Remembering the Self

Three hundred years ago a disciple asked his Master how he can come to the super-sensual life and hear god speak. The master replies: When you can throw yourself into “THAT”, where no creature dwells though it be but for a moment, than you hear what God speaks. The disciple asks him if the place where no creature or nothing created dwells is near or far away. The master answered: It is in you and it is to be reached by ceasing, even for a moment, from all thinking and willing – when you stand still from self-thinking and self-willing and can stop the wheel of the imagination and the senses. This has to be done at least once a day.

Unknown Mystic

This is a perfect parable that describes the true state of Self-remembering. All work on becoming a more conscious being as well as work on oneself depends on self-remembering. Half a minute of true self-remembering every day is sufficient enough to start with, but it has to be done completely and from the depth of our being. We should not only think & contemplate about remembering the self, but also do it. Otherwise the imprints of the impact the sheer act of self-remembering has on our state of being will fade away and be repeatedly replaced by the imprints of external impressions and events.

The initial signs of applying self-remembering properly is that we experience a clear feeling of force entering ourselves from somewhere within, as if something had opened up deep within us, creating a liberating sense of spaciousness that does not occur in our everyday state of consciousness.

That state can be found above our life and our senses, which is comprised of all our fears and daily worries, all things and people we care for, our contacts & plans, as well as all what we see and hear through our five senses.

You are on our way to work and miss your train, you see your savings & the cash in your wallet, you remember that your dishwasher is broken, you experience and see illness and despair, you witness the changes in season and you are aware of your own physical body and the shape of your face.

All that is sensual – all that is life transmitted by senses, our personal life experienced by our five senses that belong to our physical body.

This might give rise to the question if there is any other life than our sensual life?

The universal teachings say that we must transform our incoming impressions. But unfortunately we are all glued to our sensory reality, which is the reason why we cannot see beyond any particular event of life. The moment we are in an outer event, everything seems to become that event. Soon it passes and we wonder what actually has happened.

As we mentioned before, life is a series of events, and every day consists of a definite structure of events. Those events are packed into our day all the time, as well as on all different scales.

This includes our personal and family events, our local and national events and our world events. All that takes place on different scales simultaneously and is due to the many different laws we are under and are acting on us.

We obviously can never be without some sort of event, which tries to take great amounts of force from us, and that is so because we are under definite laws and are clearly not free. This takes us usually a whole life to grasp and then we are still not able to grasp it.

Have you ever noticed where you place your sense of ‘I’ or from where you derive your sense of self? Have you ever realized what kind of being you have? It is well worth pursuing this enquiry, because the moment you know your actual kind of being you will know that it weaves a thread through the way your life unfolds, continuing the same series of events. Hence our level of being attracts our life and all the events belonging to it. This happens without fail always in congruency with our level of being and as a consequence we frequently think why is that always happening to us?

To relate that back to universal ideas we have to ask ourselves if we ever have observed our own life and its events from the angle of what the ancient teachings say about being?

The teachings say that self-observation has its own limitations and can only take us to a certain point at which things start fading out and become mechanical or habitual. At this point along the scale of our development the spark of meaning and longing has lost its gravitas.  That’s the time to self-remember and once we self-remember we will experience that help will enter.

We are always thinking about the teaching but are not applying what the work teaches us, and when we refrain from any attempt to self-remember, our inner continuity with the teaching is broken, which means that the teaching is gradually moving away from us and we simply pass back into mind created life.

If we are able to catch ourselves by remembering to remember the timeless teachings the moment this happens we have to remember our true self deep within us, which opens us again to the influences of the teaching.

To truly remembering oneself is a literal surrender of oneself, in which one realizes ones helplessness. This is the meaning of a conscious positive shock in which we sacrifice something we want to keep, and a full true surrender of oneself, even if it lasts only for one millisecond is the highest form of sacrifice.

That only can happen if we understand that higher influences can reach us, influences that do not belong to mind created life but constantly surround us by higher knowledge.

Eight hundred years ago a Sufi wrote:

Self-remembering is like coming to the surface of the sea and drawing in air. This air he says is miraculous and will last a whole day, even when one is at the bottom of the ocean.

When we self-remember every day we will gradually become aware of a continuity running through our life, and when we feel the loss of this continuity we have reached a point in our development deep within our heart, which could be called the awakening of a living conscience.

Furthermore it is said that our understanding of the teaching is relative to our level of being, as well as that simply to know is not to truly understand.

So the knowledge of the teaching acts on our being and in time will give rise to true understanding.

Knowledge put into action in conjunction will give rise to true understanding. This means that the moment our being can will what it knows then it results in increasing understanding.

The teaching means us to work through action, and to work through action means that we have to apply effort. Our work is the effort to connect ones knowledge of the teaching with ones being.

The effort is to put what one knows into relation to what one is, and if knowledge and being are out of balance, whichever way round one of them has outgrown the other, we won’t truly understand.

This only becomes meaningful to us and is worth pursuing from the perspective that there is a higher level of consciousness available to us, a level of consciousness, which we realistically can reach.

We should not only know and observe, but we must remember ourselves and utilise the energy evoked by self-remembering, because only in the state of self-remembering can more refined and higher influences reach us and penetrate through all the different layers of what we have acquired and act on our being.

It has to be made very clear and we all truly have to understand that we have to be in the teachings and in our external and internal life simultaneously, and there should not be any contradiction. Some sides of us belong to life some belong to the universal teachings.

The different parts of the divided self has to be put into the right place and order, whilst having the strength not merely seeing opposites. Fact is that we need both – the teachings and life, and by establishing a perfect balance between them, we can get force out of both of them.

Its like two rooms opening up into each other and being part of the same house, and this house is you. So, no one is expected to cut oneself off life and live in a monastery, and everything we can learn from the ancient teachings will help our life and help us to ultimately attain our life-aim.

Self-remembering shifts us into a different state of consciousness, and in that particular state of consciousness we are not able to do certain things without going asleep at once, we will be able to truly see it happening, which means that we see ourselves becoming identified.

In different words if we do certain things and simultaneously remember ourselves, rest assured we will do them in quite a different way.

Just say to yourself  “I am not me”. If you truly say that from the depth of your being and really mean it, it will give us a very strange feeling as to who we are. This feeling is usually combined with a sense of the dissolving of ones own personality, and the objective of most universal teachings is to make once personality inactive so that the real part within us – our essence can grow.

Say to yourself “ what is …your name… up to? This will create a degree of inner separation and awareness, that one is not ones acquired personality only.

That one is not this ever changing figure, with all its contradictions that life has built up deep within us, and that one takes as oneself by simply not knowing any better. Such a tremendous feeling, such a true inner sense is the arising of self-remembering.

Our further inner evolution can only start when we realize that we are not what we thought ourselves to be and pretended to be. The moment the teachings really hits our home, this so stoic house of cards we take as ourselves begins to fall to pieces faster than we can think.

“There is a necessity that we come to the point that we realize our own nothingness, but this is usually mercifully delayed and can’t be artificially realized. You cannot pretend to be nothing, and it is very painful to see a person pretending to be nothing. To remember yourself 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 personality and all it pretends to be ceases to exist.

In this process you become nobody, yet the fullness of this state, which is real bliss, makes you for the first time – somebody.” M. Nicole

Copyright © Alexander Filmer-Lorch 2012 all rights reserved