I am on the plane to New York City and I have been reading What is Self? by Bernadette Roberts.  I’m having one of those fantastic experiences of reading the right book at the right time, and thinking to myself, “this is the greatest book in the world”.  Every word seems directed towards exactly what I am experiencing right now, and what I am working with.

Bernadette Roberts writes that there are two kinds of consciousness, thinking consciousness and feeling consciousness — this sounds somewhat similar to Gurdjief’s “feeling center” and “thinking center”.  These two “consciousnesses” make up each human’s consciousness as a whole.

The act of self-observation is simply the conscious mind (self-consciousness) turning in on itself.   Feeling consciousness in its untrained state manifests as desire, that pulls us along.  In it’s more developed or mature state it becomes the will, which that conscious mind has some control over.

As the mind turns in on itself, it recognizes itself and slowly begins to move from complete unconscious identification with its experience to an identification with the act of observing itself.  And, at one ultimate point, this reflexive nature of mind disappears altogether.  To say it another way, ultimately the mind ceases to identify itself with itself.  It lets go of self-identification altogether, and since self-identification is the self, the Self ceases to be.  The Self becomes the void.

This sounds very tricky.

What is exciting to me in this moment is the realization that in my struggling with my own experience of being alive, I have been looking at the struggle to become aware all wrong.  A big part of me has been struggling to eliminate my mind.   I have been fighting the “noise” of my mind and thoughts.  I now realize that this is impossible. Uchiyama Roshi says the same thing — the mind is an organ, like a heart or a lung, and what this organ does is secrete thoughts.  That thoughts continuously arise as a fact of that organ’s existence.

Instead of fighting the fact that thoughts arise, through practice one can develop willpower, and then use willpower to focus the mind’s attention back on the mind itself.  By focusing attention on the mind’s identification with itself, the mind will slowly realize that the mind is not the self.  At this point, it seems, self-reflection (or separation) may itself dissolve.

This sounds rather terrifying to me, which I suppose is why it happens so infrequently. There aren’t that many human beings running around that have experienced enlightenment.

Bernadette Roberts writes,

“The reflexive mechanism (our mind looking back at itself) is not a function that may or may not give rise to the experience of Self — the reflexive mechanism IS the self.”

Attention is the self.

The ultimate end of spiritual work is simply to realize that attention, which is a form of identification, is the self and that the self this has no substance.  And that this situation already exists — there’s nothing to change, there is only the act of realization of what already is.

On a personal level, what I thought of as a weakness — my overactive and clever mind I cannot shut up, and that tends to drive me crazy with detail and worry — may not be a weakness after all.  It may be that my overactive mind is a powerful mechanism that I can point towards self-observing the nature of itself, but I must develop the will and desire to do so.  Gurdjieff might use the word “capacity” instead of will.

It may also be that another frustration of mine, which is the seemingly automatic nature of my tendency to be creative, is simply a manifestation of the feeling-mind acting autonomously.  That my feeling center is so powerful is also encouraging, as it seems that there is a lot there to make use of, if I can learn to use this “energy” to build a more powerful will.

Attention on the very minute, and the ability to focus is a useful tool in spiritual work. All of these things are two edged swords that may be turned to service, in the end.

I think that some of the suffering (and insomnia) that I personally have been going through lately is simply feelings opening up and my conscious mind not having been trained at a young age to deal with it.  Another way to say this is, a bunch of fucked up shit happened to me when I was small, as it did to most people.  In my case I shut off some of my feelings to survive.  Those feelings are now waking up, and my system is freaking out.  So, hard time sleeping at night, but really great creative moments during the day.

As Bernadette Roberts writes, life is similar to a moving walkway.   We did not choose to get on and we cannot choose when to get off.  We can make effort to either develop the capacity to recognize the direction that life is already going, or we can try to fight against the tide.  Most of us fight because we cannot see the moving treads.  We don’t realize where we’re going, so we run blind in the wrong direction.

We inevitably end up exactly in the same place, at the end of our journey, in any case.