Self Remembering by Stuart Wilde

Colin Wilson is a good writer. He writes books about the paranormal from a fairly logical scientific approach. He's open-minded yet not too taken by the woo-woo of it all that he loses the plot.

In his book “Alien Dawn” he mentions Peter Ouspensky who was born in Russia in 1878, Ouspensky became known as the pragmatic voice of Gurdjieff. Ouspensky spent much of his life translating Gurdjieff’s teachings into a coherent mythology. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s teachings were impacting, certainly in the years between the world wars.

The ideas that Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky was a technique known as self remembering. Colin Wilson mentions it in his book saying self remembering is looking at some object – say a watch - and being at the same time aware of yourself looking at it. This is extremely difficult to do. After a few seconds, you become aware of yourself and forget your watch, or you become aware of your watch and forget yourself.

Colin Wilson goes on to say that while Ouspensky was practising self remembering, he would walk around St Petersburg. He noted that as he began to succeed in the process, his consciousness would be flipped into another reality, expanded from the personalities finite world view to the more infinite holistic view (the Zero Point). He could sense the individual history of houses as if they were living beings, full of thoughts, feelings and emotions. The material world came alive, resonating with activity and life.

I certainly have seen the same in the woods when I've been out Fairy Walking with the Druids in Ireland. You can see golden lines of energy criss-crossing the forest. They are memory traces of people who have been there before. Certain spots in the woods have a special character in that they retain the memory of human events, meetings, prayers, laughter and gatherings. It's really strange to see. In the woods I go to a tree we call the psychiatric tree. When people sit by it, their mental emotional dysfunctions come to them thick and fast and they become aware of how to heal those dysfunctions. The tree teaches them things.

There's another spot in the woods that is very scary and dark. It's marked by spawn on the ground which has an odd shape and looks like one of those big headed grays of the abduction kind. Yet another spot by a clump of oaks has the memory of romantic love. You can see from the lines of light that people have made love they're in the past.

In one section of the forest there is a dead goat carcass. If you look into the eye of the goat skull you'll see your marriage/relationship right there in all its glory, or in its loveless lack of harmony. The forest has a memory. it's a museum. Light in parts, dark and scary in others.

Self remembering helps you see the history of places and material things. The practice of self remembering requires you to be in two places at once, i.e. in the part of you that is concentrating on your wrist watch say, and in the part of you that is aware or distanced from your physical body - that is detached, watching you, watching your wrist watch. It forces you to engage both sides of your brain simultaneously. I think in many ways it's compatible to Monroe's level 10, which seeks to build a bridge between the left and right brain in order to induce the out of body state.

The other similarity that comes to mind is Castenada’s technique of going to sleep and trying to see your hands in the dream state and remembering seeing your hands. When I did that exercise I got it right the very first time, which might have been a lucky fluke. I must say when I tried Castenada’s technique I'd been into lucid dreaming, meditation and trance states for a very long time, so that's possibly why I managed to hit it on the first attempt.

Everything is connected, the bird that flies over head is in fact flying in your heart. The friend who is sitting across from you at the table in Denny's drinking coffee is also inside your heart. The whole of reality is internal even though we move through life with the reassuring illusion that houses, people and birds and restaurants are external to us.

The only way of developing true meaning in life is to move out of our left brain ego/personality - which eventually is destined to suffer a heat death of energy. It is not just physical death but boredom, irritation and neurosis. We must cross the bridge to the right brain, the special infinite self in self remembering we are in fact making that crossing.

The other technique I might remind you about here is one that Trevor Ravenscroft, the author of the Spear of Destiny, taught me. It is a technique that comes from the Hindus, of going backwards in time. At night prior to going to sleep, run methodically backwards through the events of the day in your mind's eye. In this way you process and release your finite observations of external reality. It takes you out of the finite 3D World and leaves you open during the night to a more infinite perception.

What are the things you can do prior to going to sleep is to call on that Infinity within you to provide instructions to you via your dreams or by induction while you are asleep. Sometimes you might seek an answer to a problem you are working on to which you have not found the solution. Sometimes you might ask for instructions because you want to see the world in a grander way or develop more meaning for your life.

The other thing this process does is to allow you to travel backwards in time. Past, present and future coexist in an eternity. Because of our linear day-to-day method of going through eternity we override the sensation of the infinite time was reality within.

A lack of direction and meaning is one of the intrinsic diseases of our Western societies. No amount of comfort and technology can grant a human meaning in life, which comes of course, only from his or her connection to all things