Way back in my miserable early 20s, I began to wake up from the sleep of cultural conditioning. Lots of stories I could, and often, have told, elsewhere. One of the main stories comes from the time when, for the first time in my young life, I actually, consciously, NOTICED myself engaged in a repeating ritual of self-sabotage. This revelation came to me via the practice of “self-remembering,” one of the techniques Gurdjieff was noted for, and which I read about in a book by Ouspensky, his chief disciple.
If you have no idea what I am talking about (and most don’t), you might want to begin to ponder this:
Self-Remembering: In Search of the Miraculous
I began by simply stopping the ordinary, habitual, mechanical motions of my daily life to, simply, notice. Notice that I was brushing my teeth, notice that I was speaking to my child, notice that I was sweeping the floor, on and on. Just notice, nothing more. This exercise, from the very beginning, yielded a fleeting awareness, which of course, instantly disappeared, unless I “noticed” the next moment, and the next, and the next, this daily practice of self-remembering centering me into what is now, over half-a century later, a more or less continuous state of spacious awareness, or presence, within which my 3D self is operating here on planet Earth.
“More or less,” for me in this context, tends to mean over and ever again, I wake up, can wake up, and do wake up, for instants at a time, throughout my waking day. It also means that there are rare times, when these noticings constitute a continuous flow.
Even back then the results were miraculous, because within several months of this self-remembering practice, I actually caught myself in an unconscious, habitual, act of self-sabotage!
Here goes:
I was walking along the street one day, when I happened to notice my fingers typing the air by my sides, over and over again, the same thing. Hmmm . . . what were they typing? AHA! Slowing down, my hands spelled out the message slowly, deliberately, one finger at a time, as if on a keyboard. I . . .A . . .M . . .A . . .M . . .E. . . .S . . .S . . .
I AM A MESS!
Right then and there I vowed to break that habit, which had gone unnoticed and had been drilling in deeper and deeper every time I went on a walk, for who knows how long?
Note: for those New Agers who still think they can “create their own reality,” I say, only if you can make the unconscious conscious.
Okay, now skip to the present day. I recently went through a lot of weird stuff with this MacBook Air computer, getting into it, figuring out a new Apple ID, changing most passwords, dealing with security and certification issues, on and on. This went on for about a month, and I thank the Geek Squad at the nearby Best Buy, where I was able to schedule two free 20 minute sessions. What a blessed opportunity!
One of the things required was to change the code needed to get into this computer. Hmmm . . . what shall it be?
I picked something humorous: 0verthehill80. (I used zeros rather than cap letter 0s). Humorous in part because I happen to live on a street called Overhill. And, of course I’m still inspired, horrified, amazed, astonished, to have actually reached the august age of 80, and to have started yet another decade, despite my long, and unusually high-risk, life.
So, at least twice, and often three or four times daily, I would type in that (humorous?) message in order to get into the computer: OVERTHEHILL80.
That went on for about a month, until last week, when I began to subtly notice how I was programming myself every time I started up the computer. You are OVER THE HILL 80! You are done, finished, exhausted, about to get washed out to sea, or buried in a landslide, or just, drop over dead!
Yes, I began to notice, and more and more strongly, that every time I typed this phrase, I would enter a dispirited state, a what’s the use? state. That I was emotionally triggering myself to let myself down every single time I typed in that particular series of digits.
Okay. Geez! Change the passcode! Okay. Done. (Thank you, Ethyl!)
Passcode now?
ThisC0ntinu0usfl0w
Oops. I just self-sabotaged again, since likely this is connected to the cloud. So I’ve just changed it again, and I’m not going to tell you what it is this time. Thanks to Laura, for the heads’ up!
