Remember Yourself Always and Everywhere

A new student recently asked about the following quotation from Maurice Nicoll:

It is necessary to remember oneself every day, at least once. Many different descriptions exist, for example: “When thou canst throw thyself into THAT, where no creature dwelleth, though it be but for a moment, then thou hearest what God speaketh.” The disciple asks him if the place where no creature, or nothing created dwells is near or far away. The master says: “It is in thee”, and he adds that it is to be reached by ceasing, even for a moment, from all one’s thinking and willing—”when thou standest still from self-thinking and self-willing and canst stop the wheel of the imagination and the senses.” In another place he says that this act must be done once a day at least and only for a short time. It certainly must not be attempted too often. He is really describing what in this Work is called Self-Remembering.

Put simply, this is incorrect. Rather than dwelling on why Maurice Nicoll might have said that, I would like you all to understand why remembering oneself once a day (and only for a short time) cannot lead to any meaningful progress in this work.

At any given moment, there is a struggle happening in each of us over who gets to govern, who gets to say ‘I’. This doesn’t happen just when we wake up in the morning, or once in a while, or even thirty times per day, but with each breath. It is only because of lack of self-knowledge, and our limited (but growing) ability to observe ourselves, that we do not see this. In actual fact, we spend our day as many different people, shifting between Personalities imperceptibly. And as a consequence, our Real ‘I’ is not there to meet the challenges of our day. We only realize in hindsight that we made certain decisions – sometimes crucial decisions – and ‘we’ were not there to make them. This growing realization becomes the main suffering of a practitioner on the way.

The only way out of this predicament is to learn to weave a conscious thread throughout our day. All of it. Not only once in a while, or a few predetermined times, but all the time. Hence, Gurdjieff’s adage, Remember yourself always and everywhere. And although this adage raises an impossibly high standard to the newcomer to this work, it is nevertheless necessary that we understand we must aim for it, even as early as our first day joining a school. Anything less would be a compromise, a relative awakening.

During the November Labor, we sometimes practice the Counting Exercise. Students are challenged to carry a clicker (usually a smartphone app) and aim to remember themselves at least 100 times a day. Of course, experiences vary, but many verified that it is quite possible, and that when one forces such frequency into one’s day, many possibilities open up that otherwise remain closed to one. These are possibilities of internal government, possibilities of making more conscious choices for the very reason that consciousness had appeared more frequently. In other words, our increased frequency of self-remembering brought Real ‘I’ to the forefront.

So as high as it might appear, Remember yourself always and everywhere must remain our standard.