AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:51 pm
mikekatz wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:11 pm
I truly think that much of what we are ostensibly discordant about is due to a) trying to express the non-verbal in words, and b) we each have our unique way of using words. Put these together and we are sometimes breaking our heads over nothing, lol.
What I am calling self-remembering is NOT a passive state, as my experience and I believe the quote from Ouspensky shows. It is an intensely active state. I fully understand and experience the backing up state and I further agree that in this state you are reporting on what you just experienced. You are NOT self-remembering. You are in the tunnel, and remembering what you just experienced, ala the Steiner quote.
And as I tried to explain to Cleric, I think Gurdjieff's most valuable contribution in this area is to point out what most traditions miss and what examination of our own internal lives can simply reveal, that self-remembering is non-trivial, rare, and is a skill or state one has to develop.
As regards the veil, I don't yet experience it. Perhaps it's further down the line for me. So anything I could possibly say about it would just be intellectual tunnel ramblings.
...
This description is a good approximation of experiences I sometimes have. To me they are sacred, and rare for me. It's what I described to Cleric as "Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit)." It's a unity and understanding that everything, the world out there, and in here, is one. But these experiences are so non-verbal, and rare, there's not much I can say.
Perhaps you are right, so I will leave any further discussion about the actual meditative experience to Cleric and yourself, because I just don't have any such experience.
It seems what you quoted from Gurdjieff is a basic introduction to an initial discovery. Do you know if he elaborated on what he found in the process of "self-remembering", in terms of detailed activity of spiritual beings? He makes a reference to a "practical science" of psychology, and I am not sure if by that he is referring to something akin to Steiner's spiritual science. The latter endeavors to give each person tools of spiritual sight which allow us to perceive the
inner logic through which all of our Thinking-Feeling-Willing experience is weaved (but not all at once, rather in gradual evolutionary stages of cognition). This inner logic is a reflection of higher order Thinking of spiritual beings. There are actual 'laws of soul-spirit' which can be discerned here, just as there are laws of natural science. Do you know what was Gurdjieff's understanding of the spiritual realms in that regard? I am assuming you have not personally perceived these things, so that's why I am asking about Gurdjieff.
You can download the PDF of "In Search of the Miraculous" here:
http://giurfa.com/fragmentsof.pdf
It's a massive work with a combination of practical exercises and a huge fully developed cosmology of the Universe. It's worth a look if you are interested.
Interestingly, Gurdjieff split from Ouspensky after the book was published. Gurdjieff was not interested in giving out such purely intellectual details on their own. In his way, they had to be combined by intense spiritual work to prepare the soul to receive them correctly, otherwise they would turn into intellectual mush.
A great example of this is the enneagram. If you Google "enneagram", you'll learn about personality tests, scores, types, supposed ancient traditions, and so on. It was originally a diagram Gurdjieff created to show how two primary laws of the universe, the law of three and the law of seven, interact. It's detailed in "In Search of the Miraculous". But it's been turned into hogwash.
Also, just for completion (I'm not pedalling Gurdjieff, lol), Gurdjieff eventually got to a point where he realised that his methods, being based on individual tuition, would not survive, and he felt compelled to write. His magnum opus is "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson":
https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netd ... djieff.pdf
1130 pages of what appears at first glance to be indecipherable writings. In order to break the hypnosis of the illusion of the world, he attempted to move the reader from tunnel mode to funnel mode by inventing long, hard-to-pronounce words for experiential concepts, and writing really obscurely. He says up front you have to read the book at least three times. The second and third parts of his writings are written as clearly and simply as possible, so its style was deliberate.
I can only say, in my experience, that I have understood more from Beelzebub than from In Search of the Miraculous. Sometimes, many, many years later, I connect an experience with something I read in Beelzebub and thought I had completely forgotten. From this point of view, I regard it as a sacred book.