Self-remembering

Self-remembering is undoubtedly the “icing on the cake” of what Gurdjieff brought to the world in his incredible teaching. All that have been said and written by Gurdjieff or Ouspensky or other exponents of this teaching find its meaning and resolving in this one and only point : self-remembering. Without it all the theoritical aspect of the work (a term used to call this teaching) can easily remain on the level of the intellect only, and in this case will fail to bring one to a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s relationship to the world. I would even go further in saying that it can bring the opposite of the intention behind all this fabulous work that certainly demanded tremendous efforts from those who transmitted it. The opposite effect I have in mind is the inflating of one’s ego with all its pride and vanity instead of a diminution and an eventual eradication of these undesirable properties of oneself.
So what is self-remembering ? There are many aspects in the work that can refer to the term itself and also many ways of self-remembering but ultimately it points towards our own deeper nature, what or who really are. And the term itself implies that we forgot something that we have to remember; in this case : our own inner self. This is the state we leave in and that Gurdjieff calls “sleep”. Self-remembering can help us to awaken from this “sleep” we live in and moreover self-remembering is the state of awakening itself. It can be said that there is the practice of self-remembering and the state it leads to, the practice of self-remembering being tied to the exercise of self-observation. Genuine and persistent self-observation throughout one’s whole daily life will inevitably brings one to a first taste of the state of self-remembering. An awakening. One will be “puzzled” if I may say so. Awakening brings a total shift in the perspective in which one understand and view oneself and so in some ways we can say that one will inevitably get “puzzled” by this reversal in perspective and find oneself a bit like the Hanged Man of the Tarot. This is self-remembering. This is also connected to what Gurdjieff called “seeing one’s own nothingness”. Here I find meaningful connections with some teaching of the Ch’an tradition that, in how I understand self-remembering, can be very valuable to study. Some texts from the old chinese Ch’an masters are really amazing evocations of the state of self-remembering and also more recent ones. I think particularly of Xu Yun, and the verbatim of his talks called “The prerequisites of Ch’an training”. In this text he described at some point in a very simple and insightful way the practice of the hua tou which is a form of questioning one have with oneself. And he explains that this questioning, which is based on asking oneself when one is doing something “who” is doing this something, should gradually evoke a kind of doubt about oneself; and this doubt needs to be cultivated if one wants to find what one really is. This, I feel, is really evocative of self-remembering, which brings a feeling of uncertainty or more a form of questioning, but that in this case wouldn’t be coming from the intellect and covered with words but a direct feeling or cognition, of uncertainty. It’s not like panic what I try to convey, even if in panic itself, the state of self-remembering could happen. But true, like the chinese master said, from this point you can really get uplifted and have a glimpse of your true self, Real 'I'. Again, I recall, like Gurdjieff and even Ch’an masters did, it takes some time before getting to that and it takes a lifetime to mature. But they also say that it is our birthright.