wrong, and getting lost in the emotional forest where clarity is obscured by my own ego.

When I find myself having a conversation with someone, unchecked my internal dialogue will automatically begin a silent conversation. Most of the time it’s a Defending-I that seems to want to run on forever, or a Self-justifying-I or a Making-accounts-I. When I give the command STOP! Meta-I emerges—a sensation that rises in my body, somewhere near my solar plexus. It seems vital to the art of self-observation, and it does get stronger as time goes by.

Is Meta-I a direct line to separating Knowing and Understanding? Once one enters into the state of Meta-I the possibilities are only limited by the amount of energy one has, and to the relativity of the moment.  Meta-I creates a non-defensive open position to what is happening in the This-is-Me-Right-Here-Right-Now moment. The world slows inside and out. Meta-I is an ‘I’ that can break mechanical thinking, feeling & doing. It feels like I’m wrestling with words here.

So that has to be a really useful strategy for really listening to what somebody else is saying; there’s an external focus, a focus that’s maybe outside of your self. How do we cue this shift of attention? When in the middle of a rumpus of some kind, internal or external, how do you cue Meta-I? How exactly does Meta-I operate as a stop-plug for internal chatter? What happens with practice? How is Meta-I creative?

Patrick:-

Meta-I is a sensation of being. I’ve described it many times, each time is a good practice. I’m going to go back a bit to last semester, I hope this is helpful. It’s one thing to cue oneself into a state of Meta-I when sitting along a river bank, but it is a marvelous plus when things are all a jumble, and the environment is ripe with stress. During the school semester I was going from one class to another, one study to another, and then to the domestic responsibilities of home. This can become almost manic internally, the mind is turned on in a manner of speaking to categorizing, or separating things, and believing ‘I’ am in control. This lie is deeply ingrained! I probably gave the command STOP between where I physically was, and where I was going all day long, every day, during the school semester, but that can just be mechanical. This is an important thing to remember because unless all our frantic, neurotic, fearful, ‘I’s are witnessed from a new position, nothing has changed, just another loud commanding ‘I’. Sometimes when the pressure heats up there’s an ‘I’ that goes deep inside and can seem like Meta-I but this ‘I’ may just be closer to a particular role ‘I’ am playing. Meta-I is different—it has some qualities that emanate from, and are connected to my body, like I mentioned above. None of my efforts are wasted or unnecessary there. I know that now, but at times it felt like there should have been a higher degree or scale of improvement, that’s a good example of false imagination. Only after looking back can I now see how much GOOD work was being accomplished.

Here’s a list of mechanical I’s that got in the way last semester:

No-sense-of-urgency-I
A-lacklustre-attitude-I
Believing-school-is-just-a-factory-I
Being-frustrated-I
Needing-more-I (coffee, cigarettes, food, sex, TV, more Patrick’s-old-bugger-I’s)
Believing-education-shouldn’t-be-like-this-I
Thinking-these-students-are-idiots-I
Thinking-these-professors-are-idiots-IDoesn’t-anyone-see-that-Higher-education-is-based-on-a-military-paradigm-I
Complaining-I

Nothing terrible about being human, and nothing to beat myself up over. Working with all this takes patience and a good sense of HUMOUR.

When I give the command STOP in the middle of all these ‘I’s without a conscious effort first to recognize them, and say hello, and thank them for reminding me that what falls away is always and is near, then I’m in some state of bullshit. So it’s a good idea to get to know as many of these miscreant ‘I’s as possible. It’s easy to neglect the very thing that keeps us from entering Meta-I.

Sometimes there’s a comical array of defensive positions and postures that act on each other. Like negative magnets these ‘I’s gather with glee. I remember this as clear as the sun. I walked into our backyard and stretched my body, reaching for the stars, shaking myself, then stretching again, reaching for the stars, and when some ‘I’ in me was ready it gave the command STOP! This time I wept, sitting on the grass I wept. The icy ‘I’s just fell off, and I could feel Meta-I rising like an old friend. That may sound dramatic, and maybe it’s because Meta-I has an energy that gathers other ‘I’s and from a distance gives each a perspective and the drama is our overbearing self-importance—these I’s weaken when Meta-I is acting in us.

Since I’m usually sensing my body and am aware of this, Meta-I is a cue for a stronger Paying-attention-I, there’s a greater depth of perception, the senses become more alert (creative), my body relaxes to a tension that is subtle yet flexible. ‘I’ am more present. The mind empties but there is a flow of creative energy. This is weird but the world around me becomes what it mostly is—empty. Nothing seems that important because it isn’t—but it is. Concentration and focus increase. Time is weird too because in Meta-I all that so-called school work, all the domestic worries, kids, money, the politics of the day, are given a wide berth, and because of some energy boost, more can be done in a shorter period of time.

Less of Patrick and an inner sense of Patrick stripped of so many pesky ‘I’s reveals something closer to the eyes of a child, the ears of a child, an energy that wasn’t rusted out, tarnished, or lost. This is what has been happening lately after much practice. This is a beginning, always beginning from each day.

People who spend time in Nature may enter Meta-I without giving it a name. Bathing in Nature is conducive to this type of energy. Nothing unnecessary.

When I first began doing timeline exercises you suggested that it was important to become disidentified with what I was experiencing; you mentioned an ‘I’ that was capable of achieving this state, you called it Meta-I. For some reason I used a spaceship as a vehicle to begin my timeline journeys. This spaceship or active metaphor seemed to focus my attention, and was imaginative, creative, using the gifts we are blessed with. Since life is a dream, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t employ Meta-I during so-called real life. Since I couldn’t control my emotions, or my internal dialogue, then why not use Meta-I as a tool and see what happened.

Stopping our internal chatter takes a greater effort. I have to give the command STOP with greater force, and it does help to be in a quiet place, somewhere in the woods. But this is something I’ve only begun doing this summer, so we’ll see.

I don’t have to give the command STOP in every situation now. I can cue myself when in a crowd, at home, in a classroom, by remembering, This is Me Right Here Right Now.

***

Thanks so much, Patrick!

You have no business to believe me. I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself… If you have not a critical mind, your visit here is useless.  GIGurdjieff

In the beginning it feels like we cannot but choose to believe certain things: that food will appear from somewhere, bottle or breast; that when we scream somebody will pick us up, if we’re lucky,  and comfort us; that when we take to crawling around the floor we will get somewhere other than where we were before.

Then we get things stuck on us: Father Xmas, God, a belief in The Inevitability of Periodic Reciprocal Destruction, the need to pay taxes to support it, the requirement to go to school, selling our souls as wage slaves to the Power Possessors. We become brainwashed into believing all sorts of wacky things and we quite quickly learn to have an uncritical mind because it’s altogether more comfortable and safer to go along with the herd. Anything for a quiet life.

We learn one particular program above all: ‘This is how you have to do things—it’s how they’ve always been done…’; it’s very rare that anybody tells us we could operate with a completely different program—‘You can do things any which way you choose…’

Then we start believing what we read; a school dishes out text books on the understanding that we have to believe what we read and to learn it like a parrot or we’ll fail our exams.

There’s a strange trait in our psyche, says Gurdjieff in Beelzebub—‘that of being satisfied with whatever Smith or Brown says without trying to know more… [this became rooted in us] long ago, and now [we] no longer make the least effort to know anything that can be understood solely by [our] own active reflection…’ This process is the result of the inner evil god called ‘self-calming’, says Gurdjieff, or Anything for a Quiet Life…

Maybe it’s not such a strange trait—the pressure’s on.

Then, unfortunately it’s all too easy to hide behind a pretence of active reflection, easy to imagine that you stand out from the herd.

People ‘believe everything anybody says instead of believing only what they have been able to verify by their own sane deliberation… they no longer make the least effort to know anything that can be understood solely by their own active reflection…’ There are pretenders who like to imagine that they are engaging in acts of profound verification.

Maybe I am one such…

Three Key Notions

Against all this, Gurdjieff had crystallised in his ‘common presence’ during his ‘preparatory age’ three key notions:-

•    one deriving from his dying grandmother’s advice, “In life never do as others do… Either do nothing—just go to school—or do something nobody else does…”
•    as a result of that he determined to learn the real causes of all things and to go into the learning with gusto…
•    …when you go on a spree go the whole hog, including the postage…

This must be done so that a certain something should flow through your whole presence, settling forever in every atom comprising it, in order to acquire ‘vivifyingness’ which I take to be a living factor that occurs when your whole being is engaged: all ‘Centres’ alive & kicking in synch, your whole brain & body fired up, neo-cortex (=Intellectual ‘Centre’), limbic area (=Emotional Centre), and reptile system (=Moving Centre) working together; able to think, feel and act in equal measure. (See the Triune Brain, Paul Maclean 1960-ish)

What would things have been like if you had decided to let Gurdjieff’s three key notions inform your Being at an early age? Perhaps if you had done so by now you would have been able to verify their usefulness (or otherwise) for yourself…

What is Verification?

Perhaps it’s simply the activity of systematically trying something out for yourself and holding yourself to it? Keats in Letter 123: ‘…Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced….’

As it happens, I am inclined to think that I had already gone through Gurdjieff’s three key notions by the time I first read Beelzebub in the 1980′s. His three bits of psycho-data chimed with me as soon as I read them—it was a bit like reading the book of myself; I recognised what he said as having already worked for me—it was how I had run my life for forty years. Verification post facto. Some had called it ‘being bloody-minded’; I asserted, with Thoreau, that I was never ever out of step—simply that I was marching to the sound of a different drum.

•    When I was ten, I heard my own grandmother tell my despairing mother, for reassurance I suppose, that I’d grow out of all my manifestations of ‘being awkward’ by the time I was thirty. This determined my resolve never to grow out of them.
•    Going the Whole Hog… One example. When I did two years so-called ‘National Service’ I developed a great contempt for the incompetent (but very likeable) officers, commissioned and non-commisioned, I rubbed shoulders with on a daily basis; the experience turned me into a pacifist via the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; this led to non-violence towards all creatures and I became a vegetarian and, ultimately a Tolstoyan anarchist. This was about following an argument to its very (to me) logical conclusion, never mind the postage…
•    I developed an intellectual urge to get to the bottom of things; it was never enough to go along with the way things seemed to be, the way they are presented in the media. There was a man in an office I passed my time in, Andrew Merritt—1955—oh where are you now, Andrew?—who showed me how to get to the bottom of things literally by getting hold of a great fat file full of papers, letters, calculations that overwhelmed me and tipping it all out on the desk to start from the beginning, to reconstruct its whole story. I see him doing it now… This action on its own has served as an anchor for a way of unpicking the way things are.

I Looked Up to Andrew Merritt

You can verify the truth of something by taking what somebody with a reputation and some kind of credentials says and test it out for yourself. ‘So and so says so…’—they may have universal credibility but you need to find out how they have achieved it.

This happened by reverse in my relationship with Gurdjieff, at least to start with—I had already done what he suggested and found that his own description presented me with a confirmation that my way of dealing with the world, though obviously far from unique, worked. It led, I think, to at least the possibility of my being a Good Householder: applying his principles, I had achieved ‘success’ in ordinary life terms—held down a job and paid off the mortgage— but I was left with a real nagging feeling that ‘There Must Be Something More to Life Than This’—the qualification for being a candidate for following the 4th Way according to Ouspensky…

I am reminded of the Autodidact in Sartre’s Nausea who was only satisfied with something he was thinking when he discovered that some ‘real writer’ had already committed to paper what he (the Autodidact) thought he had discovered for himself.

Many ‘I’s

It seemed that I was already prepared to accept the sense in Gurdjieff’s thinking at the beginning of Beelzebub; then I discovered that he also asserted, amongst other things, that we are not a Unity—there is no Unified-I—we are composed of many ‘I’s. Because I respected him through my own experience of the three key notions I had to find out what he meant by this—maybe this would work for me as well. Since Gurdjieff said one thing that rang true for me, maybe this would make sense too. This is called putting a provisional trust in an author or thinker until you’ve verified what they say for yourself.

Much later I learned to come to terms with Stephen Covey’s 5th Habit of Highly Effective People—seek first to understand before ever trying to make yourself understood. I take this to be a very important part of the process of verification—find out what somebody means before expressing your own way of thinking about whatever it might be: simply proclaiming what you think about it may block progress in understanding. I conceived a desperate need to understand the following from In Search of the Miraculous:-

Very often, almost at every talk, G. returned to the absence of unity in human beings. “One of our important mistakes,” he said, “one which must be remembered, is our illusion in regard to ‘I’…”

…I changes as quickly as thoughts, feelings, and moods, and we make a profound mistake in considering ourselves to be always one and the same person; in reality we are always a different person, not the one we were a moment ago. There is no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says ‘I.’ And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole person, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole. …But our every thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only physically as a thing, and in the abstract as a concept. …There are… hundreds and thousands of separate small I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, we say or think ‘I.’ And each time the I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. We are a plurality.

‘Man’s name is legion’…

The alternation of I’s, their continual obvious struggle for supremacy, is controlled [for example] by accidental external influences. Warmth, sunshine, fine weather, immediately call up a whole group of I’s. Cold, fog, rain, call up another group of I’s, other associations, other feelings, other actions. [As things stand]…there is nothing in us able to control this change of ‘I’s—we do not notice, or know of it; we live always in the last I we happened to be in. Some
I’s, of course, are stronger than others. But it is not their own conscious strength; they have been created by the strength of accidents or mechanical external stimuli. Education, imitation, reading, the hypnotism of religion, caste, and traditions, or the glamour of new slogans, create very strong I’s in Personality, which dominate whole series of other, weaker, I’s. But their strength is the strength of the ‘rolls’ in the centers. And all I’s making up Personality have the same origin as these ‘rolls’; they are the results of external influences; and both are set in motion and controlled by fresh external influences…

Boosting the Ego

Of course, the Western psychological tradition has been responsible for crystallising in us the idea that the ‘I’—the ego—is there to be strengthened at all costs. Know thyself, to thine own self be true, self-actualisation as the pinnacle of the hierarchy. There’s an unquestioning acceptance of some single Unified-I to which we are supposed pay earnest attention. So it’s not that easy to take the concept of Multiple-I’s on board—it needs a good deal of one’s own active reflection and application.

In response to the mantra ‘Know thyself’, Gurdjieff would probably have us ask, “Which self?” Many selves, many ‘I’s…

Being already familiar with the distinction GHMead drew between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’—an observer looking with relative objectivity at the antics of what it was observing—I was again already halfway there.

William James has been a hero of mine since adolescence. I—provocative-I— once deliberately incurred the wrath of a teacher in East London Polytechnic by asserting that you didn’t need to read anything about psychology after William James, whose Textbook of Psychology came out in 1892.  He has everything, including things that one might want to refine and qualify; since his time there has been a crossing of swords between Behaviourists and Field Theorists and a great improvement in techniques of measurement and testing and the expert reduction of things to statistical cobblers; but all the starting points are in James, including what amounts to stuff about Multiple-I’s.

The Me and the I

Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence. At the same time it is I who am aware; so that the total self of me, being as it were duplex, partly known and partly knower, partly object and partly subject, must have two aspects discriminated in it, of which for shortness we may call one the Me and the other the I. I call these ‘discriminated aspects’, and not separate things, because the identity of I with me, even in the very act of their discrimination, is perhaps… [just] common-sense, and must not be undermined by terminology…

The Empirical Self or Me

Between… me and… mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material; the same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest possible sense, however, the Me is the sum total of all that you can call yours, not only your body and your psychic powers, but your clothes and your house, your family, your ancestors and friends, your reputation and works, your lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give you the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, you feel triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, you feel cast down—not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.

Identification

In Gurdjieff’s terms what James is talking about here is identification: in ordinary life more or less everything is identification; we sink our selves in what we identify with; in doing so we lose our selves and become mechanically attached to things which do not last.  Gurdjieff said:  ‘It is difficult to free oneself from identifying because you naturally become more easily identified with the things that interest you most, to which you give your time, your work, your attention. Be merciless with yourself; do not be afraid of seeing all the subtle and hidden forms which identifying takes…’ (ISOTM p150)  Recognising the things with which you are identified is the first step towards being able to disidentify in order to find your Real-I.

William James sets off on the road towards the concept of Multiple-I’s by suggesting the categories of Material-I, Social-I and Spiritual-I.    What stops him from going all the way, it seems to me, is that he chooses to refer to the categories as representing an object of contemplation (the ‘me’) rather than subjects into which we can step at will, without making the necessary adjustments, viz Material-me, Social-me and Spiritual-me.  Here are further examples of identification and evidence of Multiple-I’s:-

The Material Me

The body is the innermost part of the material me in each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next. The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body and clothes—is more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply. Next, our immediate family is a part of ourselves.

Body-I, particular parts of body-I, clothes-I, family-I, son-I, daughter-I…

Our father and mother, our wife/husband and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part of our life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of affection; and we do not easily forgive the stranger, who, in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats it with contempt. All these different things are the objects of instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical interests of life. We all have a blind impulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife, and babes, and to find for ourselves a house of our own which we may live in and ‘improve’.

An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus us made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labour. There are few people who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long construction of their hands or brains—say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript—were suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards his gold; and although it is true that a part of our depression at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we must now go without certain goods that we expected the possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself…

The Social Me 

Our social me is the recognition which we get from our mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favourably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised… than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead’, and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would before long well up in us…

Properly speaking,  you have as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise you and carry an image of you in their mind… You have as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of people about whose opinion you care. You generally show a different side of yourself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ‘tough’  young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the labourers we employ,  to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a  division of the human being into several selves…

This is the closest William James gets to the concept of Multiple-I’s—but how close!

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the individual. To your own consciousness you are not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognised your contentment passes all bounds.

Your fame, good or bad, and your honour or dishonour, are names that can be applied to one of your social selves…  It is your image in the eyes of your own set, which exalts or condemns as you conform or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life…

The Spiritual Me

By the ‘spiritual me’, I mean no one in particular of my passing states of consciousness. I mean rather the entire collection of my states of consciousness, my psychic faculties… This collection can at any moment become an object to my thought…  When we think of ourselves as thinkers, all the other ingredients of our me seem relatively external possessions… The more active-feeling states of consciousness are the central portions of the spiritual life.  The very core and nucleus of our self, as we know it, the very sanctuary of our life, is the sense of activity which certain inner states possess. This sense of activity is often held to be a direct revelation of the living substance of our Soul… I wish now only to lay down the peculiar internality of whatever states possess this quality of seeming to be active. It is as if they went out to meet all the other elements of our experience.

Inert Ideas

Now all this remains an inert idea unless you take steps to figure out what it might mean to you. An ‘inert idea’ is ANWhitehead’s concept described in his The Aims of Education; it is an idea that is ‘merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations…’ ANWhitehead’s concept in itself remained an ‘inert idea’ for me until, in his own terms, I made it my own possession—made it into a working hypothesis about how to make an idea or a bit of thinking into something that makes an impact or works in a context. When you make an idea your own you start figuring out how it can be used; you learn to verify it pragmatically.

There’s a simplistic, person-in-the-street view that ‘Truth’ must somehow be an accurate copy of what is without dispute the case; ideas must correspond with what they are concerned with. William James’ pragmatism combines a correspondence theory of truth with the far more subtle coherence theory of truth. In the verifying process, we can ask how do thoughts and statements correspond with the way things are, but we can also ask how do things ‘hang together’, cohere, or fit as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; a careful synthesis of both methodologies is then verified by feedback, by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice

This also fits what I call Gurdjieff’s KUB model.

It works like this: lots of Knowledge, not much working it into your Being = little in the way of Understanding; high-class Being (saint, President or Pope), not much Knowledge = little in the way of Understanding; much Knowledge deeply related to Being and relying on systemic feedback for its development = a great deal in the way of Understanding.

Keats again: ‘…axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author… I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which only I can describe; the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me…’ (Letter 64)

The more one finds support for practice the more certain one becomes of being on the right track. You have a hunch that x is the case; you find that others have spent a good deal of time researching what you have started to accept. This adds power & scope to what you have come to believe.

One word for Knowledge

There’s the same old problem with the words we have at our disposal…

We have one word for ‘knowledge’ and it comes about therefore that without thinking about it we presuppose that all knowledge is of a piece. It isn’t.

Knowledge is systemic; in fact there’s probably no such thing as the noun ‘Knowledge’— there are simply acts of knowing. Each stage in the system adds something to the original mere registering phase; subsequent circuits are informed by the first registration and so a sense impression on the second and third and fourth time becomes vivified into a different kind of experience. As JGBennett suggests coming to terms with ideas is a matter of gradual approximation to the way things really are; the more we keep going the closer we get to Being-congruence with things as they really are.

Conversion of the system of Knowledge into I-terms makes the point that it’s not Knowledge that changes; it’s the ‘I’ that we choose to be in when looking at the nature of experience that changes things.

The acquisition of the things we think we know is a systemic process; everything being connected there is a constant ‘reciprocal feeding’ and ‘world maintenance’ through the ‘universal exchange of substances’. We have no word for this process so Gurdjieff (who may be described as the first systems thinker) calls it iraniranumange. A systemic process goes round and round making a richer picture on each circuit. And there are systems within systems… There are emergent properties which become part of the process.

All systems have ‘Emergent Properties’ (‘EP’ in this diagram)—systems have dynamic properties.

Ideally this system should be painted on a large playground where it could be danced around with a chosen sense-impression in mind. In that way the process would be ‘vivified’ throughout the whole of your Being, thought, felt and moved through. Registering-I, Ordering-I, Making-information-I, Remembering-I, Having-an-intention-I, Attending-I, Reflecting-I, Taking-action-I… And so on…

The Concept of I-tags

Mainstream psychologist, Brian Lancaster (Mind, Brain & Human Consciousness) provides the useful neologism, ‘I-tag’, for the way we attach I-ness to each particle of remembering—I-tags are tickets to dangle on all the millions of bits of experience, momentary trances, in which you can identify ‘I-ness’ when you set your mind to it. All the little bits of experience that we’ve had come back to us complete with a sensation of I-ness: I-by-the-seaside, I-swotting-for-exams, I-buying-a-first-house, I-in-a-whole-series-of-relationships-some-more-special-than-others.

…memory images, or [memory patternings] , come complete with their ‘I-tags’. These are the basic data from which our sense of identity is constructed. In any given moment, a number of such ‘I-tags’ are presumably activated as sensory systems interact with memory… Thus I may be holding a pen which triggers one ‘I-tag’, sitting by a familiar plant, another ‘I-tag’, listening to a favourite piece of music, a third ‘I-tag’—and so on. Each ‘I-tag’ embodies my past identity state when the given entity was experienced previously. We can envisage these many ‘I-tags , as constituting a plane of the mind, which I shall call the identity plane. I use the term ‘plane’ here in a metaphorical sense only. The mind cannot be described literally in geometrical terms since it has no literal spatial attributes. Neither is the identity plane to be construed as tied to a particular plane or level within the brain. It is merely a convenient label for the sense of identity as it is generated through the processes I have discussed.
    
Now it is quite clear that we do not experience ourselves as being fragmented in the way that the foregoing discussion might imply. Our sense of identity is that of a single, unified and continuous ‘I’ [which is] something of an illusion… The unified ‘I’ is an entity constructed from the fragmented identity plane to make retrospective sense of mental events…

The identity plane comprises an endless flux of ‘I-tags’ from which ‘I’ is continually constructed. Furthermore, the current ‘I’ in any given moment becomes the ‘I-tag’ attached to new memories of the present scene. Again, the point is that ‘I’ never remains the same. This is a highly dynamic process whereby ‘I-tags’ are continually being drawn from memory, and, as the present scene itself enters memory, updated in memory…

Of course, ‘I’ is generated by internal inputs as well as external ones. In other words, ‘I’ think as well as perceive. Thinking is not so very different from perceiving… Both involve logical deductions on the basis of given data. In the terms employed here, thinking is the psychological process of activating memory images and manipulating them one to another. Perception involves exactly the same process but takes place in relation to sensory data.

If we follow the argument further, it is not actually the case that ‘I’ think. Rather, each memory image that is activated during thought contributes its ‘I-tag’ to the ongoing construction of ‘I’. ‘I’ is actually a product of thought, not the master of it. Interestingly enough, it further follows that if thinking were genuinely to create new connections and forms, there would necessarily be an attenuation of ‘I’. ‘I-tags’ embody my connection to past images, but a new image has no ‘I-tag’. Therefore, for the time that a new image engages the mind, there can be no ‘I’. This is indeed the case in true creativity. As reported by those who have attempted to reflect on their own creativity, the creative moments seem to come in some twilight zone of preconsciousness…  this point is best left to the artists themselves. In answering a question concerning the creativity in her own poetry, [the American poet] Amy Lowell writes

…my own poems… I know as little of how they are made as I do of anyone else’s.   What I do know about them is only a millionth part of what there must be to know. I meet them where they touch consciousness, and that is already a considerable distance along the road of evolution.

It may be argued that this moment of creative inspiration is the only time when we truly exist in the present, when we are not simply rehashing the past. In other words, whenever ‘I’ am, past associations are necessarily cloud-ing the present moment. Of course, as soon as the poet reflects upon the primary intuition, ‘I’ is reconstituted and can begin to work on forming the poem.

[We are left wondering if] it is possible to transcend the identity plane, which will engender a new psychological state (an ‘altered state of consciousness’). [Arguably] the moment of creativity is just such a moment of transcendence. Generally speaking, it is the fragmentation of the identity plane which constitutes the major block to realization of our highest potential, as in creativity. On account of the identity plane being an amalgam of ‘I-tags’, it is essentially conservative; it always seeks to relate to the present in terms of past identities. Memory is indeed the master here and consequently, whenever ‘I’ am, I am actually in the past. Transcendence of the identity plane is achieved through awareness of the present moment, and that means awareness of becoming.

[You might very well] object that this model seems divorced from experience. We experience ourselves as a single self, continuous and whole, and memory is our servant, not a master. However, we must be careful to distinguish the personality characteristics of ‘I’ from the feeling of ‘I’. We do have an enduring feeling of selfhood… That is not in question. But the substance of ‘I’ is open to doubt.

[You might]  like to consider this point [by means] of an experiential exercise. Consider the nature of your ‘self. As you attempt to specify its nature, you will, no doubt, bring various aspects to mind. The exercise is one of detaching from each of these aspects in turn. What remains as you strip them away? Is there some core you can experience beyond the various aspects you have specified? You may consider relationships, for example. Thus you probably define yourself in part as so-and-so’s son, brother, sister, wife, husband and so on. Is it possible to be yourself irrespective of those relationships? What about career, status, possessions and so on? More fundamentally, what about dispositions and personal skills? Can you be the same ‘I’ [temporarily] stripped of those qualities of which you are proud…?

This is an exercise in imagination, but that does not make it any less important in psychological terms. The aim of the exercise is really that of a meditative contemplation of self. Indeed, experience of meditation is probably necessary for the reader to gain the insight into self at issue here.

It is possible to strip away all the aspects (and more) mentioned above. Eventually you will be left with the feeling of ‘I’. Not this or that aspect, just a feeling which cannot be put into words. And then… awareness. Simple Being.

Two Things in Relation to MULTIPLICITY

First, there is the issue of control…

Although Unified-I has the impression that it is in control… this is often not the case. Actions are planned and executed from outside of ‘I’, but nevertheless there is an ‘I’ that deems itself in control; it interprets events accordingly and thereby furthers its raison d’etre.

Second, on the subject of consciousness…

 …the identity plane is one plane of mind which accounts for the unified nature of our experience of self, the stream  of  consciousness.  However,  this  plane  is  constellated as a shifting amalgam of ‘I-tags’  and, therefore, its contents are not unified and are only a sub-set of mental activity ongoing at any one time. It is ‘I’ that is multiple and partial, not consciousness or Being.

The identity plane is conceived of as a shifting array of ‘I-tags’, each of which embodies one’s past personal connection to present impressions. From these, the sense of a single ‘I’ is generated through the work of the interpreter-I. Present impressions (which include feelings as well as sensations and thoughts) are interpreted as emanating from a single locus of control— ‘I’. Although this ‘I’ is constructed anew each moment, the impetus of the interpreter is necessarily towards continuity. That is to say, the raison d’etre of the interpreter is to generate consistent explanations of events and, complementarily, a consistent focus for those explanations —’I’. Therefore the interpreter generates a bridge between successive constructions of ‘I’. The explanations of the interpreter are set in terms of the laws of causation, which bring about the experience of time as we know it and the experience of the ‘stream of consciousness’.
    
We may assume that ‘I-tags’ themselves are constellated into groupings, giving rise to what have been called ‘subpersonalities’. Thus, although ‘I’ is constructed anew each moment, it tends to fall back on familiar ground by embodying one or another predominant image we have of ourselves. Rowan defines a subpersonality as ‘a semi-permanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a person’, and suggests that an average person displays between four and nine such subpersonalities.

We may become aware of the multiplicity of ‘I’s through the internal dialogue by which they communicate and by means of which they are maintained. Thus, in general, we may find that the inner commentary that seems to be with us most of the time can be related to different characters, one perhaps a parental authority figure, one a hedonist, another a priestly figure and so on. Each delivers its lines to one of its colleagues in an attempt to assert its will. It can be useful to get to know these foci of inner dialogue in order to achieve greater integration of self…

Many Modes of Verification

Verification by repetition, by accumulating evidence to support a point of view, by feeling things on the pulse. This obviously does not ensure the ultimate validity of whatever it might be but it provides an added imperative to figuring out why so many people in so many different contexts have come to the conclusion they have come to.

Even so, a good question to ask is ‘What if x were true?’ What would be the practical consequences? One might choose to believe x and notice carefully what happens as a consequence of adopting the belief. It is always safe enough to put x in brackets and work with it for the time being. If it works out in practice then you can make other decisions (based on the noting of feedback) to fit into your general sense of reality.

This process may seem arduous and long-winded especially when one takes seriously the need to check it out from one’s whole Being: asking how does it fit my intellectual system, does it feel right, how does it work out in practice?— this could go on for many moons. This fits Gurdjieff’s injunction to engage in Being-partdolgduty—all Centres, all parts of the brain working together so that whatever one looks at becomes self-verifying through Conscious labour and intentional suffering… maybe over a period of many years.

How Would You Deal with This?

What is the practical application of the concept of Multiple-I’s? A simple Case Study may help verification.

I spent an afternoon with a man who was out on the very edge of things. He had been very good at his job as a top executive in a local council organisation but was choosing to find his work role very stressful as a result of being overlooked for promotion and finding himself with a newly appointed female boss for whom he was developing a deep resentment. He was stuck in a vicious circle of a system:-

This was more or less how the ‘problem’ presented itself to me; this character was stuck in a system, a vicious circle that as things were he found it impossible to break out of.

First thing I noted was that the whole thing had been tipped into an abstraction: it seemed like he was stuck in the glutinous jelly of a word that carried no real meaning—as long as he considered himself to be harbouring ‘resentment’ nothing would happen, no progress would be possible.

I got him to experience for me how good he was at his job; I had him step into Being-good-at-my-job-I and figure out all the ‘I’s that could be associated with that—all the specific bits of behaviour (or ‘I’s) that had resulted in his being respected for what he did in an executive kind of way—Developing-projects-I, Coaching-colleagues-I, Getting-things-done-on-time-I, Relating-to-outside-bodies-I.

Then I got him to step into Feeling-resentful-at-the-new-woman-boss-I. It turned out that it was not just that she was a woman but that she also lived in a Big House and owned a horse which she rode about the estate—Feeling-resentful-about-specific-indications-of-success-I.

To cut the story of the long afternoon short, it turned out that Resenting-I, Being-resentful-I, had been part of this man’s repertoire for many years. The only time when he had not been in Feeling-resentful-I was when he was at college twenty years before. There, during our exploration, he discovered a Being-open-to-experience-I, Having-life-stretched-out-in-front-of-him-I. Even in his apparently successful marriage, he slipped into Feeling-resentful-I when he thought about how his wife & children got in the way of what he really wanted to do.

Cataloguing his ‘I’s as we went, laying them out on the floor recorded on bits of paper, we arrived back in infant school and it turned out that this was where, quite without his realising it, it had all started.

He had been very ill during his second year at school and his female teacher had decided that he should be held back for a year. This he deeply resented and attributed bloody-minded malice to the teacher. This generalised into Believing-that-all-women-have-it-in-for-me-I, a part of him that in some way blighted things for him for many years.

I talked to him about the idea that all human behaviour has some kind of positive intention behind it which he eventually accepted. “So what was the positive intention behind your infant teacher’s decision to hold you back for a year?”

I observed some kind of light dawning in his face. “She wanted me to have a good educational experience rather than one with a bit missing…”

“So what about the ‘resentment’?”

“Why on earth would I feel that? She was rooting for me…”

Leaving Feeling-resentful-I behind in that ancient classroom, we revisited all the experiences we had discussed; he felt reinvigorated about his college career and could understand how he might redefine his attitude towards his marriage and thought that he could now talk about issues with his new boss.

But his concluding remarks revealed a much larger unfulfilled desire: what he really wanted to do was to leave everything and go off round the world on his own! Globe-trotting-I.

I do not know how things turned out—I never saw him again!

This is how we turned a vicious circle into a virtuous one:-

Verification and the Enneagram

The Enneagram is a system of systems on which anything may be plotted so that it comes to make sense by approximating to ‘the Truth’.

Again, this diagram should be painted somewhere else on a large playground and danced around so that it comes alive for the dancer who might start off at 9 having some pet idea in mind—something that makes a whole for them. ‘The existence of god’, would do’; ‘the non-existence of god’ would do equally well; ‘my job is the most important thing in the world’; ‘I can’t wait for retirement’—some belief or thought that feels like a whole item. At 9 ask yourself what your pet idea does for you, what it looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like.

Dancing round the perimeter of the Enneagram will take you through another eight stopping points:-

1.    Here you take the opposite point of view with all the opposite attributes (whatever comes up)
2.    Here notice that you can take 9 and 1 and swing on a pendulum between them until you come to a point of synthesis or reconciliation—you may need to pause here with Pachelbel’s Canon playing in the background…
3.    Whatever temporary conclusion you come to, you need to know that everything there is in the universe goes on in spite of your parochial thoughts; your place is insubstantial
4.    But sub specie aeternitatis there are endless possibilities to be explored—the potential is endless…
5.    By setting your Being in such a context you can begin to notice connections hitherto undreamed of
6.    The deliberate making of connections will lead you to notice the way things repeat themselves down the ages and across space
7.    Patterns will emerge
8.    You will become able to build these into new structures of ideas which will create a new whole

Dancing along the lines of the dynamism inside the Enneagram will help to develop even more possibilities: from 1 to 7 will help you to perceive patterns in the polarities of your life; from 7 to 5 will get you to notice the creative possibilities in those patterns which will make new structures at 8′ at 2 a new sense of Third Force (reconciling) will begin to emerge offering new potential for development at 4. Round the basic triangle 9 – 3 – 6 the persistence of the Whole will be seen in repetition; you will take a step up in the levels of Wholes.

The dancing can, of course, be done in the head but physical movement around the system can help to engage all Centres.

A complex book like JGBennett’s Dramatic Universe demands verification—it cries out to be verified as does Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Staying the course is about going the whole hog without bothering about the postage. This dancing party is based on my limited grapple with Volume One of the Dramatic Universe which seems to place verification in a much larger context than it’s ordinarily provided with.

At Kingston Grammar School (1949-1954) ‘Bunter’ Brown taught us Ancient Greek. You could see when he was not too sure whether he was actually succeeding in teaching us the ins and outs of irregular verbs and Xenophon’s glittering strategic excitements or Socrates’ Defence because he would start to chew the inside of his cheek and go red in the face. Then he would suddenly explode with seemingly uncontrollable wrath: we hadn’t done our homework properly (I hadn’t…); we had failed his notion of the Higher Learning. After five minutes he would equally suddenly stop mid-ire and apologise, “I’m so sorry, gentlemen…”

We six privileged gentlemen, having dropped Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Geography to take up Greek, had been advised by earlier generations of Greek scholars that if we wanted to divert his attention for a whole lesson we just had to ask him a question about Stoics and Epicureans. This never worked for us but he certainly could be encouraged to pass the time in a generally undemanding philosophical manner.

One day we got him on to the existence of God. “Look, gentlemen, if you found a watch in the gutter, the last thing you’d assume is that it had got there by some kind of magic: somebody will have dropped it, accidentally no doubt, and is even now bemoaning its loss. If you opened it to scrutinise the inner workings, you would also not conclude that the watch, with its complex system of wheels & springs, had not been made by somebody… So it is with this universe we find ourselves in: it is not the product of magic and it stands to reason that it did not come into existence by accident—this means that somebody must have made it. That somebody was God…”

Then the bell rang… The next chapter of Xenophon’s Anabasis would have to wait.

This Means…

Whenever somebody asserts— ‘this means…’ (or words to that effect) what they are suggesting needs to be carefully thought about. We find ourselves on dodgy ground. For example:-

• The universe is a mighty complex construction—this means it must have been created by an ultra-intelligent being
• You’re always quoting from other writers—this means you have no thoughts of your own
• She isn’t smiling at me—this means she doesn’t like me any more
• You are awake at 5am each morning—this means you are an insomniac
• So you believe in the concept of Multiple-I’s that Gurdjieff presented—this means you think that there are lots of little men—homunculi—running around inside you

In each of these examples, the first bit is a matter of observation but the words that follow ‘this means…’ come out of the speaker’s false imagination; they are a construction from Internal Considering; they are the product of mind-reading; they are, in fact, probably what the speaker would ‘mean’ if they were to say the words they offer as general truth; the speaker projects their own meanings; they speak out of  their own autobiography.

Much of the comment on so-called social media sites rarely rises above this level. It’s just as Marshal McLuhan said long ago: the more opportunities for mass communication there are the less people will actually communicate. Simplistic imposition and projection of meanings abound. They appear to cry out to be challenged but to enter into an exchange is to become trapped in Self-justification and probably eventually lured into the Making of Accounts—two major indicators that the perpetrator is locked in False Personality. Yah-boo-sucks, etc, Facebook lingo. One can easily make the decision not to bother.

My Response to Bunter Brown

I would not have dared say it to him at the time but my thought back then was that ‘God’ is a projection of something inside of you—superego, says Freud—out on to a universal matrix—it could be some higher part of yourself that you blow up into the shape of a bearded cloudy old man figure.

‘I am the God of my inner world’, says Gurdjieff. Quite enough.

The last I heard of Bunter Brown he had quit ‘teaching’ and gone off to become a professional Essene; I imagined him—I still do—digging around somewhere in the Near East for Dead Sea Scrolls, wiping his brow with his handkerchief when the going gets tough.. Something in me kind of envied him but as a budding Essene, I think his concept of ‘God’ must have been a bit more subtle than the conventional Watch in the Gutter variety he presented to us gentlemen. Something maybe akin to what JGBennett, whilst admitting that he cannot marshal a lot of ‘evidence’ for it, refers to in The Masters of Wisdom (of which the Essenes were (maybe still are…) a subset) as ‘the Demiurge’.

For me, nowadays it does not seem so far-fetched to entertain the concept of a Demiurge as it used to do to believe in an old man in carpet slippers shuffling around the universe creating or destroying at the drop of some divine hat. The Demiurge—boundless Energy—that which runs through all that exists to keep it going—is a far larger concept than that God which is the mere projection of a simple bit of oneself on to a universal scale. Though it seems a shame to have to pin a label on it, the Demiurge fits well my long-time acceptance of the notion of a certain Something Far Larger than oneself. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…’ (Dylan Thomas)

“That means you believe in God…”  No…

‘God’, the word, is demeaning, a poor invention of a half-baked human mind; I find it astonishing to listen to supposedly intelligent grownups on the radio talking ‘theology’—the current dialogue about the status of the Pope who has just resigned and the likelihood of a successor just sounds to me like so much clatter on the air waves; whereas a certain Something Far Larger than Oneself is mysterious enough to work the spiritual trick for me—all that’s needed is a quick squint at a starlit sky and there you have it. Nothing to discuss; the sound of silence.

In The Masters of Wisdom, Bennett brilliantly depicts the scope of a billion years of quasi-intelligent behaviour within the intricate movements and associations of countless bits of universe: millions of years for this and millions for that; the coming together of molecules, amino-acids, atoms and life beginning as ‘…a thin film of blue-green algae spreading over the surface of the ocean…’ then, for another five hundred million years, the ‘intense activity of photosynthesis…’ in preparation for cells and sex. Somewhat far from being a quick-fix.

Think of one of your own Earth years and then multiply it 500,000,000 times… Five hundred million years… Go on—associate into the figure and think of all the springs, summers, autumns, winters of your life that colossal span of time represents… Provide a proper realistic context for this moment NOW.

Then ‘…for more than half a million years, men had all the characteristics of humanity except creativity. This is a higher energy than consciousness and is characteristic of the Demiurge…’ This would be the ‘Adam’ of the Old Testament—just a metaphor… Bennett says this metaphor was ‘…the first man who had all the characteristics of [humans] as we know [them]… [able to] speak as we do; …enjoy creative fantasies and translate them into action; …aware of past and future [with an understanding]… that events could occur beyond the reach of the senses. Such characteristics are not direct operations of the creative energy, but they are not possible unless it is present to stimulate consciousness. Where did this come from? Creativity is the energy that responds directly to the will… The power to initiate new activity was still with the Demiurge alone. How was it transferred to man?’

What Bennett chooses to call the Demiurge is the energy that over millions & millions of years turned blue-green algae into the thing that’s sitting here engaging in prestidigitation with the computer. Such energy does not seem to me to be a case for crassly demeaning worship by people dressed in their Sunday best—it’s just something to marvel at every day of the week..

Bennett says that it was simply the lack of an anatomical structure that made it impossible for apes to form human speech sounds; they could ‘think’ but not express their thoughts. ‘…Neanderthal man had the same limitation. The great mutation around thirty-five thousand years ago [changed the structure of the larynx in human beings] and the new race could articulate speech sounds…’

A human-being can say, “The cat sat on the mat”; but the cat can only observe the man sitting on the settee. The human creates the spectacle with words; the cat can only state it wordlessly to itself. Words are a going beyond things as they are—all words are creative; every time we open our mouths we indulge in a creative act.

This says nothing about quality: what we say can be anything from being inspirational to constituting some species of baloney.

Bennett continues: ‘…The hypothesis I want to put forward is that this was the long-awaited moment when humans could be endowed with creativity to enable them to make full use of their powers…’ The nature of creativity is unique to each individual: ‘… it cannot be transferred from one person to another. It is an integral part of the essence, the instrument of the will, and the source of freedom. Creativity must enter us at the moment of conception, and this gives us the key to understand how it entered the human race. The Demiurge can take the form of a man or a woman and can beget children…’

We Are the Children of the Demiurge

What are we doing here on Earth? We are here to continue the coursing of energy through the system; we are here to carry on the creative activity of the Demiurge; we are at the midway point of millions & millions of years; we can accept or deny the principle at work throughout the universe.

The Kybalion: ‘The Universe is Mental… There’s an ‘I’ that can stand aside and witness the operation of the Me’s mental creation and generation…’

I can observe the passage of events in the thinking of the Universe—the Demiurge. I can try all this on for size—in itself it is a creative As-if. It behoves us to recognise our status in the workings of the universe and participate in its creativity as best we can. If we fail to take up this option, life is of no consequence whatsoever.

Towards a Theory of Creativity

This is the title of a brilliant paper by Carl Rogers written in 1954. Since 1970 when I first read it it has been the basis of everything I have done in the way of teaching and thinking. It falls naturally into the preceding argument!

Carl Rogers asserts that there’s a desperate need for human beings to come to terms with their essential creativity. At the date of writing he said there was a dearth of creativity—how much worse have things become in the last 60 years.

He writes:-

1. In education we tend to turn out conformists, stereotypes, individuals whose education [we imagine to be] ‘completed’, rather than freely creative and original thinkers.
2. In our leisure-time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action [predominate]…
3. In the sciences, there is an ample supply of technicians but the number who can creatively formulate fruitful hypotheses and theories is small indeed.
4. In industry, creation is reserved for the few—the manager, the designer, the head of the research department…
5. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the ideas we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original or different is felt to be ‘dangerous’.

We are left out of the creative process when we merely follow A Influence culture; since Rogers wrote his piece the alluring power of e-communications has come to dominate life; advertising with its power to impose a uniformity creeps into every corner of existence; the Global Capitalist Conspiracy forces individuals and groups and whole countries to work harder & longer for less and less. No time for creativity.

On the Other Hand…

In a time when knowledge, constructive and destructive, is advancing by the most incredible leaps and bounds into a fantastic atomic age, genuinely creative adaptation seems to represent the only possibility for people to keep abreast of kaleidoscopic change… With scientific discovery and invention proceeding, we are told, at a geometric rate of progression, a generally passive and culture-bound people cannot cope with the multiplying issues and problems. Unless individuals, groups and nations can imagine, construct and creatively devise new ways of relating to these complex changes, the lights will go out… international annihilation will be the price we pay for a lack of creativity.

We will no longer be tapping into the process set in motion by the Demiurge millions of years ago. The lights will go out…

That’s the diagnosis. What does Rogers propose? What was so compelling for me forty years ago?

Firstly his definition of creative outcomes. There is no fundamental difference in essence, he says, between painting a picture, composing a symphony, devising new instruments of torture, new weaponry, working out a scientific theory, adopting new procedures in human relationships, a child inventing a new game to play with her mates, the cook inventing a new sauce, writing a first novel and making a renewal of one’s self.

Creativity is the realisation of one’s potentiality, the drive towards self-actualisation.

All human activity is creative. This says nothing about quality or morality; the act of taking a step forward is all that’s necessary; the step forward is a creative movement when it is thus conceived.

On the matter of judging the outcomes of the forward movement into novelty Rogers has this to say:-

Presumably few of us are interested in facilitating creativity which is socially destructive. We do not wish, knowingly, to lend our efforts to developing individuals whose creative genius works itself out in new and better ways of robbing, exploiting, torturing, killing other individuals; or developing forms of political organization or art forms which lead humanity into paths of physical or psychological self-destruction.

This leads to what Rogers calls ‘the inner conditions of constructive creativity’

1. Openness to experience: extensionality. This is the opposite of psychological defensiveness… It means lack of rigidity and lack of permeability of boundaries in concepts, beliefs, perceptions, and hypotheses. It means a tolerance for ambiguity… It means the ability to receive much conflicting information without forcing closure upon the situation…
2. An internal locus of evaluation. Perhaps the most fundamental condition of creativity is that the source or locus of evaluative judgement is internal. The value of a product is, for the creative person, established not by the praise or criticism of others, but by the self. Have I created something satisfying to me? Does it express a part of me—my feeling or my thought, my pain or my ecstasy? These are the only questions which really matter to the creative person, or to any person when she is being creative. This does not mean that she is oblivious to, or unwilling to be aware of, the judgement of others. It is simply that the basis of evaluation lies within herself… If to the person it has the ‘feel’ of being ‘me in action’, of being an actualization of potentialities in herself which heretofore have not existed and are now emerging into existence, then it is satisfying and creative, and no outside evaluation can change that fundamental fact.
3. The ability to toy with elements and concepts. Associated with openness and lack of rigidity is the ability to play spontaneously with ideas, colours, shapes, relationships—to juggle elements into hitherto impossible juxtapositions, to shape wild hypotheses, to make the given problematic, to express the ridiculous, to translate from one form to another, to transform into improbable equivalents. It is from this spontaneous toying and exploration that there arises the hunch, the creative seeing of life in a new and significant way. It is as though out of the wasteful spawning of thousands of possibilities there emerges one or two evolutionary forms with the qualities which give them a more permanent value.

A salient characteristic of the Demiurge, according to Bennett, is its ability to play endlessly with possibilities.

“I cant believe impossible things,” said Alice. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”  Lewis Carroll

So You Want to be Part of the Expressiveness of the Demiurge…

If you want to write poetry, you must read lots of examples of what ‘poets’ have written in the past; steep yourself in their writing: Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, TSEliot, Ezra Pound, John Donne, Norman MacCaig, Kathleen Raine, on and on along the poetry shelves. Model yourself on them; and eventually come to some unique personal synthesis which might take years to dawn on you. Stick at it. Play with ideas and images and judge the results for yourself.

If you want to write novels, you must have read plenty of novels: Hardy, Lawrence, Conrad, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, James Hanley, James Joyce, Iris Murdoch, John Buchan, Henry Green, Virginia Woolf. Though this list could hardly be more diverse, you must come to some way of working that is congruent with the ideas you have swimming around in your head. Stick at it. Play with ideas and images and judge the results for yourself.

If you want to write music, you must listen to much music. Don’t listen to those who say that music must have melody—that way lies perdition—what’s more it’s not true—music is just a sounding together of notes of different pitches: the rain makes music, the night sky is a musick, the wind in the woods, a motorway is a grand cacophony, the whine of the computer + the ticking of the clock + the creak of the chair & the tapping of the keyboard gives you something that Edgar Varese might have been aiming at.

if you listen
to the sound you may miss
the music
 (George Ives to his son Charles)

Lend your ears to Brahms & Beethoven & Mozart—these are the greats of the past—and then go for Havergal Brian, Schnittke, Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Giya Kancheli, Elgar, The Beatles, Michael Finnissy, Andrew Toovey.  Then find out how music works by following a printed score with the sound of the music and sit at a piano and create your own pathways along the dancing staves. Stick at it. Play with ideas and images and judge the results for yourself.

If you want to create works of art, you must go to an art gallery and look closely at the marks on paper or canvas—how do they combine to produce something you might learn to drool over?  Look for the compass point incision at the centre of Ben Nicholson’s circles & notice the razor blade marks where he has scraped paint away; observe the way Kurt Schwitters assembles the bits & pieces of everyday life; the Magic Cities of Paul Klee; get right into the design of any work of art you care to choose, its division of space, the use of colour & texture, the moving spirit. Learn to Stick at it. Play with ideas and images and judge the results for yourself.

If you want to do anything, first find out how it works. Then allow your mind to be programmed; let the poetry, the word-smithing, the music, all the artefacts enter your neural pathways; let some kind of Judicious Blend occur and notice the way that, though things appear to be separated, everything is in fact intimately connected up. The ultimate clue is the raging desire and stickability to make True Expression of what you see & feel. Play with ideas and images and judge the results for yourself.

In music, the modern way is to wonder—how can I bathe the public ear in harmless tunes they won’t have to work at that will make my name and make me a lot of money?  This is not the true way.

In art, the modern way is to think what extraordinary disgusting thing can I do to shock and appal and amaze to get me Marketable Notoriety and make me Loads of Money? This is not the true way.  

My Art Training

What got me on what I like to think of as the right track, consisted of watching my father draw before I was ten and, before that, when I was around five, carefully noting how his mother painstakingly chased very small blobs of paint with a brush into the awkward corners of outline pictures in a child’s painting book; I think of sitting at her side every time I make a painting and thank her silently.

At teacher training college, specialising in Art & English in the mid-1960’s, I caught the Schwitters Bug for some reason and suddenly started making 3-D wood constructions (‘Little Towers’) which I was amazed to discover were, in spite of myself, in demand at 10/- a time (proper money, ‘ten bob’=50p now).

Little Tower 1966

In due time,  while I was still at College, the 3-D experiments flattened themselves upon a wall. That this has been a forty year obsession can be seen from this construction made from bits of wood left over from the renovation of a house in Flitwick, Bedfordshire in the late 1980’s.

Currently, this construction continues to crumble away on the outside wall of our house in Sutton Bridge, subject to the elements and home to mason bees who have preferred to explore the old screw holes for nests rather than the little cardboard tubes we arranged elsewhere for them at some expense to ourselves.

There was an architectural feel to all the constructions I’ve done between 1966 and the present time and the circle comes straight out of Ben Nicholson…

It’s still impossible for me to look at bits of wood, their textures, the fragments of paint adhering to them, their decay, without wanting to make a dive for the PVA and the box of panel pins to make constructions out of them…

An obelisk is under construction in the garden in Sutton Bridge. The cats enjoy sharpening their claws on the superstructure. I have a box full of bits of wood waiting to be nailed to it; the old piano parts have not run out either…

Space Division,  plane surfaces, textured surfaces, circles, quarter moons, arches, chalices and gable ends.  These are the things that rouse my enthusiasm when I’m in arty mode. Why?

Why Do We Do What We Do in Exactly the Way that We Choose to Do It?

I have an obsession for gable ends. Where does that come from? I started filling sketch books reasonably systematically in 1960 and it’s interesting (to me at least), looking back, to realise that my choice of subject-matter was frequently determined by the presence of gable ends!

Swanage 1961

Shaftesbury 1961

It occurs to me, digging back into these old documents, that when, around the age of 8, I was asked the childish question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I used to answer, with some passion, “An architect!” It felt absolutely right somehow but I might just as well have said, “An engine driver…” or “An ice-cream vendor…” for all I knew about anything at all.

By the time I was modelling on Kurt Schwitters in 1965 I was also paring down my sketching towards abstraction with Victor Pasmore on my mind:-

Pudsey, Yorkshire 1967

Abstraction & Gable Ends really began to take off during the course of a thunderstorm over Luton on 4th August 1971!  The gable ends here are very self-conscious:-

When the College of Education where I was lecturing in the English Department was closed down on me in 1976 I came away not just with the novels of Henry Green which I stole from the College Library over a period of weeks knowing that they could have no better home than my front room (from the window of which this pencil sketch was done) but with a quantity of discarded paintings done by students on 2ft by 1ft 6 inch hardboard. In the Autumn of 1978 I cut some of these in half and began the series that has lasted on and off till the present day.  I’ve stuck at it!

I have no idea how & why I was driven to do this unless it was the bubbling to the surface of all the foregoing. These were palimpsests—an idea which really appeals to me and surfaced ten years later in another obsession—that of Found Poetry; reworkings of old stuff mostly found in the darkest parts of secondhand bookshops.

The process here was to cover the half-painting with black gloss house-paint and then to scratch the outline of the Magic City into the still wet paint, removing some of it with brown stain on a cloth to reveal, on & off, the colours of the original painting. It was a very instantaneous process which anticipated my next obsession—haiku and watercolours done roughly in the sumi-e fashion. An altogether right-brained approach to producing works of art; when it works the results can be really exciting; but not when you think too much about how exciting it is—then it’s not.

Strange how all my obsessions have remained current, there for the choosing as and when.

From Darkness into Light

Four years later, on some old chunks of floorboard picked up off the side of the road, I started to use layers of sugar paper covered with white wall emulsion paint (for texture) & felt tip with a minimum of added colour.

Wandering round the City of my Mind became so much part of me that I would sit in endless Bored Meetings at the FE College to which I had migrated and doodle possible vantage points. ‘Deep down my consciousness of the city is my consciousness of myself…’ Fernando Pessoa

By a strange mental reversal, this whole process began to influence the way I perceived and depicted ‘real’ towns & cities: on a day traintrip from Luton to Dartmouth this heap of buildings sprang out at me.

I didn’t see much of the Magic City during the 1990’s preferring to spend my time on developing an approach to watercolour that got each picture done and dusted in not more than about thirty minutes. This coincided with the renewal of an obsession for writing haiku, the Japanese short poem which is of the moment and written in the moment or not at all; the artistic equivalent is sumi-e.

Assissi 1998

It’s not that my watercolours look much like Japanese sumi-e painting, nor are they done with special brushes or paint carefully made from ground up powder, just that they are executed with the same sense of immediacy & truth to the moment…

Returning to Shaftesbury

in 1998 I viewed St James at the bottom of the hill with a different pair of eyes—eyes conditioned by this Magic City thing, aware of how the gable ends composed the scene.

It’s only recently occurred to me that this originally other-than-conscious fascination for gable ends started back in the 1940’s, after the War (yet another one to end them all…) when I remember the sudden sense of freedom to go on trips to the seaside. That was when I first saw the heap of houses either side of the line as the train arrives at Preston Park and then Brighton.

When we first went there with Mrs Manning and her son John, in 1946, the beach still had barbed-wire along the place where sea meets land. Later you could paddle there in this shifting perimeter where the ancient Celts liked to imagine that Wisdom exists; when you straddle sea and sand you have a foot in two camps.

Return to the Magic City

These are the most recent Magic City paintings. I have arrived at an idea  I think of as ‘serial painting’. I work with chopped up photocopies of previous paintings, enlarged or reduced in size, reassembled to make new vistas of a Magic City and then painted into. I find this process totally absorbing and spend hours at it…

The Long Way Back

And all this will disappear like blown froth off storm waves…

The question arises: How is one to keep all this in mind?

The Aphorisms of the Masters of Wisdom provide a map of the way back home.

1. Breathe consciously… placing attention on each successive breath to maintain presence. Ouspensky regarded this focus as the basis of self-remembering. Attention is sharpened. My own way of keeping focus is the writing of haiku—this is my own zikr.
2. Watch your step! Remember where you have come from and notice well where you are going to; observe the creativity involved in the forward step.
3. Make a start on the journey home… & out of the world of unrealised potential towards the Kingdom of Heaven which you will know is deep within your self.
4. Exercise solitude in a crowd! Participate fully in ordinary life but without losing the inner freedom to desist from identification with any of it. Walk through the market place and be not aware of a single sound. Bunter Brown said to me one day, “Soon you will be able to concentrate on what you’re doing without noticing all the hubbub around you…” There was always a sense of absence about him.
5. Maintain contact between tongue & heart. Ask yourself constantly, “Is what I am about to say or do likely to contribute positively to the swing of the universe?” If the answer is no then desist from all action.
6. The seeds of transformation are already within you; be single-minded. Maintain solitude in the crowd!
7. Engage in watchfulness. Learn to withdraw attention from what is undesirable. Never do anything unnecessary.
8. Recollect that loss of self results in objective loving.
9. Keep account of temporal states. Stop! in order to understand the passage of time. Always be thankful when you return to a state of Presence.
10. Mentation by form rather than mentation by words.
11. One’s own existence is the obstacle to final transformation.

And so back to being blue-green algae and the journey across billions of years begins again. Round and round, each mental circuit more useful than the previous one.

I knew that I would have to get out of all the Feeling-excruciating-pain-I’s, the Feeling-sorry-for-myself-I’s into other more positive ‘I’s as soon as possible in order to get back to ‘normal’ quickly.

I know the process; I’ve taken others through it; when it comes to working it for oneself things may be a bit different.

By 5 o’clock on 26th January 2013, post-operative pain was so excruciating that it seemed it was all there was in the world.

I Was Pain

The Pain invaded my whole Being.

For the next three days Excruciatingly-pained-I went along with the patient physiotherapist, nice man, walking the corridors of Pain, doing his exercises and receiving statements like, “You’re doing ever so well…” with an internal, ‘Get lost!’

The reading I’d planned to do went by the board; nothing in my notebook; the music I’d brought to listen to remained unplayed. Something in me knew that this was not how it should have been.

Back home, the following Thursday, I woke up and looked at the grey shapes beginning to appear out of night and realised that I had been well and truly invaded by Feeling-I’s, by Being-in-painful-shock-I, by Feeling-very-sorry-for-myself-I, by Swearing-&-cursing-I, and so on.  But accepting all this was the beginning of renewal.

Just looking at the external world took me beyond all that—the waking self went automatically into Seeing-I, and, noting the difference it felt, went into Intellectual-I, reconstructing the process. Being-in-thinking-I predominated while I trogged through 400 emails, not just to delete most of them but sometimes to construct lengthy replies.

Friday Evening This Packet of Flesh & Bone Rediscovered Reading-I

It asked my wife to pick a book at random from the library shelves; the book turned out to be My Story by Marilyn Monroe, waiting for 44 years for this moment now to be read. It’s such a lovely book: the beautiful thoughtful screen woman killed by the system comes alive. Plenty there to think about, to feel for and to bring into being. The sensible cycle round Intellectual-I, Feeling-I, Making-sense-of-things-I re-commences.

Now, early spring totally blue sky days have enabled me to stretch my ‘I’s across the fields out the back; there regrows in me a consciousness that’s nearly as big as the universe again. There are out of season primroses blooming in the rockery below my window.

How does internal change happen? It’s lots of steps taken with effort and persistence. It’s a full recognition that ‘I’ as a single being is illusory; it’s possible to maintain a proper sense of being only when you scuttle between the millions of different ‘I’s that constitute who you imagine your self to be. Then, and only then, can you make the choice to be all of them or none of them at all. Marilyn Monroe recounts how she alternated between Norma Jean, Norma Dougherty, Being-an-orphanage-slave-I, Aspiring-filmstar-I, Being-made-a-sex-object-I. Writing her notes towards an autobiography she must have been on the way to what I call Meta-I—the ‘I’ that can observe the transitions from one ‘I’ to another and learn to make real choices between useful and unhelpful ‘I’s which in the end I suppose she couldn’t do.

Meta-I

Now that, in what I call Meta-I, I can observe all this of mine, I can allow Feeling-the-pain-in-my-side-I to play its part on the stage of my mind with impunity; it’s much less of a bother to the entire carcass. I ‘feel’ I’m getting back to where I want to be after going the circuits—Pushing-into-the-pain-I, Noticing-things-around-me-I, Seeing-I, Hearing-I, Intellectualising-I and only then Ouch-making-I.

I am by no means entirely out of the woods. Why should I expect to be?

***

Mindfulness, which puts full attention on the movements and the characteristics of the body, can eventually see with clarity that the body is nothing but a conglomeration of parts which happen to be working in some manner and fashion as long as there’s life. The parts hardly ever work quite perfectly, otherwise there wouldn’t be any aches and pains, and they only keep going for a certain number of years.

We call this body ‘mine,’ creating the illusion of a ‘me.’ We think, ‘I know what I look like. When I look in the mirror I see ‘me’ and I actually know this is ‘me’. Yet, were we to make a closer examination we would find thousands of ‘me’s, all different sizes, shapes and colours. Sometimes a little fatter, sometimes a little thinner, first short, then taller, having black hair, then grey hair, having no glasses, later with glasses, feeling miserable, then feeling wonderful. The question must arise, ‘Which one is me?’ If the answer is, ‘I’m all these different people,’ we have at least seen that we’re not one, but maybe a hundred thousand people…Which one of the hundred thousand can we pick out to be the real me? There has to be somebody that’s real to keep the ‘me’ going. It’s impossible for one person to be a hundred thousand people. It doesn’t work, does it?

We may think, ‘I’ll pick the one I am this moment.’ But then what about the next moment? What about ten years from now? Always the one in this moment, that’s me. We wind up with a constantly changing ‘me’ which is sometimes hardly recognisable. Yet we think this is my body and attach great importance to it. Of course we have to look after our bodies. It would be foolishness not to. But to let our bodies dictate our lives is futile, because the body will never be satisfied. Even at one’s last moments, the body still craves comfort.

Being Nobody, Going Nowhere—Meditations on the Buddhist Path: Ayya Khema

***

Multiple-I’s

I teach a way of using the concept of Multiple-I’s as they are called in certain 4th Way Circles. There’s never seemed to be to be much point in entertaining an idea unless you find out whether it can be put to some practical use. This fits Gurdjieff’s assertion that Understanding can only come about by fusing Knowledge with Being—by doing something with ideas and seriously studying the consequences of your actions.

As part of a much longer bit of personal exploration, I coach people to think about something that’s an issue for them while they are literally walking this circuit:-

In wandering this map people move between different aspects of their thinking/feeling/doing process; they are enabled to explore something of what happens in their ‘consciousness’, up and down their Figure of Eight, and things move internally.

I begin by redefining whatever issue they have suggested and am fairly directive to start with but my aim is to get the discoverer to take over the passage round the map as quickly as possible. It’s fairly straightforward as a process—it’s not brain surgery. The simpler the process the more complex the results. Outcomes are often startlingly revealing…

Sometime Ago

There was a young woman on my course who expressed some concern about her pregnancy.

“So, you’re a bit concerned about things…”

“Yes, I’m not sure I’m quite ready for what’s going to happen to me…”

“It’s not something you’ve experienced before…”  (big smile…)

Since she was clearly feeling something deeply, I asked her to occupy the space labelled ‘Feeling-I’s’ and suggested she had moved into her limbic system where feelings would come easily and be entirely appropriate. I coached her into exploring her feelings, watching carefully for any shifts of language patterns.

She suddenly said, “I think I’ve got everything ready at home…”

“Hold it—you’ve gone into some kind of Thinking-I, you’ve moved into your neo-cortex. Go to the space marked ‘Thinking-I’s’…” We explore what kinds of things she’s been thinking about—what to call the baby, how to keep the consultancy going…

“And what have you done about that?” I ask pointing to the slot marked ‘Doing-I’s’ where she goes without much prompting.

“But sometimes things get on top of me…” she takes herself to the slot marked ‘Feeling-I’s’ and I get her to unpack the sense of ‘things getting on top of her’.

This goes on for some time oscillating between Thinking and Feeling for the most part.

I point out that she hasn’t been in the slot marked ‘Doing-I’s’ very often. I suggest she goes there. She suddenly says, “Do you know what—I haven’t been doing anything much for myself; I haven’t been getting into tune with the baby inside me…”

The floodgates opened.

“So what will you do…? How will you feel about that…? What difference do you think that will make…?” Spinning round the model on the floor.

The less you say, the more the response. Artful Vagueness. Always providing things are set up ‘correctly’…

“Go to the centre; step into Meta-I…” —a concept we’d already explored. There was a deep sigh of satisfaction: something had moved inside of her.

*

This young lass had left her own body till last.

Post-operatively that’s where I had started—all I had to do was reverse the process: get out of Being-constrained-by-body-I and step into Feeling-I and, the point of this Glob, into Intellectualising-I. Balance… 

Nearly done… Almost into Meta-I…

This caught my eye when it came up in my email alerts:-

The New Year of 2013 is upon us. The magic wand of our creative imagination allows us to consider our lives from the perspective of entering this next year with nothing from before. We stand clean. What if we could have a completely clean slate and start fresh? How does that feel? How does that change the way that we approach life? How does it change the way that we plan, set goals and consider options? In these closing days of 2012, pay attention to any fleeting thoughts or pictures that seem to arise out of nowhere. The outer self can dismiss these communications from our inner depths. Attended to, they can give us a glimpse of the future, awakening new possibilities for taking action.

My Immediate Reply

I started by thinking about all the things I have deliberately moved away from in the past, having for a time been thoroughly drawn in to their sphere of influence…

For instance, sometimes I’ve been involved in groups, including, recently, Internet groups, whose members often seem to dedicate themselves to telling others that they are wrong; they seem to have a requirement that you believe them against all other possibilities. Having a strong resistance to anybody who appears to require something of me, I have managed to detach myself from groups that are full of argument and downright unpleasantness.

Why did I join such Internet groups in the first place? Because I thought I’d learn something or find myself thinking new thoughts.

In You are not a Machine Jaron Lanier (computer expert) points out that most groups on the Internet are of the kind I have found myself in. So I withdraw… If I’ve confirmed my learning of anything from contributing to Internet groups it’s how to withdraw without regret even for the few good relationships I’ve made.

But then, courtesy of Linkedin updates, something catches my eye!

What Would Life Be Like if You Erased Everything from the Past?

Without stopping to think, I suddenly find myself in one of my favourite places—swimming amongst the stars (the celestial ones!)—that was the fantasy picture that ‘…seemed to arise out of nowhere…’ as Laurie had hoped for.

The Clean Slate—feels marvelous! Beginner’s Mind. Starting out again from innocence. But how to get there?

Innocence! How quickly it goes from life! The delightful littlest grandchild, coming up to four, stayed with us over Xmas. I was appalled at the way she had already been culturised into the ways of the world—made me realise just how ruthlessly, not considering myself to be out of step, I’d joined Thoreau’s ‘March to the sound of a different drum’ long ago. But from being a total innocent the little grandchild has already acquired likes & dislikes, desires and urges quite foreign to the real needs, as it seems to me, of what it is to be human… So early in life comes the loss of Essence… I suppose it happens to all of us down through the generations and then we might, some of us, choose, to make our way back there. To do that it’s necessary to ask ourselves what it is that’s essential to being a fully developed harmonious human-being.

The image of ‘swimming amongst the stars’ is not a new one for me—but it came up yet again when I read Laurie’s post. It represents detachment, non-identification, awareness of the dichotomy of inner & outer, flying; it gets my feet well-off the ground…

But then I began to think relatively down to earth thoughts: I was pulled up short by considering the idea of entering 2013 with absolutely nothing from before: no books, no hangups, no allegiances, no philosophical positioning, no obsessions, no enthusiasms, no being dogged by unhappiness, no passions, no clutter, no affiliations… Could I really cut myself off from all the gifts of life both positive and negative?

I look up and out of the window of my workroom across a wide river to the trees on the opposite side. In this moment now, the knack of detachment, I suppose, is to realise and grasp fully that, now, in the ice-blue sky and the movement of silver birch branches close outside my window there is no past, no time, no need to consider loss or gain, attachment or detachment. It’s all one; I am as I am right now where

peace I have from the core of the atom, from the core of space,
and grace, if I don’t lose it, from the same place.
And I look shabby, yet my roots go beyond my knowing,
deep beyond the world of man.
And where my little leaves flutter highest
there are no people, nor will ever be.

Yet my roots are in a woman too,
and my leaves are green with the breath of human experience.

DHLawrence

What Says My Ordinary Mind?

One part of me is locked in relationships and events, held in place by the things I’ve done, the places I’ve been. This part of me is a cluster of ‘I’s—‘I’ that is a teacher, Father-I, Husband-I, Traveller-I.

This part of me might well imagine that if it got rid of all this it would not exist at all, that it would lose its past. This is reinforced by Reminiscing-I: if it erased all the rememberings (moments by the seaside, holding my father’s hand after he came back from the War, kissing a girl on our favourite walk, ecstasies of limb and exertion cycling up hills and down valleys) would the whole of my being disappear?

Reading-I—what if all the book-learning went the way of memories, all the structures of ideas, all the monuments of intellect I’ve built uo slowly, formulating, as a particular ‘I’ in me fondly imagines it to be, a progressively more and more coherent view of ‘reality’?

What if this bag of skin & bone, without considering what it might learn from it, tossed all its experience, negative and positive into the dustbin of the universe? Would it then be a No-thing?

Ordinary Mind keeps to the well-trodden pathways; it does not want to lose the way.

What Might Come out of Extraordinary Mind?

School-teacher-I often used to get kids to think about the excitement of chancing their arm with something new. “For homework tonight do something you’ve never done before, something that will be of benefit to you and those around you… Think something completely new… Compose a piece of music… Do a painting like Jackson Pollack…” My starting-point for this was usually the declaiming of Miroslav Holub’s poem which serves for me as a potent metaphor for starting from scratch.

The Door

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.

Go and open the door.
if there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if nothing is there,
go and open the door.
At least there will be a draught.

*

A More Considered Reply

Laurie’s starting point was essentially a What-if proposition; what-if questions are great because they ask us to dream, to fantasise, to set aside for the moment all our conditioning, to step out of the prison of the past. Now there are futile What-if questions of the kind that cause us to lament the past: what if I had done or not done this or that—how would my life have been different? Those kinds of questions get us absolutely nowhere; ‘it is useless to fill the heart with bubbles…’ (Richard Jefferies). But a What-if question designed to produce at least provisional answers in the here and now can be a very productive one especially if the answers come not from what we imagine to be our one Unified-I but are investigated from our multiplicity.

It might be imagined that what Laurie’s question required was a response that comes from one place in us—from an ‘I’ that bears our name, for instance, one which has kept us going down the years and brought us to this point NOW. A single Unified-I by which we have chosen to be imprisoned.

We are not one single Unified-I; careful consideration of our Being will demonstrate that we are conglomerates—we consist of trillions of ‘I’s, each one clamouring to be the ‘I’ of the moment, each making a claim to be the only ‘I’—the big ‘I am’, the one and only single unified ‘I’.

So, for example, for this conglomerate called Colin, looking out across the river, it’s Writing-I that’s made it to the front of the queue, hand in hand with Making-a-sensible-answer-to-Laurie’s-post-I. Striving-to-make-sense-I is hanging around somewhere too.

When Laurie’s post caught Idly-looking-at-the-emailinbox-I’s attention, a squad of ‘I’s jostled to get in on the action, as I’ve already suggested—both Being-conventional-I’s and Being-off-beat-I’s.

To be more specific there was Asserting-that-I-am-my-past-I; it argued that getting rid of my past would abolish everything that ‘I’ am. Close on its heels was Being-so-attached-to-the-things-of-my-past-that-I-could-never-let-them-go-I. Then there was Believing-that-everything-that-happened-in-the-past-is-a-gift-I so that even what one constructs as ‘negative’ can serve as a useful cue to the ‘integration of the self’. There was Believing-that-there’s-no-such-thing-as-a-clean-slate-I—the ‘slate’, if slate there is, always has something written on it to influence current behaviour (but what if you break the damned slate? asks another ‘I’ with a quiet voice). There was Believing-that-the-slate-is-just-the-story-of-my-life-I—if that’s the case it might just as well contain a different story and there’s an ‘I’ that could re-write the whole sorry tale. Then there was Believing-that-rubbing-the-notional-slate-clean-would-get-me-to-nothingness-I; this immediately woke up Being-jubilant-I because there’s a powerful part of me (another ‘I’) that senses that until you are as nobody going nowhere there’s no chance at all of making what we imagine to be ‘progress’. And so to Swimming-amongst-the-stars-I.

Being in a state of Nothingness is akin to being in Beginner’s Mind which is where Being-a-teacher-I always goes when working with others. Otherwise what we call ‘the past’ is a real obstruction to ‘progress: This-is-the-way-I’ve-always-done-it-I is a profound obstacle to Let’s-give-it-a-whirl-I.

Infinite Peace & Quiet

I suppose that the ideal state, one to which we all perhaps aspire, is one of infinite peace and quiet, a state of calm even in the thick of action. We work to get it, amass fortunes to get it, arrange our time in order to achieve it. The danger is that we put ourselves into a sleep which comes to be understood as the calm we were after in the first place. That way we become identified with all kinds of things that serve as distractions—unnecessary things like work, career, money, fun, hobbies, politics, clubs, societies & systems. We lose the way; we lose our souls. This can be called ‘self-calming’, putting oneself to sleep.

Being truly calm is not the beginning but the end of a long arduous process which requires the growth of insight and the discarding of all that is unnecessary to what it is to be a harmonious human-being.

Follow the circle (or system) round and round!

Explication

The desire for a state of Calm can get us locked into self-calming when we become attached to or identified with it. We all too easily fall for the comfortable sense of being it is supposed to provide—this leads to an unquestioning acceptance of how things are or appear to be—and sleep.

Once we make an attempt to follow the path to true calmness of spirit, we find many distractions: mere thoughts keep on coming to get in the way. All thoughts are friction; they run in the grooves of the mind, sometimes very deeply—they make up what we like to call ‘consciousness’. Nevertheless, thoughts are there to be carefully observed for exactly what they are: unruly, fleeting, of the moment, deriving from old patterns of thinking, from habitual ways of constructing the world we imagine we live and have our being in. Thoughts, preserved just as they are, interrupting the process of getting to Calm, are worth observing for the effect they have on Being. Or rather, each thought being instigated by a separate ‘I’, can usefully prompt consideration of the I-tangle: Indulging-in-fantasy-I, Only-too-willing-to-follow-old-patterns-of-thinking-I, Dream-master-I, Being-content-with-negativity-I, Being-too-positive-I, Being-keen-on-a-quick-fix-I, Easily-being-distracted-I, Desiring-easy-comfort-I. So many ‘I’s, each to its own groove.

Mindful labelling thus enables us to notice what’s going on inside what we habitually think of as single Unified-I. One ‘I’, identified with when we think of it as running the show, is an illusion—a construction that we put together from a dim (undefined) awareness of many agents that operate inside us.

A human-being may be regarded as a series of momentary beings. Apart from these momentary beings there is no real human existence, so that in attributing to a human-being such continuous existence as we undoubtedly do in everyday life, we are performing an act of mental construction which endows with apparent permanence and solidity what is, in fact, a series of fleeting momentary particulars.

The world of matter is thus composed of momentary particulars subsisting each of them for a short time only, and a so-called material object is merely a logical construction or symbol standing for a series of particulars which are arranged together by our minds…

Professor CEM Joad: Mind and Matter

There’s all this neuronal activity—the electro-chemical activity that drags focus hither & thither, part of us focused on this, part on that on and on.

the clock ticking
the pain in the leg
the view over the river
the dead computer-thing
the scratching of the pen-nib
the odd look of words when you go into a trance of verbal satiation
the wondering how they ever came to signify what they do
the clicking of the central heating
the pleasant feeling of being able to write at a clear desk

All this gets combined into ‘I’—the ‘I’ that thinks, “I really must get this finished…” For the moment all the ‘I’s seem to be combined into one—the one we usually live out of, imagining it to be the same linguistic subject of all the verbs we use to describe our actions.

Labelling all the ‘I’s—Feeling-I’s, Doing-I’s, Thinking-I’s—enables us to separate from them, and more importantly perhaps, to change the ‘I’ we’re in from moment to moment. We don’t have to be in any of the habitual ‘I’s. We can simply watch their antics from a stillness within. The question worth asking is—What is the ‘we’ that can perform this function?

What-if there is an ‘I’ that is capable of standing outside the whole process in order to take stock of it, shape-shifting and all? It’s not an ‘I’ that can take control but at least it might be able to understand the movement between one ‘I’ and another—between Being-angry-I and Being-relaxed-I, for example.

The knack of being able to stand back and just observe is an aspect of mindfulness or self-remembering.

Meta-I

I prefer to think of whatever-it-is in our makeup that can step outside things as Meta-I. It can literally step away from all the other ‘I’s.

In the unlikely event of there being anybody who denies the possibility of such a concept, they are perhaps still stuck in the grooves of old ‘I’s so familiar that they have become comfortable to be in even though they perhaps haven’t worked successfully in the past. It requires that one become unstuck to begin to understand the very concept of being unstuck.

Once define it, once occupy the space mapped out by Meta-I and you can find yourself well on the inside of it, standing apart on the other side of the bridge. Ordinary minds will just argue about it all; extraordinary minds will just say, “OK, right, here ‘I’ go then…”  Give-it-a-whirl-I says, “What do I do first then?” It’s a what-if kind of question. Answers to a What-if question tend to define the answerer’s state of being.

I don’t have to quarrel with the world—the world quarrels with me…  Buddha

Don’t try to become enlightened. Just discard all your views & opinions… Nasrudin

Things Constantly Change

If it’s true that things constantly change what is the point of clinging to them? What is the point of clinging to the past? What is the use of identifying with another person when tomorrow they will be different just as you will be?

Bodily aches & pains don’t last—they are not ‘me’. Swimming amongst the stars is a way of detachment; it is a metaphor, a manageable image, of being detached while not denying the ache or the pain.

Feelings don’t last—they are not’me’. I have misery but ‘I’ am not my misery. I have love but ‘I’ am not my loving. Swimming amongst the stars is a way of leaving feelings behind while not in the least denying their existence. When I return from a ‘swim’ I discover different feelings, the miserable ones transformed, the loving ones enhanced…

Perceptions are ego-constructs—they are, of course, not ‘me’ at all. We construct things one way and might just as well construct them otherwise. To assert the correctness of one’s own perceptions over those of others is ego-delusion; to argue with another is an attempt at ego-bolstering. Swimming amongst the stars leaves all that behind.

All mental constructions change: feelings from the past; political and religious attitudes, philosophical frameworks—‘I’ have them but none of them are ‘me’. ‘I’ can play endlessly with mental constructions without an assertion of rectitude to engage in which would be to try to achieve ego-support. Ego needs constant support. All judging, deciding, grasping, rejecting and so on comes from ego-delusion.

The need for pleasant sense impressions, the search for pleasure & fun, the avoidance of pain, construct the world for us—they are not us. Swimming amongst the stars helps me to see them for what they are—unnecessary figments of the imagination..

Remaining detached in the face of all this without friction—a suitable metaphor for me is swimming amongst the stars. To extend the metaphor… Each star perhaps represents something relatively fixed: a bodily ache or pain, a feeling with which I am familiar, a perception or an idea I’ve got used to, a Beethoven Symphony, a Rothko painting, an ‘I’ of one kind or another… When this bag of wind swims amongst the stars it becomes detached from it all but can paradoxically choose to settle just wherever it will.

This is a kind of at least temporary insight. One needs to go several times round the system.

The return to earth at least helps one to see things differently

Go and open the door.
if there’s a fog
it will clear.

To Recap Briefly

As Laurie asked: ‘How does that feel? How does that change the way that we approach life? How does it change the way that we plan, set goals and consider options?’

See http://www.thebacajourney.com/?p=551

‘I’ am student/learner/business person/father/mother/son/daughter/footballer/statesman/cook/and so on, at different moments of my life; ‘I’ lead an existence variously fanciful, invented, humdrum, playful, exquisite, dour, magnanimous; the life of the outside world and that of our inner world both proceed together, in what seems to be an undifferentiated unity, in real time focussed on whatever ‘we’ (our many ‘I’s) may imagine to be important from time to time.

The inner world in which we swim, mysteriously, is of prime importance to ourselves but of singularly small real account to others, hard as they might try to empathise. It is represented by the bottom of the Figure of Eight model… For a full explication of the concept of the Figure of Eight, see  http://colinblundell.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/somatic-markers and subsequent posts.

The Fleeting Ephemeral Quality of the Inner World

Dead and long gone, mouldered by now into almost nothing in the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris, are the remains of Marcel Proust who once noted that ‘trees in a clearing and the flowers on road sides or on old walls’ had a quality of having chosen ‘just that place to grow…’ so much so that ‘they filled it with a silent and different life, with a mystery in which my person found itself lost and alarmed at the same time…’

My person, my collection of multiple beings or ‘I’s, can find itself lost in mysteries and memories, alarmed and charmed at one and the same time; it is impossible to keep up with the way flipping in the memory from thing to thing, event to event brings to mind the millions of I-tags with which we label the minutiae of our past.

There was a road leading to Blackmoor Gate in Devon where she and I bent down to look at bladderwort only to discover a lizard basking in a short moment of sunshine before the mist came down fifty-five years ago. One lizard that achieves a kind of immortality for me; lizard scuttles off out of this all too brief trance of togetherness; if she is still alive, I wonder if she too remembers that moment—she’d be 76 whereas in all of lizard-time she is still 20… What was it that ceased in their relationship when the man who was up on a roof thatching saw fit to bid them, “Good Morning!”?

Literary Parallels

Pick a moment from your past—nothing spectacular but something that continues to have some ‘meaning’ for you. A moment to which you pin a label that represents one of your past ‘I’s, an I-tag. Notice how the experience comes and goes in intensity, in definition as you try to hold on to its mystery, to put it into words, both the event—what you saw, heard, felt—and its significance for you in afterdays.

In her novels Virginia Woolf captures the fleeting quality of inner experience so well; this from To the Lighthouse:-

Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay: thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said “Pretty—pretty”, an odd illumination into his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his simplicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had gone out of their friendship.Whose fault it was he could not say, only, after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he maintained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there, like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality laid up across the bay among the sandhills.

Luriana, Lurilee

This was a poem was written by Charles Elton who was related by marriage to Lytton Strachey, part of the Bloomsbury set. Her relationship with Lytton Strachey was presumably how Virginia Woolf came across this not very well-known poem which was not published until 1945;  she quoted it in To the Lighthouse (1927)

Lytton Strachey and VirginiaWoolf 1923

Come out and climb the Garden path
Luriana, Lurilee.
The China rose is all abloom
And buzzing with the yellow bee.
We’ll swing you on the cedar bough,
Luriana, Lurilee.

I wonder if it seems to you,
Luriana, Lurilee,
That all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
are full of trees and changing leaves,
Luriana, Lurilee.

How long it seems since you and I,
Luriana, Lurilee,
Roamed in the forest where our kind
Had just begun to be,
And laughed and chattered in the flowers,
Luriana, Lurilee.

How long since you and I went out,
Luriana, Lurilee,
To see the Kings go riding by
Over lawn and daisy lea,
With their palm leaves and cedar sheaves,
Luriana, Lurilee.

Swing, swing, swing on a bough
Luriana, Lurilee.
Till you sleep in a humble heap
Or under a gloomy churchyard tree,
And then fly back to swing on a bough,
Luriana, Lurilee.

The whole tone of the poem conveys the underlying fleeting sadness of life, ‘all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be, full of trees and changing leaves’. It illustrates, perhaps, the way we take observations deriving from the top half of the Figure of Eight and lodge them as symbolic images in the bottom half—’changing leaves’ being sufficient to stand non-verbally for the ephemerality of our Multiple-lives.

The Entrancement of Literary Texts

When I first read Richard Jefferies’ The Story of my Heart at Easter 1953—I remember the date because I took it to Paris on a school holiday, an important I-tag—I was entranced by the way his observations seemed to sum up for me all the things I had felt till then in what I might now describe as my proto-self.  To give myself what the sacred book then named as a ‘strong inspiration of soul-thought’, I had for a long time on a Saturday morning cycled the half-hour to Wimbledon Common where the ferns and dank undergrowth and the silver birches gave me all I needed to lapse into ‘communion with Nature’.

My old Greek master, Mr Brown, in a rare moment of confiding in me, said that although at 15 my soul was replenished by undergrowth and hidden streams by the time I was his age (around 50 then, I expect) I would have a replacement yearning for high hills. That interesting pattern did not exactly play itself out for me but on long cycle rides later I certainly relished the alternating taste of deep valleys, wide bare landscapes and open hills. But for his timely comment I might not have appreciated the distinction.

This is the beginning of The Story of my Heart. It will always send shivers up my spine.

The story of my heart commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul-thought.   My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge.  It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk… There was a hill to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression. The familiar everyday scene was soon out of sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration…

But then there’s the way our expectations are dashed. Remember to put the high moments with the low since all human experience has some positive intention for us. We are in To the Lighthouse again.

“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheel barrow, the lawn-mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language…

“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine…”

Shock

I vividly remember the  huge shock when, at the centre of the novel, I read that ‘Mrs Ramsay died in the night’. This was abruptly announced in squared brackets as though being of little consequence. This woman through whose eyes we have been experiencing a whole sequence of events, a complex of feelings and intimations… Dead! How could she be dead when the reader has been by her side for so long and so intimately? All the contents of the previous pages burst like a bubble, just like that. I-tag for the bubble-nature of human life.

Though advocated in all the self-help books on Creative Writing, it’s not of great consequence to me, but it is probably useful for a novel to open with some kind of shock; it makes the reader sit up and take notice. I like the less conventional shock of an opening to a novel that appears to start mid-stream as though a lot of other stuff has been happening before we set off on the great journey that is the novel. One of my favourite neglected novelists, Henry Green, is a dab-hand at launching into things as though we’re already familiar with what’s going on. I was on holiday in Eastbourne—little boy pausing from playing with stones on the beach—when war broke out in 1939. I-tag.

When war broke out in September we were told to expect air raids. Christopher, who was five, had been visiting his grandparents in the country. His father, a widower, decided that he must stay down there with his aunt, and not come back to London until the war was over.

The father, Richard Roe, had joined the Fire Service as an Auxiliary. He was allowed one day’s leave in three. That is, throughout forty-eight hours he stood by in case there should be a fire, and then had twenty-four in which he could do as he pleased. There were no week-ends off.

Public holidays were not recognised. The trains at once became so slow that there was no way he could get down to see Christopher in a day.

Christopher was like any other child of his age, not very interested or interesting, strident with health. He enjoyed teasing and was careful no-one should know what he felt.

He was naturally a responsibility but, with things as they were in the first few months, he was not too great a one, nevertheless rather irritating at a distance. War puts men in this position, however, that they can. do little about their own affairs, they have no prospects, their incomes fluctuate wildly, heavier taxation is always threatened. As soon as Roe felt he could do no more for the boy than he had already done and by what he was still doing, dropping in to the office on leave days, Christopher grew very much closer to him.

After a time, when the turmoil of the first weeks of war subsided, conditions settled in the Service and it became possible to do ninety-six on duty to get forty-eight hours off. In this way, after three months of war and no raids, that is of anticlimax, Roe worked four days to be two days on leave.

He took a train. It was raining. The carriages were full of young men uniformed…

(Henry Green: Caught)

So many questions raised, patterns set up.

The Openings of Novels

William Morris’s brilliant revolutionary News from Nowhere starts abruptly with a kind of rhythmic incantation:-

Up at the League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the future of the fully-developed new society.

Says our friend: Considering the subject, the discussion was good-tempered; for those present being used to public meetings and after-lecture debates, if they did not listen to each others’ opinions (which could scarcely be expected of them), at all events did not always attempt to speak all together, as is the custom of people in ordinary polite society when conversing on a subject which interests them. For the rest, there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions.  One of the sections, says our friend, a man whom he knows very well indeed, sat almost silent at  the beginning of the discussion, but at last got drawn into it, and finished by roaring out very loud, and damning all the rest for fools…

And when Morris awakens on the morning after we find ourselves around a hundred years into his future. Haunting! The I-tag here is Utopian-I. I have always hung my hat on Oscar Wilde’s dictum that a map of the world that doesn’t include a place called ‘Utopia’ is a map not worth having.

A few months ago, strolling up Charing Cross Road lamenting how, before the filthy capitalists moved in to put the rents up, it used to be the Secondhand Bookshop Road in London, I suddenly conceived the desire to possess Joseph Conrad’s The Rover. I had a hunch that I’d find a copy in Henry Pordes, my favourite remaining bookshop, and there, sure enough, the owner knew exactly where a handsome copy was filed amongst thousands of books.

What was it presented my being with this desire? For fifty years I had represented  the novel as ‘pigeons outlined against a blue sky on a roof ridge’ (describes my I-tag for the original experience of reading it). I wished to find the reference and to refresh my image of the book. I was not disappointed. You’ll have to find the pigeon image for yourself—it doesn’t appear in this opening paragraph!

After entering at break of day the inner roadstead of the Port of Toulon, exchanging several loud hails with one of the guardboats of the Fleet, which directed him where he was to take up his berth, Master-Gunner Peyrol let go the anchor of the sea-worn and battered ship in his charge, between the arsenal and the town, in full view of the principal quay. The course of his life, which in the opinion of any ordinary person might have been regarded as full of marvellous incidents (only he himself had never marvelled at them), had rendered him undemonstrative to such a degree that he did not even let out a sigh of relief at the rumble of the cable. And yet it ended a most anxious six months of knocking about at sea with valuable merchandise in a damaged hull, most of the time on short rations, always on the lookout for English cruisers, once or twice on the verge of shipwreck and more than once on the verge of capture. But as to that, old Peyrol had made up his mind from the first to blow up his valuable charge—unemotionally, for such was his character, formed under the sun of the Indian Seas in lawless contests with his kind for a little loot that vanished as soon as grasped, but mainly for bare life almost as precarious to hold through its ups and downs, and which now had lasted for fifty-eight years.

It is old Peyrol’s undemonstrativeness that I think I built into my being all those years ago; the idea of his simply ‘knocking about the sea’. I-tag. I have just ‘knocked about’ this place and that accumulating by chance a treasure that would be difficult to locate even to me for whom presumably it ought to be relatively easy.

The I-tag of Place

Finally, the opening of HGWells’ Ann Veronica:-

One Wednesday afternoon in late September Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening.  She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to see and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving in. “Lord!” she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a leather clutch containing note-books, a fat text-book, and a chocolate-and- yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that she had to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as the result of her precipitation. “Sold again,” she remarked. “Idiot!” She raged inwardly, while she walked along with that air of self-contained serenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under the eye of the world.

So what’s the I-tag here? ‘Morningside Park’ is Wells’ disguise for the place where he lived briefly around 1896— Worcester Park in Surrey, England, where I lived for the first twenty years of my life. The wide station approach still has a coal merchant and an estate agent on one side though the wicket gate and the field path have long since given way to suburban sprawl and the main road from Kingston to Cheam. Huge numbers of I-tags dangle on the events and the scenes and the feelings relating to the twenty years I lived there.

She walked down the station approach, [I do so with her!] past the neat, unobtrusive offices of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate by the butcher’s shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside the post office [a fine building now sold off to save money] stood a no-hatted, blond young man in grey flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely unaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent her by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the avenue.

“Umph!” he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning it to the pillar-box. “Here goes,” he said. Then he hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to a whistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

Ah, The Avenue! Wells lived somewhere in The Aveue. Even up to the year he died, it was tree-lined, with large Victorian houses in leafy gardens, leading up to the church and beyond where, in my early years, there was the Big Field from the top of which was a view across Surrey to rival that from the top of Richmond Hill. Up The Avenue was the direction—not the direct way—I headed off on so many cycle rides to the coast. I went that way because I remember at the age of around 8 standing in The Avenue with my mother while she talked to somebody about journeys. While she talked I looked into the undergrowth and sniffed the dank air and determined that this was where all journeys should begin. The Big Field is now a housing estate and most of the big old mansions have been knocked down so that builders can pack in twenty houses where one was quite sufficient in the old days.

Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. “It’s either now or never,” she said to herself…

Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say, come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There was first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from the railway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the Pavement, the little clump of shops about the post office, and under the railway arch was a congestion of workmen’s dwellings. The road from Surbiton and Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and very brassy window blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenue again.

Wells’ memory is not exactly accurate—Pavement and Post Office were under the railway arch which until the 60′s or 70′s was so low that the 213 bus I used to board to get to school in the 50′s had to be a single decker. The iron-fenced path would have gone around the church… And beyond the stile there was what I called the Big Field where I used to spend much time with Maureen with our backs against the Big Log in the middle of the field… The last time I remember spending good time with her was at Blackmoor Gate.

“It’s either now or never,” said Ann Veronica again, ascending this stile. “Much as I hate rows. I’ve either got to make a stand or give in altogether.”

She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the new red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be making some sort of inventory. “Ye gods!” she said at last. “What a place! Stuffy isn’t the word for it.”

Of course, I didn’t think Worcester Park in the least bit stuffy. It was a place I relished. A profound part of my Inner Life. Much of the sense of it residing in the bottom half of my Figure of Eight. Though the area as far as Epsom had been built over by the time I was born in 1937 the smell in the air still comes from the Surrey hills and is fresh with ferns and silver birches. My parents said that when they bought our house there was nothing but countryside at the top of the small hill on which it survived the Blitz.

I go back there in memory and collect up the Multiple-I’s that hang around in every street and tree and at every corner.

For some strange reason, ‘Christmas’ offers many people an opportunity  for a peculiar kind of celebration which seems to entail spending vast amounts of money. Over ‘Christmas’ 2011 I decided I’d celebrate in a peculiar manner by re-reading the selected essays of Michel de Montaigne. I first read these about fifty years ago and I was playing a hunch that they had a big impact on the way I came to view the world.

I have lost the copy of the essays I read all those years ago otherwise I have no doubt I would easily have been able to turn up the things I deemed important then because I have long been in the habit of underlining things of significance to me in books neatly in pencil.

The introduction to the new Penguin Selected Essays by the translator, Dr MAScreech, included several references which made me think I was on the right track with my hunch.

It seems that when Montaigne withdrew from the world he inscribed quotations on the roof of his library in much the same way as Gurdjieff did at Fontainebleu. For instance he might have had this (which is amongst the host of quotations in his essays, some of which I quote here from time to time) up there in his library:

‘Endeavour to make circumstances subject to me, and not me subject to circumstances…’ (Horace)

I emulated Mr G by covering in a similar fashion the six-sided conical ceiling of the summer-house I built at the end of last century. These act as anchors for ideas and serve for reminders of key things in the 4th Way. They feature boxed throughout the text of my farrago book  ROOM THREE.

My Summerhouse

For Montaigne the possession of books was a delight… When I was about 16 I read Arnold Bennett (in Literary Taste I think it was) who said that the way to learning was first of all simply to surround yourself with books—so I’ve done just that for 50 years. Like Montaigne it pleases me greatly to be able to reach up to a wall of books and either find something I know is up there or discover something new on an autumn afternoon, as it might be. It delights me to lace my writing with quotations that seem to add something to what I write, confirm it, justify it somehow. Like Sartre’s Autodidact (in Nausea) I am always pleased when I discover that somebody more famous than I will ever be has expressed the same (or a similar) idea as I have tried (= ‘essayed’) to put into words. I always feel a need to honour and acknowledge earlier writers, not to put myself on their level but simply somehow to confirm a common basis in humanity. Montaigne says: ‘I only quote others the better to quote myself…’ I suppose I delight in quoting others because it gives me a better inkling of what I think I mean to say…  As here, just now!

Learning is always for a purpose; it is instrumental; like Montaigne I have no desire to be ‘learned for its own sake’. Learning is life; Montaigne said ‘…my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested…’ No completion; no finality till death…

Screech says ‘Montaigne held that philosophy should be delightful. He saw no need for it to be severe and forbidding…’ Them’s my sentiments too. A philosophy that larks about! Unless you can play the clown you are not entitled to be serious, say I.

Since my aim is to quote sufficiently from Montaigne’s essays to back up my hunch that I owe such a lot to him, I have gone to the on-line Gutenburg Project’s free version of Charles Cotton’s 1685/6 translation rather than run the risk of being extradited or incarcerated for infringing copyright by Penguin. However, I do owe my researches to reading the MAScreech translation over Xmas 2011.

At the age of 38, tired of the life he’d been leading, Montaigne

…retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find—

Variam semper dant otia mentem—Leisure ever creates varied thought—Lucan

that… it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself…

Montaigne's Chateau

Notice that it was at the age of 38 that Montaigne decided he’d had enough of living life for the benefit of others. At that age he determined to ‘..live out the small remnant of life’ for himself. To do this he had to ‘call in [his] thoughts and intentions to [himself, in aid of his] own ease and repose…’

It is no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough for us to do without mixing other enterprises.  Since God gives us leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take leave of company, and disentangle ourselves from those violent importunities that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves. We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole.  The greatest thing in the world is for a man [sic] to know that he is his own.

Apart from the historical fact, this is such a useful metaphor for learning to be yourself, without attachments, on the road to the ideal state of Nothingness from which you can always choose to move carefully towards the idea of being ‘something-or-other’. Gurdjieff said approximately: ‘Until you can think of yourself as a Nothingness, going Nowhere, there’s no chance of change…’

I suppose that retirement from wage slavery in 1992 at 55 (17 years after Montaigne escaped the rat race) should have brought me a peace similar to what he had hoped for but, as in his case, the flow of ideas keeps growing apace, without, perhaps, much in the way of order or design.

‘This plodding occupation of books is as painful as any other, and as great an enemy unto health, which ought principally to be considered.  And a man should not suffer him self to be inveigled by the pleasure he takes in them…’ (Florio) Ah books! What would life be without them?

The many worlds I still inhabit sustain multiple interests which have a habit of linking up in accordance with Ouspensky’s dictum written on the ceiling of my summerhouse, ‘All things are connected—they appear to be separated…’ Conversely, every world is managed by a different set of ‘I’s; people of the haiku world would not necessarily recognise the ‘I’s in me of that world as compared with the ‘I’s in me of the Enneagram world or the ‘I’s in me that flourish in the musical world, for instance. As Dr MAScreech points out ‘…Montaigne discovered that he could never pin down a stable I which he could study: his I as the writer was ever-changing; his I as the subject was ever-changing too…’

In 2006 Writer-I made the idea of the variable (or Multiple) ‘I’ the subject of a 200 page book, The Campaign Against Abstractionism.

Montaigne comments that he cannot provide a stable portrait of himself since he changes depending on context; he is never the same for two consecutive moments; he is not depicting a Being, but a Becoming. I think that when I first read this I must have felt so comforted—as a young man not long out of adolescence, I ambled from this to that in an vain attempt to figure out what it was all about.

As a kind of follower of the 4th Way now, I know that the only way to do this successfully is to engage in what’s called External Considering, to look objectively at one’s experience of life and track the Multiple-I’s that appear in different circumstances. Since everything can be looked at from these multiple points of view, nobody can have the last word on anything. As Montaigne points out ‘Men [and women] are vain authorities who can resolve nothing…’

Charles Cotton’s editor, William Carew Hazlitt, in 1877, said of Montaigne that ‘…What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects.  He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force…’

How Do I Imagine that my Reading of Montaigne’s Essays 50 years ago Affected Me?

I suppose the main thing might be that it perhaps set me up for an embrace of Gurdjieff’s instruction which I came across much later on to engage in constant self-examination without making judgements, without ever beating oneself up about anything.

Montaigne’s blend of Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism got into my soul (or somewhere like that) as did Thoreau with his statement that it was pointless reading newspapers—once you’ve read one, you’ve read the lot because you know that they will consist of reports on murders, bomb-dropping, political chicanery, sporting pastimes and celebrity antics—the things that make up civilisation as we know it. Why would you wish to remind yourself daily about such things? All superficial ‘A Influences’.

…if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days.  There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity…  And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year.  If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing…

Once we have got the hang of the pattern of life, we realise that things go round and round: for instance, by the time I went to school in 1942 Gradgrindism had begun to give way to a more enlightened more creative approach; then my great experience at Kingston Grammar School was flexibly anarchic; nowadays, mechanism, computers and the ticking of boxes are all the rage; but there are suggestions that we are producing a race of kids who cannot think for themselves—modern Gradgrindism will no doubt give way to a more creative approach in due course, though we have first of all to get through the Gove Factor. (Gove is the current posh Monster of What-he-likes-to-think-of-as-Education in the UK so-called Government…)

A constant state of flux does make it difficult at first to pin things down; it is impossible to say once and for all, “So this is how it is…” Any serious thinker is constantly on the go, putting this together with that, making sense of things by comparing, synthesising, making a collage of ideas, shaking up the kaleidoscope whilst essaying to keep a strong grasp on her own angle.

This is a daunting proposition. It threatens to overwhelm us and so we tend to limit ourselves to what we can see around us, what’s at the end of our all too simple nose. But how exciting! The true thinker embraces everything like Socrates when asked ‘of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but of the world…’

This great world… is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. [Montaigne] would have this to be the book [which should be studied] with the most attention.  So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws, and customs… So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own.  So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion… The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of so many courts and grandeurs… so many trillions of men, buried before us… Pythagoras was want to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.

Montaigne seems to be agreeing that the spectators at the Olympic Games are the  most admirable types. These latter days though, the spectators will be roaring their heads off, shouting for the winners, wining & dining themselves in the corporate hospitality saloons, staying in hotels where they can afford £2000 per night in London 2012; hyped up to the eyebrows with various invented patriotisms, they will certainly not be sober & collected enough to learn much from the potential experience of being docile & ordinary down-to-earth observers.

It requires a certain quiet distancing to develop the ability to shuffle things into order. Until the synthetic nature of ‘reality’ can be grasped, until a certain amount of carefully observed repeated experience makes it clear that things are constantly shifting, it’s more less impossible to assert, “This is where I stand…” Until then

…my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds, that I am not able to penetrate.

I wonder if Tennyson read Montaigne…

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use…

(Ulysses)

And so I have kept at it, groping around in the dark, trying to catch up with untravelled worlds, never satisfied with one way of looking at things, delighting in subtle changes of emphasis from one writer to another, from one idea to another. Pursuing Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas!

Teaching

I first read Montaigne’s essays around the time (early 1960’s) when I was toying with the idea of turning myself into a teacher. Montaigne offers some advice to an acquaintance about the general characteristics of a person suitable for her to choose to tutor her child. I think I probably welded a lot of this into my scheme of things:

…a tutor [should rather have] a well-made than a well-filled head; …seeking, indeed, both the one and the other… [but preferring to cultivate] manners and judgment to mere learning, and… should exercise his charge after a new method…

in order to get away from the usual method which is based on

…pedagogues [habitually thundering] in their pupil’s ears, as if they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the pupil is only to repeat what [they] have said. Now I would have a tutor… permitting the pupil himself [sic] to taste things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for himself; …[just as] Socrates [had his] scholars speak, before he spoke to them…

Montaigne quotes Cicero: ‘The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn…’

Authority alienates.  Though I had never, of course, put it into two words of eight syllables, this I had felt during my time at school; I always put myself down in the face of authority while all the time, I lately realise, keeping my own secret counsel. As a result of my experience, for many years, teaching teachers how to teach, I used to assert that the task of teachers was to render themselves superfluous as soon as possible so that their students are given space to develop their own dynamic.

Before content becomes important, it’s the process of learning that has to be come to terms with—what has come to be called ‘learning how to learn’. Gregory Bateson called it ‘deutero-learning’…

…let the learner judge of the profit she has made [out of learning], not by the testimony of memory, but by that of life.  Let the learner put what she has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if she yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it her own… …no matter if she forget where she had her learning, provided she know how to apply it to her own use…  so the several fragments she borrows from others, she will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely her own…

I have so often quoted ANWhitehead (in Aims of Education) who says exactly this. Learning remains inert unless you can contrive ways of making into your own possession and work out how it relates to other subjects and to life itself. Unless we can do this

…our minds work only upon trust… Bound and compelled to follow the appetite of another’s fancy, enslaved and captivated under the authority of another’s instruction; we have… no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own vigour and liberty are extinct and gone.

Learners should ‘…thoroughly sift everything they read, and lodge nothing in fancy on simple authority and trust… Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing…’  Verify everything for yourself, said Gurdjieff.

Getting on the Inside of Things    

It follows that ‘…to know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only the ability to retain what one has intrusted to memory…  there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it…’

How do we get on the inside of things, to make them our own possession so that we can, so to speak, build endless structures of ideas on them? I suppose that the answer is to talk about them, turning the words over and over in an experimental kind of way, learning to ‘approximate to truth’ (JGBennett) by taking feedback into account. A systemic process. It’s pretty clear that a diligent respectful dealing with things in themselves will ‘force the words to express them…’ (Cicero). Handling ideas and trying them out in various ways for ourselves will turn them into our own possession. ‘When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves readily… When things have taken possession of the mind, the words trip out accordingly…’ (Cicero)

Horace says: ‘Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it soon present themselves… The words will not reluctantly follow the thing preconceived…’

To confirm this, imagine what must be going on for a person who complains that they can’t quite put something into words—it’s surely an indication that they just haven’t got on the inside of what they think they want to say. If they could attach words to what they want to say, they would find out what they were imagining they were thinking; the words would probably still be an inadequate representation of what they think they want to say. But once it’s out in the open, the wording can always be refined by an honest thinker willing to spend time ‘approximating to truth…’ rather than concluding to start with that they’ve got it.

Montaigne made articulate what I came to feel about teaching & learning… What else did he do for me?

Solitude

He alerted me to the possible pleasures of solitude or rather, perhaps, he served to firm up a predisposition towards the idea of being comfortable inside your own skin that was already in my being.  ‘In solitude, be company for thyself…’   (Tibullus)

At the age of 38, then, Montaigne abandoned the world that most people imagine is the only world there is—making money, paying the mortgage, watching sport, attending popular events, chatting ‘on-line’, expressing vapid opinions and so on—and repaired to his fortress expecting the benefits of the solitary life. Ironically, the space he created for himself simply filled up with thinking.

Montaigne suggests that, the aim of life being ‘to live at more leisure and at one’s ease’, we do all really crave solitude, even those who ‘aspire to titles and offices and the tumult of the world…’ Such as they simply ‘…make their private advantage [of solitude] at the public expense…’ He would have us ‘…tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?  What does she so much seek as elbowroom?…’ But not for Montaigne is the belief that the way to solitude is to elbow others out of the way by a kind of cash-force.

He quotes Horace: ‘Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the great ocean, banish care…’ Some inner shift of being is necessary to dispose of ‘…ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires…’ otherwise we take all our cares with us: ‘…they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them…’ Socrates was told about somebody who ‘…was nothing improved by his travels: “I can very well believe it,” said he, “for he took himself along with him… ‘Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun?  Who is the person that by fleeing from his own country, can also flee from himself?” (Horace)

If we take all Leading-an-ordinary-life-I’s away to a secret place in the country, Being-happy-with-solitude-I will not stand a chance.

If a man [sic] do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the harder and sit the heavier… You do a sick man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly into the earth by being moved up and down in the place where they are designed to stand.  Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the public; it is not enough to shift the soil only; you must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of your soul, you must sequester and come again to yourself: ‘You say, perhaps, you have broken your chains: but the dog who after long efforts has broken his chain, still in his flight drags a heavy portion of it after him…’ (Persius)

‘Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself…’ (Horace)

Left to my own devices for even so short a period as a weekend, I know how time may be squandered unless I take charge of the minutes & hours, being careful not to let ordinary things intrude. A longer period is much easier to deal with because you can relax into it, and not mind the minutes, especially if the object is to go from place to place with a constant succession of new sights & sounds & smells. But it does all depend on you.

Since we will attempt to live alone, and to waive all manner of conversation… let us so order it that our content may depend wholly upon ourselves; let us dissolve all obligations that ally us to others; let us obtain this from ourselves, that we may live alone in good earnest, and live at our ease too.

What can one do without? What can one eschew that solitude be made more secure from distractions? Even without a desire for solitude, it’s worth noting how much we are attached to things; we identify our selves with external objects, people, things, opinions, excitements and so on, so much that we take it that the loss of anything we imagine close to us to be the loss of a part of ourselves.

The philosopher Antisthenes… said, that ‘men should furnish themselves with such things as would float, and might with the owner escape the storm’ (Diogenes Laertius) and certainly a wise man never loses anything if he have himself.  When the city of Nola was ruined by the barbarians, Paulinus, who was bishop of that place, having there lost all he had, himself a prisoner, prayed after this manner: ‘O Lord, defend me from being sensible of this loss; for Thou knowest they have yet touched nothing of that which is mine…’ (St Augustine) The riches that made him rich and the goods that made him good, were still kept entire.  This it is to make choice of treasures that can secure themselves from plunder and violence, and to hide them in such a place into which no one can enter and that is not to be betrayed by any but ourselves.

The riches & treasure of the mind… But what comes of separating ourselves from the people who are close to us? Family and friends? To separate my self from attachments to people, I have become very clear that human-beings lead their own lives; that while I have very strong bonds with other people, especially those closest to me, I cannot live their lives for them. But, sadly, what for me is simply disidentification can seem like coldness or being remote from humanity, when, in fact, for me, radical disidentification makes me feel paradoxically closer to others; in Meta-I it’s possible to see what’s going on for others without being involved oneself. Every now and again though it’s necessary to surprise people with an expression of proximity. But we must all have our ‘backshops’, secret rooms, summerhouses and sheds.

Wives, children, and goods must be had, and especially health, by him that can get it; but we are not so to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence upon them; we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

And that’s the problem: it is uncomfortable to my self to cause others to be uncomfortable with my own seeming lack of enthusiasm to be with them. It is really nice to have visitors but it’s maybe even nicer when they’ve gone so that the event may be clasped to the breast as the perfect and rounded meeting of people—it’s only when they’ve gone that it becomes this as it always does… It is always good to be with people in teaching situations but such a relief to be on your own again when you are able to review what went on like a multi-faceted jewel—this does not happen truly while the meeting of minds is taking place… Whatever we do with others ‘…in our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves…’ Paradox: we can best keep things close to us by keeping them at arm’s length. ‘Can you conceive in your mind or realise what is dearer than you are to yourself?’ (Terence) ‘It is rarely seen that we have respect and reverence enough for ourselves.’ (Quintilian)

On the other hand, when I find myself in a friendship it often becomes something very significant. I have a few deep friendships; they are what matter to me. It seems to be something similar to Montaigne’s experience:-

I am very capable of contracting and maintaining rare and exquisite friendships; I greedily seize upon such acquaintance as fit my liking, I throw myself with such violence upon them that I hardly fail to stick, and to make an impression where I hit; as I have often made happy proof.  In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy, for my motion is not natural unless with full sail: besides which, my fortune having in my youth given me a relish for one sole and perfect friendship has, in truth, created in me a kind of distaste to others… And also I have a natural difficulty of communicating myself by halves, with the modifications and the servile and jealous prudence required in the conversation of numerous and imperfect friendships…

I also enjoy relating to people at any time, investigating their innermost beings, provided my actual contact does not have to be a lengthy one. The measure of the very best of friends is that you can pick up with them from just where you left off, maybe many years ago.

What I would praise would be a soul with many storeys, one of which knew how to strain and relax: a soul at ease wherever fortune led it; which could chat with a neighbour about  whatever he is building, his hunting or his legal action, and take pleasure in conversing with a carpenter or a gardener. I envy those who can come down to the level of the meanest on their staff and make conversation with their own servants…

Montaigne points out that ‘Plato requires three attributes in anyone who wishes to examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, daring…’ To understand how others tick it is necessary to recognise these things in yourself.

Plato’s three attributes are not that far removed, if at all, from the KUB model, as I call it, in the Gurdjieff model:-

Knowledge can easily be amassed, as my old Greek master said on advising his students to drop geography in the third year at Grammar School when we had dropped Chemistry, Physics & Biology after the first year in order to take up the study of Ancient Greek. Benevolence, acquired through empathy and emotional Understanding, takes a bit longer to acquire, as does Being which accumulates as you seek to transform the products of thoughts & emotion into some kind of practice. Lots of Being but not much Knowledge = paucity of Understanding; lots of Knowledge but not much practical Being = paucity of Understanding; a balance of Being and Knowledge leads, other things being equal, to a growth of Understanding. The KUB model is a thoroughly natural process which can only be appreciated as you put it into operation, as Montaigne did:-

When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring then back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.

Our most great and glorious achievement is to live out life fittingly. Everything else—reigning, building, laying up treasure—consists of tiny props and small accessories…

Prepare Yourself for Retirement

Those preparing to retire might well do the process systemically in terms of Multiple-I’s just as Montaigne does and using his very own words (the systemic arrangement of them is mine though—double-click to enlarge) :-

Montaigne used the concept of Multiple-I’s, so many years before Gurdjieff? Not in so many words maybe, but reading what he wrote might well have been the moment when I conceived my passion for the concept. After I had read the words they would have been lodged somewhere in my being ready for the moment when I first read The Fourth Way…

…anyone who turns his [sic] prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent: chaste, lecherous;  talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant;  generous, miserly and then prodigal—I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own Logic is distinguo. [I make distinctions...]

We are all lumps, and of so varied a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others…

And what then do we get from retirement from the world? The aim is to act as a Whole person, Unified-I, Meta-I, Observer-I, Master-I (take your pick!) because, just as Seneca said, we should ‘Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same man…’ But before we can get to that stage it is sufficient to remember (to use him as an anchor, emblematic of the ideal) the man

… who was asked why he toiled so hard at an art which few could ever know about: “For me a few are enough; one is enough; having none is enough.” He spoke the truth. You and one companion are audience enough for each other; so are you for yourself. For you, let the crowd be one, and one be a crowd. It is a vile ambition in one’s retreat to want to extract glory from one’s idleness. We must do like the beasts and scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs. You should no longer be concerned with what the world says of you but with what you say to yourself. Withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome yourself there. It would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself, if you did not know how to govern yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.

The man Montaigne refers to might well have been my friend Mick Miller of Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire.

A possible way of dealing with the world successfully in retreat, as well as during one’s miserable sojourn in the ‘real world’, is to make yourself invisible. Twelve years ago while reading Maurice Nicoll’s Commentaries, I wrote this poem which is especially poignant to me right now since my cat Hanley is slowly dying of liver cancer.

my cat Hanley

turns himself into a cardboard cutout
as he approaches the shrubbery;
he essays to escape the notice
of the small bird teetering in liveliness
in the lavatera; stillness bestows invisibility
motionless in space

frozen thus you are not noticed
by the scavengers and the mountebanks
of the mind; there’s no doubt that you’ll experience
their questing  their failure to locate you—
you will hear them twittering in the undergrowth
falling in the pond     diving
from the summerhouse roof

when my cat Hanley leaps into action again
all the animals and birds instantly
see where he is     rumble his little game;
the customary demons representing worries
irritations unpleasant thoughts  conceits
anxieties from out of the thorny thickets
of the mind   seize upon you once again;
the animals and birds roar and scream
and all the scavengers and mountebanks
of the mind shout   GOT YOU!!!

you lose the sense of what is really you—
dismembered again—the anxious look
the hurried step    the urgent voice on the telephone
sleepless nights and frantic days

(from Looking Closely Hub Editions 2000)

Being invisible (or equally desirable, as Leonardo da Vinci advises, being like smoke, sfumato—hence my passion for bonfires) presents you with the opportunity to be infinitely flexible.

It seems to me to follow that

…those are the bravest souls that have in them the most variety and pliancy: ‘His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had been born only to that which he was doing.’ (Livy)… Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so graceful a fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform motion.  To be led by the nose by one’s self, and to be so fixed in one’s inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor writhe one’s neck out of the collar is not to be a friend to one’s self, much less a master—it is to be a slave… Most men’s minds require foreign matter to exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need to sit still and repose itself… I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it… ‘to live is to think…’ (Cicero)

I like a Man Who Can Talk about His Library (after Sidney Greenstreet…)

When I first read Montaigne’s essays I suppose I might have had maybe forty books—an amount which could hardly warrant the name ‘library’. Now I have getting on for four thousand books which I am proud to call ‘library’.

I wonder now if my need to be able to occupy a room surrounded by books was set going, at least in part, by having read about Montaigne’s own passion. One of the great things about books is the way that the reading of them sows ideas that come up unexpectedly like snowdrops in spring.

Montaigne's Library Room

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family.  It is situated at the entrance into my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and almost all parts of the building.  There I turn over now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design.  One while I meditate, another while I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these I present to you here.  It is in the third storey of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more retired; and above is a great wardrobe.  This formerly was the most useless part of the house.  I there pass away both most of the days of my life and most of the hours of those days.  In the night I am never there. There is by the side of it a cabinet handsome enough, with a fireplace very commodiously contrived, and plenty of light…

The Tower Itself

Montaigne shows us that his grasp of the world is thoroughly balanced in the 4th Way sense: he not only thinks about life and feels deeply about all aspects of it but he recognises the need to activate his whole body/brain system by physical activity.

Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all those who study without a book are in the same condition.  The figure of my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of shelves round about me.  It has three noble and free prospects, and is sixteen paces in diameter.  I am not so continually there in winter; for my house is built upon an eminence and no part of it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as this, which pleases me the better, as being of more difficult access and a little remote, as well upon the account of exercise, as also being there more retired from the crowd.  ‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal authority only, and of a confused essence.  That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home a place where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.  Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like the statue of a public, square: ‘A great fortune is a great slavery…’ Seneca

I live from day to day, and, with reverence be it spoken, I only live for myself; there all my designs terminate.  I studied, when young, for ostentation; since, to make myself a little wiser; and now for my diversion, but never for any profit.

What is it About Books?

I think it’s their handleability that does it; the feel of them, the smell of them, their permanence down the years. The pages you can turn never knowing what’s coming next like turning a corner in an unknown city or coming to the top of a long laborious hill intrigued by the idea of the coming view. Then there’s the idea that contained in their pages there are endless delights; riches beyond imagination. One does not have to go abroad to find such treasure. Elia, Lynd, Lucas & Lubbock, Mannin & Mansfield, Priestley & Pearsall Smith—the whole of life is there. I am nearing the time when I shall consider that my library is complete; its collecting has taken me 60 years; it contains more than anybody could probably read in a lifetime—I am coming to the end of my lifetime. Aware of this, I have spent a great deal of time in the last ten years doing a sort of resumé, revisiting the books that I take to have formed the basis of my Intellectual Life, as, for instance, Montaigne’s essays. When I see people on trains opening these e-contraptions I know for sure that my time has been and gone and when I find myself back in my library I breathe a sigh of relief that I am home once more and do not have to concern myself with the ‘Modern World’ which tips all its eggs into the e-basket imagining it to be The Panacea but does by no means improve itself in spite of all its contrived excitements. Bread and Circuitry.

I have been described as a ‘chain reader’: while I am reading one book I’m am wondering which one to go to next, a contrast or something by the same author, or in the same vein.

Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose them; but every good has its ill; it is a pleasure that is not pure and clean, no more than others: it has its inconveniences, and great ones too.  The soul indeed is exercised therein; but the body, the care of which I must withal never neglect, remains in the meantime without action, and grows heavy and sombre.  I know no excess more prejudicial to me, nor more to be avoided in this my declining age.

Until various bodily failures, I had always balanced the reading habit with great physical activity, gardening, cycling, walking; but in recent years reading and writing have taken precedence. Maybe I do need to make space for the exercise of the body as well as the soul…

I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, it is for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.

A great delight in my life has been the segment called ‘Reading on a Summer Lawn’ first alluded to in my more than curious novel Structures. Nothing please me more on fine summer days than to dump myself in a deckchair on a lawn and find myself in a book, more often than not with a pen and notebook by my side in case some sequence of words should suddenly form itself into a Found Poem. Books fold into one another; the images join and rejoin in a parade that can never end. I am never done with anything; it’s just possible that I deliberately avoid the trap of self-satisfaction which

…is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty…  It is an irregular activity, never-ending and without pattern or target. Its discoveries excite each other, follow after each other and between them produce more…

The Writing of Books

Montaigne tells us, on many occasions and in different ways, that, in writing his essaies, he is not into a display of knowledge, not attempting to be encyclopaedic, but merely piling up words in the expectation that he will eventually find himself under, or inside, the heap.

These are fancies [his essays] of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself; …if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.  Therefore, let none lay stress upon the matter I write, but upon my method in writing it…  As things come into my head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole bodies, sometimes in single file.  I would that every one should see my natural and ordinary pace, irregular as it is; I suffer myself to jog on at my own rate… My design is to pass over easily, and not laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.

It used to tax me no end that on closing the last page of a book everything I had read would fly out of the window; the completed book would literally be a ‘closed book’. It must have been some comfort to me to read that Montaigne considered himself to have a poor memory. It took me many years to understand that there is no such thing as ‘memory’—it is a meaningless abstraction—but only an activity called ‘remembering’; what contributed significantly to my enlightenment was the reading of Memory by IMLHunter. Once I had got rid of the bucket metaphor of ‘memory’—which gives rise to the idea that when you tip more things into your bucket it will overflow—I constructed a different metaphor for myself: ideas and concepts can be hooked up on a sort of celestial clothes-line that reaches from here to the stratosphere and back—so things can be retrieved by reconstruction, going on a journey. Remembering is a reconstructive process; ideas can be pulled off the clothes-line at random and be fitted together to make sense in whatever way one chooses.  ‘As things come into my head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole bodies, sometimes in single file…’ Cudgeling the brain doesn’t work any more than trying to squash things into a bucket will.

Montaigne’s direction to pay attention to the way he writes is useful for anybody who might claim to experience ‘writer’s block’: he heaps things up and kind of hopes for the best; things gravitate to order especially when, as I do, you work always with the virtual question at the back of your mind: HOW CAN I CONNECT THIS WITH THAT?

It took me many years to create a flow in my writing but I think now that the seeds were sown by Montaigne. Before that I thought that you had to get it right first time; I had not got hold of the idea of an ‘essay’ (literally a ‘try’) as simply having a go at saying something; if it doesn’t work first time then it’s OK to have another go, and another and so on. What you’re doing is to interpret the way things are. Interpretations of interpretations… In recognising that he takes this route, Montaigne is slightly critical of others who build their writings by just interpreting those of others; there is too much interpretation, he seems to be saying, and not enough totally original writing about things in themselves. But he persists!

In any case, we interpret the world; then we interpret our interpretations, forever and forever. That’s all.

Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one.

How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of maternal love…  My own excuse is, that I ought in this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.

That’s fine by me!

…all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness, is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain…

Self-knowledge Provides Knowledge of Others

Montaigne justifies his excessive self-examination on the grounds that it gives him enhanced insight into the nature of others.

That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits me to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I speak better and with better excuse.  I happen very often more exactly to see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves: I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have given them warning of themselves.  By having from my infancy been accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once intent upon it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours, or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me.  I study all, both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow.

The principle on which I have based all my teaching is that the more you find out about yourself you more you are likely to be able to empathise with what you might construct as the inner workings of others. First find out where you are currently fixated in Enneagram terms and then check out how you could make things better for yourself by talking about the fixations of others.

This is done bit by bit; change does not come bounding over the hill like the American Cavalry with dancing stars and fireworks. Change is the fruit of long tentative conversations.

The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common souls as ours.  Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark: ‘Wisdom only is wholly within itself’ Cicero

This fits the ‘Artful Vagueness’ of Milton Erikson and Gurdjieff’s ‘Nothing must be given in a ready-made form’. Keep yourself to yourself and make brief utterances which people have to fit together to make sense for themselves—their own sense is what counts, not yours. Montaigne is happy to leave it to others to figure out his meanings—‘to settle our inconstancy, and set it in order…’ He would find it quite useful, he says, to find out what sense others might make of his ramblings but one has to be in the right state of mind to receive comment & criticism. ‘A man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship; for it is to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for our own good…’ On the other hand…  ‘I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are more than his good ones…’ He would have the sensitivity to hold off in that case and maybe try to figure out some other way of helping.

How to Do Life According to Montaigne

By the time Montaigne was writing his later essays he admitted that… ‘my age is now past instruction, and has henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can…’ but he also thought he might have something to offer others in the way of advice. ‘I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster, I have made the experiment.  Here are some of the articles, as my memory shall supply me with them…’

•    I have no custom that has not varied according to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of me.

•    My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or less, according to my strength and appetite.

•    My health is to maintain my wonted state without disturbance.  I see that sickness puts me off it on one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.

•    I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the use of things to which I have been so long accustomed.  It is for custom to give a form to a person’s life, in whatever way it please…

•    …it is  not long ago that I found one of the learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune, studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence.  He told me..  he made an advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation, and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself. Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of his studies.  Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, “Why,” said he, “as those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing water.”

Though this state of affairs appears from the way he writes about it to be admirable to Montaigne, he admits that he can’t do what he appears to be about to recommend: ‘I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily discomposed; when it is bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly murders it…’ But my old Greek master said to us one morning, “Gentlemen, as you grow older you will find it possible to work and concentrate under the most adverse conditions..” Taking everything he said as gospel, I decided then and there that was how it would be for me but I’m not too sure that he applied his dictum to himself during the adverse conditions we often created for him in the course of our Greek classes; maybe his own inability to follow his rule accounted for the frequent fury he directed at us after which he would say, “I’m sorry, gentlemen!” He always called us ‘gentlemen’!

•    Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.

•    Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.  Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.

•    Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

•    …let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the levity of the soul…

•    …let custom make you hope better for the time to come

•    …use imagination as gently as you can… discharge it, if you can

•    Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate

•    A man [sic] should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and servitude are of profit.

The End of Things

One begins to fall apart a bit in various ways. I’m not sure that there’s anything to be done about it; nowadays the doctors consult their computer screens and offer you a pill or two; I avoid doctors and pills.

I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness, injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies—one while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death. Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it was at least disturbed.

So long as I can get on my motorbike and drive off into the blue yonder I will be OK.

My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you; they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by that means prolong your misery an hour or two: ‘Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and all, giving way, fall together.’ Pseudo-Gallus

The book by which I have lived my life is The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies who ironically died at 39—just over half my age. To make up for poor health he expressed a craving for ‘soul-life’ and energy together with a complete indifference for what Gurdjieff would have called ‘A Influences’.

It is in myself that I desire increase, profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and soul.   The surroundings, the clothes, the dwelling,  the social status, the circumstances are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor of the room be bare, let the furniture be a plank table, the bed a mere pallet.  Let the house be plain and simple, but in the midst of air and light. These are enough—a cave would be enough; in a warmer climate the open air would suffice. Let me be furnished in myself with health, safety, strength, the perfection of physical existence; let my mind be furnished with highest thoughts of soul-life. Let me be in myself myself fully. The pageantry of power, the still more foolish pageantry of wealth, the senseless precedence of place; I fail words to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions.

Life is composed of opposites between which we constantly swing as on a Pendulum: night & day, light & dark, winter & summer, hot & cold, misery & happiness, sickness & health, mystery & clarity, stupidity & wisdom, harmony & discord, openness & withdrawal, mess & order. Always the swinging… We could say that… ‘nature has given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence.  When Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow and mutually beget one another…’

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things—of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only affect some of these, what would he be able to do?  he must know how to make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it than the other.  To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.

Without contraries no progression, says Blake.

I have made a kinaesthetic exercise out of the Pendulum concept; it is an integral part of my Enneagram course. The discovery one makes is to be able to find out what happens at the bottom of the Pendulum swing which is where energy is conserved. Gurdjieff calls it Third Force.

I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its wounds.  If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems… He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears…  I only judge of myself by actual sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience?  Will you know how much I get by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon them without any bodily pain.  I have many times amused myself, being well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions, being all the while quite at my ease…

And What of the Hunch Itself?

I think that I have proved my original hunch—the one I set out to prove: that I learned much from reading Montaigne’s essays… They did have the effect on me that I believed they had had.

Or maybe I have simply reconstructed Montaigne as I would have him in my imagination.

Such is life…

What do they have in common?

Yes, they’re all words that have the appearance at least of referring to things that are supposed to go on in the inner workings of a human being… Yes, they are labels for categories that seem to have some relevance to what it is to be a human being…

Yes, they are abstract nouns…

But what precisely do they mean? Not as in some airy-fairy gush of feeling or wishful thinking, squelch of horror, or expressible in some momentary high-minded physical gesture. What is their exact meaning as in ‘this large puffing machine going along iron rails is a steam locomotive’—the equivalent of that kind of relative precision.

Sure we have those words but are they anything more than words? Invented labels. The possession of words does not mean the possession of things. You could find an ordinary stone on a beach and tie a label round it ‘GOLD’ but the label would have nothing to do with the actual stone. Tie the label ‘ambition’ on to a whole bag of inner something or others and it would have no real connection—only an imaginary one. We are full of imagination.

If you’re asked to say what ‘ambition’ is, for example, one kind of answer would be to say, “I want to be an engine driver…” but that’s not what I’m driving at. The question is—what does the abstract noun ‘ambition’ refer to? “An inner oomph to achieve…” you might say. What is an ‘inner oomph’? “It’s a piling up of wants going in a certain direction?” What’s a ‘want’ and how does it get a ‘direction’? And so on. More abstractions…

Like all abstractions ‘ambition’ is a human invention and has no meaning until you make it work for you. “I want to be an engine driver…” does not define the word, the concept itself. It’s the same with all the other words up there. If you’re asked to define what they mean you are driven to putting them into a personal context. Notice how this works. “My passion is collecting china dolls…” “I have a drive to cycle across India…” What is a ‘passion’? What is a ‘drive’? More abstractions…

Abstractions are Airy Nothings

We choose to enslave ourselves to the idea that abstractions  ‘mean’ something. And in doing so we enslave ourselves to the politicians and the advertisers of all shapes & sizes, the war-mongers and the religionists, who revel in abstractions because we slaves tend not to question their meanings, stupidly imagining that they must know best.

‘We are so befuddled by language that we cannot think straight; it is convenient sometimes to remember that we are really [just] mammals…’ (Gregory Bateson) The heart is merely a squashy roundish thing that ticks along inside us for a little while—not the seat of what we label ‘love’. Abstractions are human inventions with a long beguiling history.

All feelings are abstractions. Feelings are nothing other than reifications of a certain something or other that takes place in the human mind-body apparatus: we make feelings into things by giving them a name and pretending to ‘have’ them.

Similarly, ‘self’ is a reification of an improperly delimited part of a much larger system of interlocking processes that reaches from here to the stars & back. ‘Self’ is an abstraction from the whole system.

There is a constant flux of events from which we concoct abstractions in order to appear to control what would otherwise be just a great unmanageable sprawl. But then abstractions conceal the reality of things. They are a very effective smoke-screen for people who have things to hide.

Abstractions are just words…

Experience unchecked is an endless flow. It can be overwhelming. How do we check the flow? By caging it in words. Words segment experience into seemingly manageable bits.

Some words we use to check the flow of experience clearly refer to things that come from observable ‘reality’.

‘Cat!’for example.

Now, no matter what you’re doing, the focus of your attention is limited, at least for a moment, on the small segment of ‘reality’ represented by the word ‘cat’ even if there isn’t one around for you, even if you detest cats…

What do you have in your mind right now?

For me, experience is punctuated by ‘cat’ because, just now, a cat came into the room; in the next moment I’m hearing words on the radio about severed heads in the Syrian uprising and so my experience is differently punctuated; “I’ll light the fire…” I hear myself saying and my stream of experience is re-punctuated by another small segment of total ‘reality’. Words shift focus.

Some words segment external ‘reality’—they focus attention outwards; the senses alert us to segment experience on the outside. Other words segment, or attempt to segment, an assumed inner ‘reality’.

We’re probably OK with ‘cat’ and words of reportage on the radio and words that stand for what we intend to do but abstractions segment ‘reality’ in a wholly spurious kind of way: they appear to refer to a certain something or other but exactly what they refer to is entirely nebulous. Yet we act as if abstractions were real; the human process called ‘reification’ makes them into ‘things’ which we proceed to imagine that we possess.

Consider! Tune into your experience right now: it’s probably a seamless flow… Well it was until you read the word ‘Consider!’ when things may have paused for a second inside you… But, before that, probably, one thing had simply followed another, one sense experience and then a different one, on and on; we are bathed in events of this kind; it’s all a seamless flow until you punctuate it, internally or externally, with words. Reading thus, you are choosing to let these words percolate through your psychic apparatus; they have punctuated your drift, but look up and away and notice how you can resume the flow now…

And now segment the flow with your own words: “I see a … [cat, maybe...]…” “I hear … [somebody talking maybe...]…” “I’m now going to… [do something else...]…”

Observe how what was a seamless flow of events is segmented by these punctuations.

Words are the real punctuation marks!

Now wonder how your experience is segmented by an abstraction… ‘Democracy’, say, or ‘love’… How exactly do such abstractions relate to experience? What segment of it do they represent? If you are anything like me, which I am assuming (maybe rashly) you are, things become pretty vague at this point…

The abstractions—ambition, anger, fear, love, excitement, enthusiasm, energy, intention, attitude, consolation, desire—are just labels, conventional signs for what we single out for special attention from all the neutral neural activity in our heads.

Abstractions have no meaning in themselves; they do represent some kind of potential human behaviour but the immediate set of sensations, feelings, attitudes slips out of reach when you try to pin a label on it. Abstractions are slippery customers. They may single something out from the flux of events but in themselves, though words & theories are piled up on them, they fail to describe anything.

Abstractions fall into ANWhitehead’s category ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ or they come under the heading of ‘reification’—they have us imagine that they represent things. We crave thinginess, the concrete… Things we imagine we can manage. We are all fixed at Piaget’s stage of ‘concrete operations’ which is supposed to have ended when we were around the age of 11.

Uncertainty about how to Proceed Now

Something called ‘uncertainty’ can persist over time and therefore seem real enough. I am in a state of ‘uncertainty’ as I write these words now. My neural connections are all to cock in some way or the other; I’m not sure which way to go; I have a vague idea where I want to go and I know where I want to finish up, you may be pleased to know. Something you could call ‘persistence’ keeps me at it; I have a ‘drive’ to get somewhere with this bit of writing. But ‘uncertainty’, ‘persistence’ and ‘drive’, being abstractions are not something I ‘have’.

What do I have?

Well, there is a kind of unity of sensation; it persists but the label has fallen off. I don’t know how to describe it. I could say that inside me there’s a ‘struggle’ going on, but that’s just a metaphor, a way of speaking.

The unity of sensation is held together for the moment in a temporal sequence and by the space in which I’ve been working; I am aware of a  ‘self’ but I remind it that it is just ‘a reification of an improperly delimited part of a much larger system of interlocking processes that reaches from here to the stars & back…’

There’s a unity of effort, maybe, but the cat comes in and throws herself down in front of the log-fire. Any unity that there was is busted apart as I notice not what’s been going on for me but stop to watch her rolling around which gives me as much pleasure as it seems to do when I project it on to her tortoiseshell furry self.

‘When I play with my cat,’ asks Montaigne, ‘who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?’

It’s absurd that we take what we imagine to be a relationship between ‘self’ and environment to be about what we call ‘feelings’. Says Gregory Bateson: ‘It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names which are usually handled in ways that assume that the ‘feelings’ are mainly characterised by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology…’ When we give ‘feelings’ names they appear to be things when, if anything, they are just ‘transforms’, significations of the way we transform patterns of relationship into something else.

Pursuing the concept of abstraction, Bateson says that the question to ask is ‘What circumstances promote that specific , habitual, phrasing of the universe… which we call ‘responsibility’, ‘constructiveness’, ‘energy’, ‘passivity’, ‘dominance’ and all the rest. All these abstract qualities… can be seen as various habits of punctuating the stream of experience so that it [seems to] take on one or another sort of coherence or sense…’

What is the Way Out of the Quagmire of Abstraction?

We have tied our cognitive processes to one way of thinking; as soon as we do that we abandon the precious ability to think in new ways; it becomes comfortable and comforting to abandon ourselves to abstractions, for instance, and it’s irksome to be asked to shift into a different gear.

In the category ‘nouns’ we are familiar with the term ‘common noun’—any object you might see lying around you, pencil, book, paper, magnifying glass and so on—and we are familiar with the term ‘proper nouns’—the names of people & places, recognisable by an upper case initial letter. We ought to propose another division to be named ‘improper nouns’ because they bear no relation to ‘reality’—ambition, anger, fear, love, excitement, enthusiasm, energy, intention, attitude, consolation, desire and so on.

How to Unpick Improper Nouns

Let’s go back to the abstraction ‘uncertainty’ = the part of us that is not sure where to go next. A few paragraphs back I described myself as being in a state of ‘uncertainty’ but it is inaccurate to describe my self, my entire self, as being in a singular ‘state’ (abstraction) of ‘uncertainty’. Only a small part of me was uncertain—about what sense I was making, about what to write next in order to clarify things; other parts of me were not at all uncertain—about noticing that the sun had set while I was writing, about the something inside me that was feeling hungry, about the fact that tomorrow is another day, about knowing quite clearly where I was going to end up with this piece of writing, and so on.

To say that my ‘I’—the whole of what is called ‘I’—can be described as being lost in uncertainty is erroneous; only one part of me could ever have been so. I have got up steam now… That’s Persisting-I at work…  Let us say that there were at least three or four parts of me signified as being in operation in the previous paragraph. It makes at least provisional sense to call each of these separate parts a distinct ‘I’. So ‘I described myself…’ = Describing-I at work. Then there’s Noticing-the-fact-that-the-sun-has-set-I and Feeling-hungry-I and Knowing-that-tomorrow-is-another-day-I. Not-knowing-where-to-go-next-I could be closely linked to Feeling-the-need-to-make-myself-clear-I or Searching-for-the-right-words-I, Keeping-the-end-in-mind-I and so on in a deceptively seamless flux or unity. This fits Gurdjieff’s important concept that we are not a unity, that Unified-I is a kind of lie or deception. The ‘I’ in a series of sentences spoken by the same person like ‘I am a window cleaner’, ‘I go to the theatre’, ‘I sleep for eight hours a night’, ‘I have porridge for breakfast’ appears to be the same ‘I’—the tag ‘I’ gives the illusion of continuity but there are in fact four different ‘I’s in those four sentences, four parts of what we take to be the ‘same’ self. Four different selves. We move constantly between one ‘I’ and another.

It is of great practical use to follow Gurdjieff’s instruction to ask periodically what ‘I’ you happen to be in.

Now My Sense of Being is in Getting-up-steam-I

Treating behaviour as a unity or abstraction does not enable us to think about it in any truly meaningful way. When ‘behaviour’ remains an abstraction full of ‘excitement’ or ‘fun’ or ‘commitment’ or ‘purpose’, we cannot hope to capture anything relatively permanently manageable from it.

Fact is we behave in lots of different ways all at once: overlapping, concurrent, ill-defined, hazy, given labels that don’t match the contents; feeling uncertain, feeling hungry, making decisions, trying to get things into order—so much happening at one and the same time. Analysing a slice of a behavioural event in terms of Multiple-I’s unpicks the abstraction ‘behaviour’, makes it manageable. It’s just the same with all abstractions.

There are always lots of bits of me performing in a variety of ways all at once: conflicting opinions, drives, energies, lots of other parts that might all work successfully together when drawn out and put into a relevant system. Batteries of ‘I’s to draw on… ‘I’s for this and ‘I’s for that… Practicalities…

An Indecisive-I and a Being-able-to-suddenly-crack-it-I. Suddenly-deciding-I, Feeling-of-aha-I. Lots of Something-or-other-I’s can come into focus when Adjusting-the-microscope-I gets into its stride.

To describe Other-I’s as Something-or-other-I’s neatly preserves the possibility of an endless multiplicity of ‘I’s. In Bateson’s terms it preserves what he calls ‘loose thinking’, productive thinking, that can be made specific by adopting certain deliberate methodologies. Loose thinking, tossing things around, tightens up when you do something deliberate to produce a sensible structure—one that works.

Here’s one example of how it works practically. It’s a breakdown of the abstraction ‘learning’ into Multiple-I terms. You want to learn how to manage your Multiple-I’s… You might find a course that will enable you to find out just that. You have an Intending-to-learn-I. It is an ‘I’ that is full of ‘hope’ and good ‘intentions’. Beware abstractions! That’s what ‘hope’ and ‘intentions’ are… They will not in themselves get you anywhere.

The crucial point is that the ‘I’ that intends to learn is not the same ‘I’ that decides to go on a course (that one is Going-on-a-course-I) which is not the same ‘I’ that gets down to it (that’s Getting-down-to-it-I) which is not the same ‘I’ that reads a book on the subject in hand (that’s Reading-I allied with Making-notes-I) and so on. It’s a rather large system; here’s one way of doing it—it’s my way & yours might be different.

Mouse-double-left-clicking-I will get you an expanded version of this diagram…

What is the Meaning of an Individual Multiple-I?

Unified-I is an abstraction. Whenever we use the unexamined tag ‘I’ we are unwittingly using an abstraction. We have grown accustomed to imagine that ‘I’ has some meaning—it does seem to signify ‘self’—but it has no functional, relational, meaning within the system that constitutes ‘self’. The ‘I’s in the above diagram are embedded in a system; at each stage in the system a single Multiple-I could find its own system attached to it: Setting-some-goals-I would probably need Asking-oneself-questions-I and Aiming-for-variety-I and so on…

To acquire ‘meaning’ a specific Multiple-I is to be construed as existing within a pattern or structure of other ‘I’s. A specific ‘I’ only makes sense within its context; a single Multiple-I is part of a system that gives it function and purpose.

The great thing about systemic thinking is that it is productive thinking: a series of ‘I’s in a system will produce an Emergent-I. The Emergent-I at the centre of the above diagram might be defined as Effectively-learning-I.

Without going deliberately round the system there will be no effective learning.

How Come Abstractions are a Danger to the Human Race?

The straightforward answer is that they allow people to get away with murder on a grand scale…

Take a few current abstractions:  ‘deficit reduction’, ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’, ‘insurrection’, ‘rebellion’, ‘collateral damage’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘Axis of Evil’, ‘nuclear ambitions’, ‘growth in the economy’… That will do to illustrate the point.

Segmented into Multiple-I’s these abstractions might become amongst other things:-

‘deficit reduction’—Putting-nurses-out-of-a-job-I, Cutting-public-servants-I, Depriving-disabled-people-of-care-I

‘terror’ & ‘terrorism’—Making ‘War on Terror’ gives Bombing-anybody-I-dislike-I carte blanche to do just that; protestors become the object of indiscriminate shelling… cf  ‘insurrection’ & ‘rebellion’

‘collateral damage’—Dropping-bombs-on-innocent-civilians-I

‘democracy’—Doing-what-you-like-while-the-electorate-thinks-you’re-working-on-their-behalf-I

You Get the Drift…

All the time we accept abstractions uncritically, we choose to let the Human Race go downhill…

***

See The Campaign Against Abstractionism: Colin Blundell (Hub Editions 2007) Obtainable from the author…

And consider the organisation Enneagram-Multiple-I’s.  Details from the author…

It’s a model that sets out to depict the workings of a whole human being, from inchoate other-than-conscious psychic mechanisms operating in the dim interior through to what we might imagine to be ‘waking consciousness’; when we  work our way through the diagram we can learn to make multiple connections.

Much of life is pure imagination. We imagine, for instance, that coming to terms with the self—presupposing that there is only a single unified self—is done in the top circuit and we leave the bottom half of the Figure of Eight in the lap of the gods, or somewhere like that—probably pretty uncomfortable …

The top circuit is the realm of ego-consciousness which can ‘know’ nothing but ego-concerns deriving from the world we imagine we live in, responsive only to words which are a very dubious tool.

In The Undiscovered Self,  on which this post is largely based, Jung points out that we confuse ‘self-knowledge’ with the feeble understanding created by our conscious ego-personalities—that which is generated, in my terms, in the top half of the Figure of Eight.

Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that they know themselves. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the [other-than-conscious]… and its contents… (paragraphs in italics are from Jung’s book)

Common or garden ‘self-knowledge’ is measured by what we imagine we know of ourselves in a social context, ‘not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden…’ in psyche and anatomical structures. We live out of both of these but have no systematic contact with either which is strange considering how closely we are tied into our body; maybe not quite so strange as far as the psyche is concerned since, though it has a label attached to it, it completely escapes our grasp.

Ordinary self-knowledge is about the way we are in a social context; it depends on our interactions with other people and what they reflect back at us. There’s no theory that will get us into what might be called ‘self-knowledge’, especially theories that stake a claim to universal validity; the individual always eludes the universal application of theory.

The distinctive thing about real facts is their individuality… the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule… absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity…

We are irregular; our proper self-knowledge depends not at all on external influences; it is unique and singular. That is the only rule there is. In the end what’s there ‘can neither be known nor compared with anything else’.

There can be bold provisional outlines of human categories as in the Enneagram and this does constitute a kind of knowledge; but many are fooled by what’s there into thinking that it depicts definite human ‘types’. Understanding the way a particular human specimen functions is a matter of forgetting about ‘types’ and studying unique Multiple-I manifestations.

…scientifically the individual is nothing but a unit which repeats itself ad infinitum and could just as well be designated by a letter of the alphabet…

But something else is needed for understanding:

…the unique individual human being… stripped of all these conformities and regularities, dear to the heart of the scientist, is the supreme and only real object of investigation…

There are only two movements—inwards & outwards: go down deep into the darkness within and you begin to become aware now of a self-something that has always been there solely for you, ‘the same’, constant through all the days of your life; you can take whatever it might be back into your past as far as you can remember… (as I write, just at this moment, I have gone back to a dark winter evening in 1943! I check to see that it is the same central core of being then as now, though it was a different ‘I’); go outwards and you will come eventually to the distant galaxy where the external conditions of your life are manipulated for you by the Power Possessors, the small exclusive club of around five hundred people who imagine that they run the world and perhaps do till now. Things being as they are now…

…the goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself…

Since 1958, when The Undiscovered Self was published, the State itself has become subject to the talons of Global Capitalism: in England, for instance, it would be impossible to renationalise the railways because of external regulatory strictures imposed by the Global Capitalist Power Possessors.

Of course, those who imagine that they are ‘in charge’ are ‘slaves of their own fictions’; we who elect those who imagine they are ‘in charge’ are slaves of our congruent fictions.

How to Break Out of the Great Fiction? How to Tell Your Own Unique Story?

The more the individual joins itself to the mass, the more the Great Fiction takes hold.. Then it is taught in schools and becomes an unquestionable reality. ‘Democratic Responsibility’ pre-supposes that the individual willingly sink itself in the same fictional process.

Then the mass throws up a leader ‘who almost infallibly becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness…’ The individual acquiesces in the maniac dictates resulting from the leader’s subscription to the Great Fiction.

Those who strut about on the world stage and whose voices are heard far & wide seem, to the uncritical public, to be borne along on some mass movement or on the tide of public opinion and are either applauded or execrated…

But, either way, they are not doubted; their reign is simply considered to be part of the way things are. Anybody who is intelligent or game enough to step outside thraldom to question the pre-suppositions on which the whole fraudulent system is based is severely mocked: Noam Chomsky, for instance, becomes described as the ‘great American Crackpot’. But, much to the relief of politicians and the swindling rich, the vast majority have neither his guts & energy to keep tabs on the system, nor the energy to keep up with events.

Is There a Simpler Way to Realise the Scope of the Fraud that Binds Us?

Could it be done in one fell swoop? With an economy of effort? Only if we somehow step right outside the system.

…it is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them…

William Blake: Without contraries no progession…

Religions claim to offer such a transcendental possibility but they have mostly become compromised by association with a state apparatus, or else they have adopted some born-again political standpoint. Worse, by sticking to their guns, they have encouraged devotion to, and therefore dependency on, a Mister God; the individual loses self that way.

...the individual will never find the real justification for existence, spiritual & moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extra-mundane principle capable of revitalising the overpowering influence of external factors…

But no conventional external power will do to repulse ‘the lie which has become the operative principle of political action…’; we need ‘…the evidence of inner transcendent experience which alone can protect us from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass…’

Intellect is not powerful enough to keep us out of the lie. And employing it is, in any case, only to use one Centre: feeling, instinct & moving Centres need to be harnessed too. All our human faculties need to become engaged.

Most of all beware the parties of the Right who claim to be acting against what they call the State and on behalf of ‘the individual’ when all they are doing is to disappear their bid on behalf of the moneyed classes under ‘privatisation’; when everything becomes secretised—for that is the intended consequence of privatisation—there will be even less public accountability than there is now. When they talk of ‘the individual’ we should understand that they mean not the unemployed or the volunteer unwaged well-qualified slaves who are threatened with loss of benefits if they refuse to sweep floors, but the very rich individuals who can award themselves big pay rises and bonuses for doing something they should be doing out of personal commitment.

Maybe we might claim that the Twentieth Century was that of the Common Man…

…that he is lord of the earth, the air and the water and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion… In reality man is the slave & victim of the machines that have conquered space and time… ; he is intimidated and endangered by the might of the war technique which is supposed to safeguard…

Lost in lies and confused by the mystique of smooth-tongued, liberal, high-sounding political explanation—of the workings of the money markets, for example—human beings become an enigma to themselves. Unable to comprehend the smokescreen of words, they lack the criteria for self-judgement and self-assertion.

If you have read so far, you have chosen to focus your brain on the result of my brain focussing on certain issues that are currently of interest to it. How do both our brains do this? There is a certain something inside of us, hidden away in our dark squelchy recesses and spreading itself throughout our planetary being that keeps us at it; the correlation between whatever it is and the brain itself is at the moment (and probably forever) impossible to comprehend. ‘The structure & physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process…’

Consciousness We Take for Granted like a Fish With Water; it Seems to Bathe Us in Being

Without consciousness there would be no world; the world exists as such only in so far as it is consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche, consciousness is a precondition of being…

In pure consciousness one may escape from the fraudulence of the invented world of commerce, from all the lies of the existing socio-economic system. In pure consciousness, everything can be returned to Nothingness, the start of a journey backwards (or forwards) to something more human in scope—something else, something other than what has been known in the past.

Consciousness is outside the statistics; if anything it is a zero-state which nourishes us constantly, providing we enter into a contract always to return to its simplicity after forays into the so-called ‘real world’ for a spot of action, relating to somebody, filling a hole in the ground, writing a book, making the dinner, teaching…

Rather than being something wrapped up in religious dogma, what people call psyche, the soul, is nothing other than individual consciousness truly focussed and accepted for whatever it is—sunlight on green fields in early spring, awareness of stars & moonlight, a simple taking of all such things into the self, pondering them, making them into an inner something-or-other that informs Being. When soul or psyche is conceived as something other than this, something spookily allied to what is fancifully imagined to be ‘Divine’, capable of being ‘saved’ it is removed pronto from the scope of human understanding; it becomes a meaningless sound-bite.

The problem for systems like orthodox psychology (literally ‘soul-study’) and academic philosophy is that the more the complexity of individual experience dominates attention

…the more practical, detailed & alive will be the knowledge derived from it… the objects of investigation… become more complicated and the uncertainty of individual factors increases… and the possibility of error… academic psychology is scared of this risk and prefers to avoid [it]…

Psychologists, for the most part, prefer to reduce things to simple linear cause and effect. Fact is that if ‘soul’ is the province of green fields, clouds, stars & moon it becomes as complex as the universe itself; better for psychologists, they might agree, to earn their bread by reducing life to something abstract & easily measurable.

The paradox is that ‘…as understanding deepens the further removed it becomes from knowledge…’ because it becomes so attached to Being. Understanding on its own is the great subjectivity; knowledge is restricted to the nuts & bolts. Green fields, clouds, stars & moon as part makeup of my soul, my Being, is the great subjectivity. Science does not deal in how something like the immediacy of haiku can express ‘soul’:-

silver bay
under a silver sun
frosted mudflats

Subjectivity is the objective nature of the inner Being, theoretically untouchable by exterior forces. I will be me untouched by the exterior world of A Influences…

It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organisations [in the great illusion of LinkedIn connections, for example...] and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being—the real one, not the statistical [invention]. This is hardly possible except through a new process of self-nourishment…

Something is required to help us stand up against ‘the suffocating power of the mass [which] is paraded before our eyes in one form or another everyday in the newspapers…’ and so on.

And This is the Central Point of Jung’s Little Book

Resistance to the organised mass can be effected only by people who are as well-organised in themselves and in their individuality as the mass is in its own organisation…

Individuality could be construed as the natural state of the human psyche without all the encumbrances imposed by education, mass media and general upbringing. What is ‘the natural state of the human psyche’? It is ‘a certain jostling together of its components’, but it has a quite alarming propensity to lose itself in identification with the ‘ten thousand things’ alluded to in Buddhism. To aid the true assertion of individuality, some organising principle is required in the first place, something more than capable of persisting. A meticulous disidentification from all A Influences.

Above all, let’s not abandon soul or psyche to some quasi-religious limboland; let’s not leave it dangling in the clouds but bring it down to earth where it belongs. Psyche, the home of green grass, stars & moon, sunlight & ticking clocks.

Words, Words, Words…

The great problem we have to face is in the Word which was, so it is said, in at the beginning of all things and one supposes always will be loafing around in this New Age of enhanced ‘communication’ in which there is a general failure to engage in it. What is at the bottom of our Being is completely word-free: ‘green grass, stars & moon, sunlight & ticking clocks’ exist there without the need for verbal expression and so does ‘psyche’. The words just get in the way.

No one seems to notice that the veneration of the word, which was necessary for a certain phase of historical development, has a perilous shadow side. That is to say, the moment the word, as a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its original link with a divine person…

So ‘Church’ & ‘State’ become entities in themselves, abstractions, which, like all abstractions, have no existential basis in reality whatsoever; it’s just that apparently sane & sensible people use them in discourse as though they had practical meaning & consequence and we fall in with their ignorance.

Jung goes on:-

…belief in the word becomes credulity and the word itself an infernal slogan capable of any deception. With credulity come propaganda and advertising to dupe the citizen with political jobbery and compromises and the lie reaches proportions never known before in the history of the world…

Communication is supposed to draw people together but more often than not words sow suspicion and distrust. Politicians rely on the uncertainty in words to keep us in thrall. When those of the Right prate about ‘individual choice’ they rely on our attaching their sloganising to ourselves, because we’d so like to be able to make choices, when, of course, the only individuals who can really exercise choice are those with stacks of money and ‘power’—supporters of the Right, the Power Possessors.

Another paradox Jung points out is that when human beings set out with positive intention to exercise their drive to learn about the world and its contents it simply becomes a matter of adapting to things that so-called civilised society considers to be of value. So the very process of learning leads us more and more unquestioningly away from instinct towards what other people value—the conduct of war, the making of money, worship of the Crown or the System and so on. We identify all too readily with such surface knowledge; consciousness comes to operate there at the expense of all the things that nurture the unmeasurable other-than-conscious.

We come to imagine that knowing oneself is about becoming conscious of self—how we think, what words we have at our disposal, how we relate to others and so on.

…consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around us and it is to its peculiarities that we feel we must adapt our psychic & technical resources…

Investing Our Energies Thus We Forget Our Selves

We substitute our own conception of our selves, our invented being, the picture we have of us, all of that which we imagine to be uniquely ours for ‘real Being’—what Gurdjieff calls Essence.. Thus we slip ‘imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of conscious activity progressively replace reality…’ We no longer relate to things and people and circumstances but to our reductionist version of ‘reality’…

We invent ourselves and seek to sell what we have invented on the world’s stage for money or Kudos or medalhood. The organisations we subscribe to and the mass movements we support are invented to keep us calm & comfortable in the face of our fear of ourselves. To get rid of it (or at least suppress it) we project our inner fear in to criminals, terrorists, alien cultures and political systems: at the end of the 19th Century it was The Yellow Peril; by 1918 it had become The Red Menace which lasted till around 1990; now it is Al Kaida—there always has to be some outside objectification of a threat to our existence when the real threat is inside us. The process is sustained by the political system in whose interest it is to ‘keep the rabble in order’ (Chomsky). The more intangible the culprit on to which we are encouraged to project our own inadequacies the better: Al Kaida is more slippery than ‘Moscow’; even more sophisticated is ‘The Deficit’ which has suddenly come to the aid of the party.

The fact is that, unless a psychopath declares war, the enemy is always within; it is our own fears and uncertainties; it is our own feeling of responsibility for past & present inhuman subjugation by ‘Empire’, for example; it is the suppression of the latent criminal that is in all of us. Worst of all it is our failure to recognise our acquiescence in the Global Capitalist Conspiracy to defraud humanity of health, wealth and well-being. The detestable lie of ‘present pain = future gain’. As a little boy, I remember a politician called Stafford Cripps saying more or less this—around 1947—sixty years on and they still sell us this lie…

When the evil we choose not to recognise in ourselves is projected on to the ‘other’ (unfortunate Iran is the current scape-goat ‘other’…) we make matters considerably worse.

[It just] strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over on to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of the threat… our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with the evil [in ourselves]…

We prefer to localise the evil in individual criminals or groups of criminals while washing our own hands in innocence & optimism and ignoring the general proclivity towards evil. It’s no good trying to take steps to tinker with bits of our being without facing up to the evil within; it overrides everything we try to do. In the UK there’s currently an absurd A Influence discussion about the nature of Happiness inspired by our millionaire prime minister who presumably intended his initiative to divert attention away from the misery he is causing ordinary folk. Without facing up to the evil within nothing of any consequence will come out of discussing the abstraction Happiness.

The Bottom Part of the Figure of Eight

From such heady and remote considerations it is salutary to feel the shift of energy as you take yourself now right down deep inside; to listen to the sound of blood flowing in your veins, to be aware of your limbs and inner bodily structure—all that sustains your presence on the planet, the only objective reality there is. Feel the planet under you revolving in space at thousands of miles an hour. All the rest is invention—invented as it is, it might just as well have been invented in some other way; perhaps a way more supportive of human welfare and well-being and you can conceive it thus any time you choose.

It is a reversal of conventional wisdom to suppose that the life of the psyche constitutes objective reality while the outside world is a subjective invention but it is worth working on. What are the implications?

In contrast to the subjectivism of the conscious mind, the [other-than-conscious] … is objective, manifesting itself mainly in the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses and dreams, none of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively.

This is a severe challenge to the conscious ego which considers itself so important and goes about its business with a subjective unconcern, building castles in the air, subscribing to newspaper mythologies, listening with open mouth to profound ‘economic analysis’ on the radio, being beguiled by celebrity spin of all kinds set up to divert our attention from the enemy within…

A Influences build a self-sustaining invented world; whoever subscribes to such a world uncritically has forgotten self in a sinister web of words. To claim ‘consciousness’ for the puny purchase one has on invented ‘reality’ is to choose to relegate oneself to a very minor league.

True Consciousness is being alive to all possibilities whatsoever; to understand the invented world and to embrace psychic objectivity.

So Who on Earth Possesses True Consciousness?

Who knows? It’s maybe just an idea.

We are not conscious, for example, as Jung says, ‘…of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore implicated in their conflicts…’

It is useless to pretend to self-awareness if we choose to let its pursuit be circumscribed by a denial of the influence of the conspiracies of the Power Possessors.

So what is ‘self-knowledge’? The willingness to thoroughly explore psyche; the proper harnessing of the energy that’s there, its whole force both constructive and destructive, the recognition that all the energy of the psyche has a positive intention for us when we stop projecting and identifying.

O we can wait no longer
We too take ship O soul
Joyous we too launch out of trackless seas…    Walt Whitman

Jung’s little masterpiece ends just at the point where one might have expected some guidance to help us out of our Great Fictions. I like to think that the Figure of Eight might help.

Let’s imagine that every human being has three energy reservoirs: the first containing the physical and mental energy necessary to function in our daily life; the second contains an additional energy we use when the conditions require to overcome the habitual limits of the first container- we rarely get some fuel from this container for our tendency to protect ourselves from efforts; the third container keeps an incredible, qualitative and unlimited energy, almost ignored by the majority. If we could understand the way to gain fuel from this container, we could  achieve an integral transformation and unlimited possibilities.

To achieve the energy of the third container, we have to consume the content of the first two, and this is what we obtain from the practice of the conscious effort. To perform such kind of effort, we must apply all our physical, emotive or mental possibilities, depending of the effort we have to do. The most important factor of this effort is that we have to struggle for something we can’t gain any interest without any external solicitation. For example, a person who has to work ten hours a day, to maintain, in this field of inner work obtains less than someone who decides to perform some physical work without any specific motivation except to obtain a different state of consciousness.

Obtaining the “power of action” means performing conscious efforts, we must get the hidden power of our Being. We must use our human machine at the full of her potentials.

If we want to learn a new language, the quickest way is to over fatigue our brain with more information than usual: if we can memorize 6 words in one day, we must improve our possibilities and memorize 60 words, and this process mustn’t be stopped for the reason that this task appears impossible.

If we want to success in this field of the inner work, we have to “overload” both body and mind with new rhythms, different from our habits. This will produce a real shock to our psycho- physical structure: both our mind and body are conditioned, and breaking their habits, overloading them, they’ll be forced to gain additional energies to achieve the goal imposed.

Through the acceleration of the rhythms, developing more intense actions without taking care of tiredness, we’ll notice a positive enhancement of our emotional energies, and the fatigue we usually escape would become a Cult of Ecstasy.

Think of the person you feel closest to — perhaps your partner if you have one, perhaps a friend or relation if not. With eyes closed, imagine yourself becoming that person. Be him physically. Think his thoughts. Feel his feelings.
Now open your eyes. Let this person express his deepest feelings, his hopes and fears, his strengths and self-doubt, everything. Also record this person’s feelings about you. Write this all down.
Do not worry whether this is accurate or not. In fact, do not assume
that it is. It is not the particular things that are of importance, but making the effort to see it from the other’s point of view. By doing so, you may begin to notice whether your guesses are correct, because you begin to observe more closely. Perhaps you even ask. It is all about paying attention.

Spend a day practicing awareness of your tendency to engage in self critical, negative thinking. Label each instance you notice and number them consecutively: “Self-abuse number 1, self-abuse number 2, . . . self-abuse number 37,” and so on. If you lose count, just start at one again. Do this in a lighthearted way. Laugh.
If you do this deeply, you will notice that many thoughts may contain an implicit self-critical element rather than a direct criticism of yourself. Count these also.
If you have a lot of these thoughts, you might like to continue this
practice for several days. See if, by the process of awareness and without trying to correct the thoughts, they automatically begin to decrease.