Remembering Self-Remembering

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…
     [Milton, Lycidas]

I encountered the writings of P.D. Ouspensky roughly in the 1970s and soon learned about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, who was Ouspensky’s inspiration. Both men were Russians born in the nineteenth century; both died in the late 1940s. Gurdjieff was the leader of a spiritual teaching movement; Ouspensky, while part of this grou for a while, was more broadly speaking a philosophical writer. Much later I discovered that Gurdjieff had latched on to his ideas from Sufi sources and turned a narrow slice of these into the foundations of his work; he himself characterized what he taught as esoteric Christianity and never acknowledged his debt.

I found Ouspensky’s (and later Gurdieff’s own) writings fascinating but strange. The essence may be rendered by saying that people are asleep; they have selves but not a genuine core self. That self, the real one, develops after arduous practice; the central technique for producing this initially absent self is self-remembering, thus becoming conscious of self, separating oneself from the flow of mentation, seeing the multiple personalities that constitute us (per G&O) as unreal, and gradually reaching genuine humanity.

I found this strange because I was only too aware—and indeed from childhood on—that I did too have a core self. My roots are in Catholicism, and you don’t go very far from those roots before you’re only all too aware that you have a conscience. But in truth I already knew that as a little child before I’d ever heard of anything like the catechism. Therefore, in the 1970s, the notion that I was an automaton sleep-walking through life was odd. I knew what it referred to, by and large, namely inattentiveness, absorption, passion, and the like, but the notion that you somehow created this self—and in its absence were sort of dismembered after death and blown into the void like dust, as Gurdjieff suggested—seemed illogical. How could you remember the self if there was no self there to do the remembering in the first place. Quite early on, of course, I’d learned Goethe’s famous saying: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast.” True enough, of course, but Goethe, the third soul, as it were, knew this fact. Later yet I encountered the modern evolutionary doctrine that we are automata—and that our personalities are nothing but discrete (and ever changing) structures of nerve cells engaged in a Darwinian competition. But while that description also fits the G&O model of the ordinary, unenlightened common human, neither of these men came from that modern tradition.

The fascinating aspects of such doctrines is their narrow focus on some aspects of a teaching which, entirely legitimately, uses techniques to nurture human development. The very narrowness of focus is what makes bodies of teaching such as this one cult-like—thus with but marginal influence. The Sufis have developed many techniques of disengaging the human attention from the flux of ordinary life. The repetition of a single phrase, the zikhr—also known to us from the Hindu mantra—was another. Catholicism has both. Self-remembering has the same function as the examination of the conscience; and there is also the repetition of the Holy Name. But what makes a particular practice valuable is the comprehensive structure in which it is embedded. Some teachings tempt people because they promise success by some kind of recipe or formula. Therefore such groups attract those seeking power and—much more poignantly—whose who have been starved of meaning.

The core self is, indeed, enveloped in the material dimension—and, unless cultivated, can readily habituate itself to live in the continuous flux of stimulus that life produces. The proper preparation of the human takes place by nurture in a home and a comprehensively formed society. The vast number of religious and quasi-religious movements that have characterized the twentieth century testify to the failure of homes—and society as a whole—to assume the burden of nourishing the higher aspects of the soul. Then the hungry sheep look for almost anything that seems to offer help.

Castaneda

What follows is a diary entry of mine from a while back. I thought it might be of some interest here. At the end I’ll enlarge on the initial reference, which I expect is obscure for most who haven’t read, or no longer remember, the book.

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I found today the chapter in which a mountain lion plays a role in Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan; reading it I was reminded again of the mastery of the author. His knowledge is very advanced—and these days I’m experienced enough to recognize that. Therefore the various scholarly critical dismissals of his work, not least that he was simply writing fiction, thus imagining the content, I reject. No doubt the presentation is fictionalized; no doubt a good deal of his knowledge was acquired from books, but I am fairly sure that he was in touch with a living shaman tradition. Oddly enough my conviction arises because I see so very many similarities with Sufi traditions, most pointedly the one that Gurdjieff had tapped into and exploited and Ouspensky “took to market,” as it were.

All harsh forms of mysticism seem derived from a cosmology in which the divine is conceived as indifferent to—but not unaware of—individual entities. These tend to be pantheisms. The discovery prized by their devotees is a kind of crystallization that takes place under extreme conditions of inner training. Castaneda’s cosmology fits into this class. There is no love relationship between creator and creature. The survival of death, in my definition of it anyway (as holding on to memories and to identity) is denied to all but the tiny minority of sorcerers

The cosmology doesn’t interest me. What strikes me forcefully, however—and much more now than it did when I read Castaneda more than thirty years ago—is the force and correctness of the methods used and the accuracy of the psychological descriptions. Castaneda’s vantage point—from what he claims is a “primitive” position, pre-Christian, unaware of Judaism, blind to Islam, ignorant of Hinduism, and so on and so forth—is now, and has always been, for me, very original and refreshing. The motivation for action is direct and entirely free of the vast overhang of cultural forms, rituals, traditions, dogma, and unsavory history that, in truth, completely suffocate spirituality in the West. Here you find the hard basics—and find it easy to ignore the primitive framework, anchored in nature, which is the teaching’s outward support. This sort of thing attracts the adventurer, the solitary, the “I-want-to-do-it-my-way” personality

Much of this originality really comes from having different names for everything—while the relationship of concepts to real life remain the same. The authenticity of this teaching shines through, however. This is not just a verbal exercise. Castaneda’s stuff comes from people who got there the hard way, by doing, experiencing, and thinking things through in an environment quite different, back when their patterns were laid down, than that of any other tradition on earth.

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The mountain-lion episode appears in Chapter 11 of Ixtlan, entitled “The Mood of the Warrior.” This mood is composed of contradictories, iron control and total abandon. Castaneda guide into sorcery, don Juan, arranges an experience in which Castaneda encounters a mountain lion by night. Moved by fear, he acts with a great deal of skill and yet with total abandon, and this don Juan later explains is the warrior’s mood. It can be invoked at will—not merely by fright.

Other aspects of this story left an impression on me. Don Juan reminds Castaneda that his disciple simply acted, did what was necessary to escape the mountain lion. He treated the mountain lion without unnecessary, extraneous judgments—such as hating it, or imputing all sorts of fancy motives to the animal. At the time I read the story, it suddenly struck me that in most cases, dealing with individuals and with institutions, it is indeed very wise to regard them simply as natural phenomena without wasting time on all kinds of secondary interpretations of their motives. That view has served me very well. I remembered that a while back and went back to reread the account, hence that entry. The last paragraph of that chapter is interesting too:

“I know, I know,” don Juan said patiently. “To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of the warrior’s spirit. It takes power to do that.”

Now the mention of two names, G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. Both were Russian émigrés, Gurdjieff the leader of a self-development system which has earmarks of having been derived from Sufism. Ouspensky became its chief advocate. The essentials of the teaching are in the latter’s book, The Fourth Way.