Hi Cleric
Thanks for all this, you are a very generous and gracious soul!
After reading the quote you provided it's not difficult for me to see why the whole Thinking stuff doesn't seem agreeable to you. I understand how you see the funnel, the meta view, like stepping outside the movie and observing how our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, will, play their act. And this is very characteristic experience. It really feels as a layer of reality has become objective. Those who have experience with cannabis, for example, know the feeling of being high with other friends among people who are not high. For those high, it feels as if they are in an additional layer of reality which those not high simply don't notice and don't even understand. When those high look at each other it feels as if they operate at a different level of logic which others simply don't see. There are many jokes, for example, who only those high understand and they live in their shared meaning. From their perspective they are one degree outside the movie while those low, lurk in their roles. The latter can hardly understand or imagine it even if it is being explained to them. Of course, this depends largely on the character of the high persons, whether they'll see things in this way, and I'm in no way advocating such an approach, but just wanted to make an analogy, in case someone can relate to it.
The thing with self-remembrance is that we can hardly go much farther than it. Once we learn to step out of the movie and observe how our inner world acts along, this is pretty much as far as we can get. In certain sense we polarize (as Ouspensky tried to sketch) and observe our inner life as a movie but we can do that only if our self is quietly stepped in the background. In other words, in order to be able to do this observation unbrokenly, we must be fully receptive and not focused in activity.
I was trying to say that the Thinking stuff IS agreeable to me, because I see it up to now as equivalent to self-remembering. If we can move this perception, I'm game to try!
Also, when you say we can hardly go much further with it, you may be right. But, this state of consciousness is literally, for me, like waking from sleep. I see and understand much more, and I AM much more. Sometimes I can observe that I am about to react in a situation, out of some deep suffering that is driving my (bad) behavior, and I can catch it and do better. Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit).
It takes practice, and it requires Krishnamurti's effortless effort. If you try too much you are captured by your mind, but if you aren't receptive to it's possibility it can't happen.
And I would say again, that without having
experienced this state of self-awareness, I would be utterly unable to understand what you, Steiner, Ouspensky, Spira, and kind of teacher, was actually getting at. Without this state of awareness, everything is just an intellectual game in tunnel mode.
When one has embraced the above experience it is difficult to point attention to what Thinking refers to. We can only understand this if we try to recognize that there are two distinct ways in which we can grasp the thinking activity.
The first is of the same character as any other process we observe. Imagine that you're observing how you make juice in the blender - you observe 'blending'. Certain perceptions in specific flow. This is the first way (and for most people the only way *coughJimcough*) in which they conceive of thinking. It's the stepping outside the movie and noticing how thoughts are 'thinking' themselves. We need to get a good feel for this. When we use 'thinking' in this way it is of the same nature as saying 'blending' about the juice - we observe objective process in the inner or the sensory world respectively, which unfold according to mysterious laws.
So here is something that was to me a most profound and tragic realisation. I'd ask you read what I say here, and then go back to the Gurdjieff quote and re-read it.
The fact is that most people do not even step outside the movie. They are just in the movie. They are blending, but they are not there when they are blending. They are asleep. They are NOT observing what they are doing. I'm like that most of the time too. I get up in the morning, go through my routine of toiletries, take my pills, eat my breakfast, but there may be not a single moment of watching the movie (self remembering, mindfulness, whatever) in all of that. I know I did all that stuff, or I must have, but I don't actually remember the exact experiences of doing them. And how could I, since I wasn't actually there!
I once explained this to Eugene in this way: Consider the sentence "I see X". X can be a simple object, a beautiful women, a distasteful situation, anything.
In sleep mode, we see X and nothing else. Our full attention is captured in X. There's nothing else there, there's just attachment to the object, and mechanical reaction to it as object - a reaction whose origin we don't even know. This is how we mostly live, in just the one word of the sentence.
Now, when we self-remember, are mindful, etc., it's different. We wake up. We observe that we see. We see X, and we
know that we are seeing. And, if we remain in that state, we can further observe our mechanical reactions to this act of seeing, and again, we may be able to observe prejudices, past sufferings, etc., and even start to heal from them.
Here, we are living in two words of the sentence " I see X".
And the next level, is when we start asking who exactly is doing the seeing. So we have X, we have the seeing of X, and then we go deeper and ask who is this I who is seeing? The full sentence "I see X" is experienced. And it is only here that the real spiritual path can start.
I cannot explain it as well as Ouspensky, so I would ask you to reread the whole quote. To me, it's so vital. You can't get anywhere at all without this. Steiner, idealism, materialism, any-ism - until you get out of the tunnel and into the funnel of awareness, it's just a logic game we play to distract ourselves. We're debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
The second way is when we realize that we're the active spiritual force which thinks the thoughts. And here's the difficult part. It's difficult because it clashes with what you've come to cherish as the deepest experience - the ability to step out of the movie (into the funnel) and observe (experiencing, self-remembrance, etc.). From that perspective thinking feels as leaving the funnel and entering the tunnel.
The lure here is that if we observe thinking (in the sense of blending) from the funnel, we're in a superior position. But this isn't so. This kind of observing can never lead us to the experience of the rules which shape the movement of thoughts. We're practically dissociating from the thought process, such that we can assume the receptive funnel perspective and observe conscious phenomena as we observe blending.
But we can also experience how we actively will the thoughts, how the meaning that we weave through is being cast into thoughts (for example verbal). And here's the great difficulty because this willing of thinking is seen as inferior level of consciousness. It looks like we're sacrificing the funnel for the tunnel. This is why you don't resonate with the term Thinking. Because it smells like tunnel.
That's not how I experience it. I am often, when self-aware, coming up against previously unseen factors that have and are shaping me, and others.
Perhaps what you are calling Thinking is what I am calling the second or third level of awareness in the sentence "I see X", perhaps not. The difficulty here is talking with words and using them to describe experiences. Similar words may describe dissimilar experiences, and different words may describe similar experiences.
In certain sense it is completely true that concentrating thinking leaves a lot of things in the periphery. That's why it's called concentration - we concentrate certain forces while leaving the distractions in the periphery. The fact that we need to leave something in the periphery is felt to be very disagreeable. It seems that it neglects the experiential funnel. This is what Eugene has always protested against. He says "you guys focus too much on thinking while you neglect experiencing which is much more encompassing." And in certain sense this is correct but there's important detail - this kind of experiencing reaches a certain ceiling. Once we step out of the movie and encompass all our inner life, we really may get quite some insights but not too long after this, the insights are exhausted. We're left in a position which can't encompass anything more. Yet we feel that there must be more. And it is exactly at this moment that we come to the veil philosophy. We say "I stepped out of the movie, I made steps after steps backwards, distancing myself from the world content such that I can encompass it, yet I come to a halt. My back hits something. I can't go further back. So there's the veil. It's what separates the Earthly existence from the Cosmic. This veil will be removed only after death."
So my response to this is that I am still so far from even that. If I was living truly in a state of full self-remembering / mindfulness, whatever, then I know from my brief glimpses that I would be in a far better / advanced / awake state than now, and that it would be full of joy. And if my back does hit something, I'd be happy to look further then.
This is as far as we can reach through self-remembrance. Now I can speak further but my experience here shows that it will be ignored. I don't know if I've convinced anyone that I know what you are talking about. I understand it because I experience it. I can describe it as self-remembrance, as stepping out of the movie, experiencing, effortless effort mode and so on. You realize how difficult it has been for you to describe this to others. The question is, are you open for the possibility that there are levels of understanding? And that in the same way others don't understand you, so it might also be possible that you don't understand someone else who tries and tries to explain it?
I know you experience it, I can see it.
I'm very open to different levels of understanding, and I think I have made clear that I have experiences at shallower and deeper levels. I don't think it's just a matter of stepping out the movie. But unless you step out of the movie, you can't get anywhere.
You can see this with Eugene. He has pressed his back at the veil and says "Everything is in front of me, the thinking that you speak of is in front of me. I see you dabbling in that thinking in front of me but you can't extract anything of value there. The truth is behind my back. What you're thinking in the tunnel, I'm experiencing in the funnel. My perspective is wider than yours so you can't surprise me with any of your thought contraptions."
Would you join Eugene here? Would you say "your thinking is a kiddie toy in the tunnel. Come and press your back at the veil with me, so we can observe the movie together."? We can continue if you're at least partially open for the possibility that conscious development might not be all about stepping further and further out of the movie while observing everything as more and more blending.
The self-remembrance or stepping out, feels that it must expand more and more in order to grasp more of the periphery. Thinking seems too centered and that's why you would say "You're wasting your time. The truth is in encompassing the periphery." This is said even though the veil is hit and any further expansion is scheduled for after death. But Thinking doesn't focus in order to become constrained in the center. The thing is that even if it was possible to continue beyond the veil and encompass more and more of the world content, it would form an inexplicable panorama. Just like we don't understand the laws which move blending or thinking as long as we observe them as a movie, so the world would be a vast panorama of blending. Beautiful, magnificent but ultimately inexplicable. The focus on Thinking is not in order to become lost in the tunnel but because only in that way we can pass through the tunnel and emerge in the mirror funnel which, however, is now weaved out of meaning and not of inexplicable movie perceptions. This funnel of meaning is the same as the first but experienced 'inside-out' as the meaning implied by the spiritual activity of beings. This expansion can continue waaay further than the veil that is being hit in the purely receptive way. And in this moment Eugene says "You can't do that, the veil is there for a reason".
I'll leave it with this question. Is there openness for the possibility that it's not enough to step receptively outside the movie until we can't step any further, but we might need to be spiritually active in order that we turn inside-out through thinking and we find ourselves once again expanding, but this time also with cognition? Is there openness for the possibility that someone might be speaking from this expanded volume of meaning and their words are being dismissed, just as people inside the movie dismiss those that have learned to step outside of it?
So my answer to your question is that yes of course, I am always open to be able to be better.
What I don't see is that stepping outside the movie, and the experiences that it leads to, is passive. I experience it as active (although not activated by ME exactly).
I also don't see how any spiritual activity of any kind can happen without the process of being aware of what is happening in my thinking or Thinking. To be aware is precisely this self-remembering.
Thanks so much for this, I really appreciate it.
Just an FYI I have my grandson staying over this evening, so I won't be make here until late Sunday or maybe even Monday morning Eastern time.