I know I sure was, up until the moment when a book fell to floor from a Cambridge Massachusetts bookstore shelf in 1966 as I was wheeling a stroller with two little kids through an aisle. What was the book? “In Search of the Miraculous,” by P.D. Ouspensky, a recounting of his relationship with the mysterious Gurdjieff.
The title of course, intrigued me. I sure needed one! Something had to change. My so-called life as wife, mother, and graduate student had become a role-playing prison with no room for free thought or action.
I didn’t just read the book. I devoured it.
LIFE FORCE ACTIVATED!
First sign of regeneration.
What struck me deeply was especially the idea that though we are imprisoned, acting in a mechanical manner, we can break free. How? Via a seemingly silly little practice called “self-remembering.”
I started practicing. . . Whatever I was doing, just stop, stop! And notice. Notice what I am doing. Just that. Notice.
And it’s true! That momentary noticing would eventually evolve into a mostly steady awareness that envelops and surrounds all my otherwise mechanical motions, so that I no longer identify with them, and can thus alter them at will.
Back then, in my early 20s: Notice that I’m brushing my teeth! Notice that I’m changing a diaper! Notice that I’m emotionally reacting to husband’s demand!
I’ll never forget the day, walking alone along a street, when I suddenly noticed that my hands were automatically typing in the air, over and over again. Curious. What were they typing? “I. . . A. . . M . . . A . . . M . . .E . . .S . . S. . .”
“I AM A MESS”!
Over and over over again. My body diagnosing my mind, and, apparently, making sure I stayed that way.
Had I not begun the practice of self-remembering, of noticing, at any moment, what I was doing, I doubt I would have made this discovery.
A discovery which led, over several decades, to the practice of exploring and engaging the unconscious mind. So that I could begin to understand the roots of my actions. To understand how my body is an outgrowth of the unconscious, which provides me with behavioral cues!
We call this “shadow work,” and to me it is the foundation of freedom.
One might say that this sudden synchronous (miraculous) event, “In Search of the Miraculous,” falling off a shelf, ignited my existential search; as a budding philosopher, I would actually begin to follow in the footsteps of Socrates: know thyself.
From this foundation, the inevitable realization: the boundaries of the personal unconscious are permeable; at deeper levels, we call it the collective unconscious, each of us a drop within its infinitely mysterious oceanic tides.
In other words, by engaging in the tiny, seemingly innocuous practice of noticing, of “self-remembering,” one eventually opens to a spacious awareness that encompasses the whole of reality.
And, I might add now: This practice of “self-remembering” became the cornerstone of my conscious life so that I could, over time, extract, and learn to engage, my own sovereign soul from the welter of social conditioning that still, according to the passage below, deadens 80% of humanity.
