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 

“Out beyond wrongdoings and right doings there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

A summary of a talk, held at the Jivamukti Yoga Centre in London mid August 2012, based on a 'Rumi' poem.

Once your enquiry takes you further into the depth of the universal teachings, you gradually will come to the conclusion that meditation & philosophy can’t be separated. Together, they can be seen as the two different sides of a coin.

Philosophy gives meaning to meditation and satisfies the mind and intellect, whilst meditation gives life to philosophy and transforms the substance, of which true knowledge is made of, into actual experience.

Higher knowledge is constantly surrounding us everywhere we go, whether we are receptive to it or not is irrelevant. It meets us in specific forms of influences that are acting on us in our life. This particular knowledge can’t be found in mind created life, which nowadays penetrates through almost every corner of this world as well as what lies beyond  our limited world of perception.

This higher knowledge we are talking about, is mainly transmitted through the fine arts & sciences of this world, safely contained and disguised within architecture, philosophy, literature, as well as nature, religion & poetry.

The more abstract ideas of universal teachings that lay beyond the understanding of our conceptual mind and intellect, are often embedded within the powerful influence of poetry. They are mainly directed towards our heart and aim to awaken our finer emotions that connect us with the transformative force of meaning.

Poetry points towards something eternal and can induce a state of self-remembering in us.

If we truly want to absorb these ideas and be nourished by the meaning of poetry we have to keep the door to our hearts wide open.

“Out beyond wrongdoings and right doings

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

'Rumi'

      

‘Between wrong doings and right doings’ that form the horizontal line of life, including past, present and future, there is a centre point or a middle, represented as a fulcrum called ‘neutral’, which can take us above our two dimensional way of perception that is mainly active on this horizontal plain in life.

Here - our mind rules in form of a ‘Me’, as subject and everything else, or ‘Them’ as the object, manifesting the ever-changing external world of our experiences.

As a consequence, this leads to the appearance of forces that oppose each other in form of ‘yes or no’, ‘positive or negative’, active or passive, as well as good or bad etc. Those forces are comprising the 'law of opposition'. 

So, the meaning behind ‘wrongdoings or right doings’ is revealing the teachings & methods that re-connect us with, as well as facilitates us to further develop a strong sounding conscience that is alive and not deeply buried by our countless contradictions. Those colliding contradictions form part of the divisions within the ‘Self’, which separate us from all that is noble and divine in us.

This gives rise to the realization that we can’t become more conscious without an alive, clear and fully developed conscience. And the methods that will take us towards this objective are applied ‘self-study’ & facilitated ‘self-enquiry’.

If we choose to stay in a linear state of perception, or are simply not interested or receptive to the transmission of knowledge that is continuously surrounding us, pointing towards a way out of those powerful laws that are constantly acting on us, we will keep bouncing back and forth within the dynamics of those forces in external life, as well as in our internal world. This means that the possibilities to change, transform or further evolve will diminish more and more the older we get, and in time we will become completely immersed by the vale of ‘blissful denial’ that will stay with us to the day we will die.

So, a third force is required to take us out of this linear state of perception, and the teaching that will lead us to this specific force can be found within the meaning of the word ‘doings’.  

‘Doings’, are governed by an active force that can take us into opposite directions, depending on the positive or negative charge of our intentions once we apply the idea of scale to them. Everything around us and everything within us contains the idea of scale. For example, the scale of our emotions, or the scale of our house, or the scale of a mountain range.

So this active force within doings can take us towards right-, as well as towards wrongdoings and the moment we find the equilibrium between both of them, a triad comes into manifestation in the form of an interval in which the possibility of change appears. If change does not manifest during this interval, then at least something else can happen that lies outside the limitations and confinements of different opposing forces and their linear ways of perception.

We have two futures according to the universal teachings, one in time & one in scale. Additionally we have two bodies, our physical body and our psychological body.

As we all know, our physical body moves along the horizontal line of life, hence in time, whilst our psychological body can rise up and down a vertical line known as the vertical scale or the ‘scale of eternity’.

The teachings of this vertical scale, which is literally infinite can be found within the meaning of the words of ‘out beyond’, which contains the teaching of ‘self-observation’.

To be able to observe our selves, we have to remove ourselves to create enough distance and space, by which we can truly see what lies in front of us. We then can see both ends of the pendulum simultaneously and can allow both ends to simply ‘be’. Hence ‘out’ symbolises a neutral place or state that lies above the horizontal line in which things can be seen from their actual ‘Isness’ point of view and can be put into a greater perspective. Whilst ‘beyond’ symbolises the neutralizing force, that can transcend the dynamic of wrongdoings and right doings into a new proposition that lies above all doings, as well as positive or negative connotations.

Within the meaning of ‘there is a field’ we will come across the teaching that man is a self-evolving organism and can further evolve his consciousness & state of being by means of conscious effort.

‘There is a field’, might give rise to the question what actually happens on a field? A field is an environment on which something can grow like the seeds in the ground can germinate and sprout to further grow and develop into crops. Instinctively the sprout is attracted to the sun and by absorbing and assimilating the sunlight it grows and flourishes on all levels.

Similarly, once we can see beyond the limitations of our mind created life, and once the meaning of the finer influences have had a chance to penetrate through the outer layers of our personality and make us look inwards to perceive our internal world of experiences by means of self-study & self-enquiry.

In time we will realize our internal world to be a large a field within that holds the seed of our inherent potential of further growth and evolution. Initially this field requires a tremendous amount of work and constant care and it will cause us a lot of hardship, friction and resistance.

There are many weeds to be eradicated that try to prevent the seed from blossoming, and there is a lot of sticky clay as well, in which we get stuck again and again, slowing our work down. Additionally there are tough weather conditions comprised of storms, fog and floods that are holding us up to complete the work and succeed with our objective.  

With a bit of patience and a sufficient amount of conscious effort, as well as help from others, we will slowly get there.

The more we grow within, the stronger the inner longing becomes. And the more its inherent magnetic pull like qualities take us further into the divided nature of our self, the more our heart is thriving for union.

‘I’ll meet you there’, symbolises the pure nature of real ‘I’, in which the divided nature of ourselves meets the undivided nature of our internal being. We now have come to a place of peace & silence within that vast field of our internal world, in which we are entirely on our own. Stripped & freed of everything we believed ourselves to be, we might be carried away by the universal pulse of consciousness right through the heart of our awareness towards the unchanging nature within, when they see fit.

  

Copyright © Alexander Filmer-Lorch October 2012 all rights reserved

Our History is Stored in Our Connective Tissue

Our History is Stored in Our Connective Tissue

There is scientific evidence that suggests each of our cells has its own intelligence.

One example of this is the research from Albrecht Buehler Ph.D. who says:

“My research for the past 30 years or so was devoted to examining whether cells have such signal integration and control centre(s). The results suggest that mammalian cells, indeed possess intelligence.”

His research documents that cells have the ability to see and respond to light as well as possessing special awareness, and can change their direction towards a different object if required. Other research indicates that each cell in our body contains traces of cerebrospinal fluid and can function like a mini brain containing a definite level of intelligence.

Bruce H. Lipton PhD discusses the matter of intelligence in each of our cells in detail in his book Biology of Belief. In one of his interviews about his book he says:

“We think of ourselves as a singular entity, but the reality is that we are an interactive community of 50 trillion individual cells. It is their technology and their intelligence that created us. The reflection of their intelligence is in their technology—they can manage their environment and manage their world with technologies that we haven’t even comprehended yet”.

As a therapist myself, having specialized in post-traumatic stress disorders for ten years, I am constantly witnessing how much unconscious memory is stored and can be held by our connective tissue, and how intelligent this tissue memory is.

The body’s inner self-healing ability seems to play an integral part within this process, as well as it seems to be an intelligence in action, which aims for a resolution and completion of the bio-emotional process. 
 Every force that is impacting on our body has to be dealt with in one way or another by our physical system. 
If it is a light force, like someone accidentally bumping into us in a crowded department store, we might be pushed slightly off balance, but otherwise our body can easily deal with this impacting force.

The energy of such a nominal impact will go straight through our body and won’t leave any traces behind. But if we happen to walk down a flight of stairs and accidentally miss one of the steps, the impact of the force of that fall might not only lead to a lower back injury and some bruising, but the physical and emotional trauma that fall has caused, will be stored within the connective tissue. The energy of the impact of the fall will enter our body and instead of travelling all the way through it to dissipate on the opposite side again, it will enter and be directed along a certain vector and will get stuck somewhere in the connective tissue.

The place where it gets stuck is usually quite a bit further away from the actual injury. The same is the case regarding the impact of forces like surgery, food poisoning, any verbal abuse or physical abuse as well as sexual abuse or severe illnesses.

Most of these extreme impacts force us into a state of shock and, depending on its severity, we may not remember a thing afterwards. People describe this experience as if a large part of themselves froze in time and was paralyzed during the traumatic experience. What they might be left with after the physical injuries have healed and their life has gone back to normal, are feelings of anxiety, minor to major changes in behavior that can be triggered by certain situations or unexpected circumstances.

Severe trauma causes our mind to blank and can lead to complete loss of memory of what actually happened. This can result in experiences of paranoia, feelings of being polluted within, aversions to touch and affection as well as mood swings and phases of deep depression.

To therapists those areas of trauma are called active lesions manifesting as hardened tissue within the body’s connective tissue structure. And once those lesions are detected and palpated, they usually display a specific movement pattern.

By applying specific tissue release techniques to these active lesions, as well as simultaneously implementing very specific non-invasive therapeutic dialoguing and imagery techniques, the client’s tissue gently will reveal and shift the dormant memory up into the field of the client’s awareness, to enable the person to release the stored energy the traumatic experience had caused in the past. In time, and with regular treatment sessions, the symptoms that had been causing a lot of problems to the client’s wellbeing completely cease to exist.

The capacity of tissue memory is vast and very precise. Nothing is forgotten, yet not everything is required to be remembered. But rest assured, only what we no longer need, and only what is of no further constructive use to us will be brought up to the surface by our self-healing faculty, that forms part of this amazingly intelligent organism called our physical body.

Organ transplantations and obvious changes in behavior of the organ receivers, has attracted the attention of the medical world. Candace Pert78says:

“Memories are stored not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body, all the way out along pathways to internal organs and the very surface of our skin.”

She discovered neuropeptides79 in all different kinds of tissue and fascia, which gave rise to her conclusion that:

“...through cellular receptors, thoughts or memories may remain unconscious or can become conscious-raising the possibility of physiological connections between memories, organs and the mind.”

Paul Pearsall, MD, a psycho-neuro-immunologist and author of The Heart’s Code, has researched the transference of memories through organ transplantation. After interviewing nearly 150 heart and other organ transplant recipients, Pearsall proposes the idea that cells of living tissue have the capacity to remember.

University of Arizona scientists and co-authors of The Living Energy Universe, Gary Schwartz PhD, and Linda Russek PhD, propose the universal living memory hypothesis in which they believe that:

“...all systems stored energy dynamically and this information continued as a living, evolving system after the physical structure had deconstructed.”

Schwartz and Russek believe this may explain how the information and energy from the donor’s tissue can be present, consciously or unconsciously, in the recipient.80

To summarize:

•    We can say that the ability to store memory might not only be exclusive to the brain and its neurons, but also to different tissue types throughout the body.

•    Then we can say that this newly researched cell memory ability does not only store trauma caused by an external physical or psycho- emotional force, it stores all the memory and the blueprint of different states of consciousness.

•    Furthermore we can say that the impact gamma wave activity has on our cells and different types of tissue requires further research, yet the impact of gamma wave activity on permanent changes in brain function does not require further proof.

•    And finally we can say, that increased memory of higher states of consciousness in our cells, might play a major part in the formation of something, which is not subject to change within induced by objectless meditation.

•    And we can say that regular meditation can have a powerful impact on the way we assimilate and integrate the stored memory, which was brought up to the surface by the connective tissue while it processed towards release.


Suggestion: 
If you have the feeling that you are inhibited by certain Somato-Emotional, or Psycho-Somatic patterns to develop into your full potential, it might be worth considering talking to someone who is specialized in post-traumatic stress disorders. The relief and freedom you might gain out of a few sessions with an experienced therapist can be phenomenal. Throughout this process you only rid yourself of something you no longer need that is not conducive to you and your life anymore. 

Copyright © Alexander Filmer-Lorch July 2012 all rights reserved