Self-remembering

Eight a.m. . . . still drowsy and shocked from the suddenness of waking up. Robert rocks and intones mantras in the back garden beneath the willow tree while I sit inside, blasted and heavy-eyed, feeling thoroughly stuck in the here and now.

“Don’t go out there, Robert’s doing his meditations,” says Dad, with a simple acceptance of what R. is doing—Robert’s just been rudely interrupted by the cheerful trivialities of the milk woman—and right now I too feel a need for some sort of ritualistic affirmation of a vow to myself. I tend to have a gut distrust of ritual ‘magic,’ but it’s necessary, a private proces . . .. This is a revival of the old ‘shaved head’ ideal, something that has to be done if I’m to ‘save’ myself.

Maybe the ‘power’ of Jesus is a symbolic form of self-salvation, a “reaffirmation to the self,” just as the demons and devils of the mediaeval mind were symbols—though real enough—of the evils of ‘spiritual neglect’? I need heuristic mental discipline—self analysis, self awareness, self documentation—like Gurdjieff’s ‘self-remembering.’ The arrow points in as well as out. I need to realise intentionality.

I’ve been intending to keep a record of dreams to see if any pattern emerges, and I also want to cull through the pages of this journal from the very beginning to discover everyday ‘peak experiences’ and to see if their frequency has increased. A direct mental influence of mind over an intentionality of perception is probably only possible by grasping the process/problem with every faculty of the mind and by living every aspect. I am so self-forgetful. It takes seeing Robert to make me remember. SELF-REMEMBER ←----→

This faltering thread of words is the only testament to my past life. “Are you still keeping that up? What are you going to do with it?” asks Robert, seeing me writing.

What am I going to do with it??