Self-remembering

The term self-remembering is used to signify the process of being aware of oneself, namely self-awareness or self-consciousness. Although Marxist thought considers self-consciousness to be the rational activity of evaluating one's own knowledge, outlook, behaviour and feelings as a totality and with reference to other people, in other systems it is not considered to be a function, a form of thinking, or a form of feeling, but rather a different state of consciousness that emerges from the mental process of trying to remember oneself, an attempt to create in oneself a state of consciousness without any relation to functions such as emotion and sensation.

Self-remembering or self-transcendence may be experienced as a result of some religious emotion, under the influence of a work of art, in the rapture of sexual love, or in situations of great danger and difficulty. It then constitutes a certain detachment of awareness from whatever an individual happens to be doing, thinking or feeling. There is an objective awareness of self, of being outside of, separated from the confines of the physical body, namely a state of non-identification with the observed world. It is an acute identity experience in which this greatest attainment of autonomy or selfhood is itself simultaneously a transcending of itself, beyond and above selfhood such that the person becomes relatively ego-less.

Self-remembering is considered to be distinct from self-observation which is always directed at some definite function, whether observation of thoughts, movements, emotions, or sensations. In self-observation there is always a definite object to be observed within oneself, whereas self-remembering does not divide the person in this way. It requires that the person remember the whole, experiencing the "I" of his own person. At a later stage, self-observation and self-remembering may occur simultaneously, but initially the process of self-observation leads to the understanding that the person does not remember himself except on rare occasions.

When a moment is experienced as part of eternity and the individual is aware of the unity in everything, this may be referred to as self-remembering. The mind's tendency to associate ideas and to think about what is being experienced is for that moment, checked. This may occur as the result of a shock or through disciplined self-observation and practice. According to Gurdjieff, self-remembering may be used to discourage the waste of fine energy by sifting the impressions which the human organism receives to remove attention from the negative and non-beneficial and focus attention on the beneficial.

Self-remembering is distinguished from the ordinary state of alertness of mind. It is a form of thinking or intellectual work which corresponds to awakening, and in this way it induces a moment of realization that the self-remembering state is as different from the normal state as the normal waking state is from the sleep state. When asleep an individual's world is limited by actual sensations, and on awakening he finds himself in an objective world which is much less limited. This is however only a half-awake state, which impedes awareness of a still richer world whose characteristics normally pass unnoticed; Gurdjieff refers to it as [waking consciousness]

. Beyond self-remembering is a fourth state, [objective consciousness]

, to which again one wakes from self-remembering as one wakes from sleep to waking consciousness.