“You can think of Self Remembering as a kind of lifting oneself up from the uproar of things in oneself.” Maurice Nicoll
Separation from Events
“There is an ancient definition, or description, or indication, of Self-Remembering: I come out of everything unto myself. If something real and true and permanent is to grow in me, it must be kept separate from the passing states, the passing events. When caught in the events of life, if I can have even a moment to remember the Work, to remember myself before the reaction takes over, something of myself is transferred from the hurly-burly of life to myself, something you could eventually call the beginning of the birth of Real I.” Annie Lou Staveley, The Plan Is Good, p67-68.
“Can you separate from yourself—from an event? A person can become halted in some event of long ago, and walk about like some black dead creature. Do you notice that the general tendency is to expand an unpleasant event and contract everything else? Time—that is, events—can be accompanied by a method of selection, choosing and discarding, giving attention and withdrawing attention. Time is all there, like a countryside. But we come on it bit by bit, and we pass through it according to our state. If we add conscious state to blind reaction to events, then we are at a higher level of being, and then we can begin to realize that some events should be contracted—even squeezed up and thrown away—and some should be left as they are, and some expanded with all of one’s powers of inner work and Self-Remembering.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p427.
The Practice and Its Prerequisites
“Self-Observation without Self-Remembering is simply not good practice. You can think of Self-Remembering as a kind of lifting oneself up from the uproar of things in oneself, or of going into another room and shutting the door and sitting down quietly. … It is only when this quietness begins that help can reach us from the higher parts of our own Centers … from the place of Self-Remembering.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p450.
The Circular Nature of Life and Conscious Action
“You should often remember that all your life exists and everything you have thought, felt, said, and done is there, in a higher dimension, hidden from the senses. You have to face your life from the Work point of view. It helps you to remember yourself if you realize that your life is a circle and what you do consciously now changes both the past and the future, and what you do mechanically changes nothing.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1648.
The Art of Remembering What Was Seen
“What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” René Daumal, Mount Analogue.
The Paradox of True Self-Remembering
“To remember yourself simply as you are now is not Self-Remembering. Self-Remembering comes down from above and full Self-Remembering is a state of consciousness in which the Personality and all its pretenses almost cease to exist and you are, so to speak, nobody, and yet the fullness of this state, which is really bliss, makes you, for the first time, somebody.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p533.
“Hold attention as a resonant field, pay attention to the patterns. The price of admission is your narrative self, which is grounded in time.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom.
Logion 84
Yeshua says...
When you see your own likeness
projected into time
it makes you happy.
But when the time comes
that you are able to look upon
the icon of your own being
which came into existence at the beginning,
and neither dies nor has been fully revealed,
will you be able to stand it?
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Page numbers for Annie Lou Staveley refer to The Plan is Good, (Two Rivers Press: 2023)
Quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault are from The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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