Table of Contents | More Practical Wisdom

Having verified to some degree our situation and come to at least a partial understanding of the material presented in Chapter One, our next consideration is how we are to manifest a different reality for ourselves? Western culture's conscious-mind answer has typically been to acquire more knowledge, more theories, more facts, conduct more experiments; to "think about it". While it is true that knowledge is an essential ingredient, knowledge secured without a commensurate change in level of consciousness is of little value and does not produce any result. Therefore, our focus needs to turn to the pursuit of methods that will create for us a new level of consciousness. We will define consciousness here simply as awareness or sensitivity, not thought, not cognition, not even knowledge, but simple awareness, aliveness.

Nothing new can be realized until an individual can begin to access a different state of being, as an experience, not as an idea or a concept. No amount of what we know as formal education will provide this, as more and more people are discovering each day.

This is the reason for the current emphasis on the development of consciousness. The expansion of our capacity to be aware is the only solution to the "terror of the situation".

Here we encounter a classical difficulty. Those who study the Tao claim the Tao is indefinable. This is also true of higher states of consciousness. Such states are, by their very nature, unlimited. Any attempt to define them would thus end in failure, as definitions are limiting. Having acknowledged that we attempt the impossible and are doomed to failure, we will now offer some definitions for the purpose of discussion. We warn in advance, however, that what is offered is not to be taken literally or as all inclusive. We will define by example and challenge any who read this to find their own examples.

FIRST STATE

To observe awareness is to note that we have different levels of awareness. When we're asleep in bed at night our level of external awareness is almost nil. Our sensory apparatus is shut down and we inhabit a world of dreams. We have no direct connection to physical sensation, although our experience of the dream state may be affected by physical stimulation. Our reality is completely subjective. Ouspensky simply numbered the various states of consciousness, calling what we generally know as sleep the First State of consciousness. It is important to know that states of awareness have degrees.

The various states need to be looked upon more like rheostats, or dimmer switches, rather than on and off switches. For instance in the so-called First State we may be so deeply asleep that there are no dreams, or we may be closer to the Second State.

SECOND STATE

As we surface out of First State, we merge into the next level of awareness, or Second State. Our dreams trail along with us into this state, continuing to have an effect upon how we perceive reality. This state too has degrees, as we may all recognize. When we stumble into the bathroom in the morning we're still in the twilight zone between First and Second state, confused, disoriented, fuzzy, our senses not quite activated. We can see that as the day progresses, our mentation becomes more clear as we move higher into Second State consciousness.

It is in the Second State that we spend most of our waking life. In this state we carry out our routine life tasks. We go to work, we raise children, interact with others, make love, make war, and so on. This is the state of awareness in which we're disunified, where we run on autopilot, where everything "happens". We don't DO

anything, all is DONE for us. This is considered to be another level of sleep, Waking Sleep.

Our awareness is a dull orientation to the mundane. Nothing extraordinary penetrates us and we move through life almost automatically, remembering little of what occurs, simply knowing that time has passed. Were it not for calendars and watches, the passage of time might even slip our notice. Significant to this state of awareness is the fact that we don't Remember Ourselves. The concept of Self-Remembering is of particular importance in this system. It is a key to the expansion of our awareness and will be treated separately later on in this chapter.

Another way to approach our perception of states of awareness is through the idea of internal rate of vibration. Deep in the First State our internal vibratory rate is very low. Our heart rate slows down, our respiration becomes shallow. Everything is slow, at a low level of vibration, nothing is vivid, all is dull. As our rate of vibration picks up, we begin to rise out of First State into Second State. Should our vibrations continue to rise, our state of awareness will ascend with it up through the degrees of Second State consciousness.

From this description it is easy to conclude that most of our lives are spent in these two states of consciousness. Many of us are quite convinced that this is all there is. Yet there is more to life, and we all have tasted it.

THIRD STATE

We all have in our memory banks recorded moments of vivid life experience, times when remarkable things have happened to us. These include, but are not limited to, moments of life-threatening danger, moments of ecstasy of one type or another, moments of strangeness, of wonder, of the perception of great beauty. These are the things that we truly remember. We remember the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sense of temperature, what we were wearing, what was said, what we were doing. When we tell our stories to each other, these are the things that we recount. Most of the rest of our life is recalled as a fuzzy blur.

These are our experiences of the Third State of consciousness. What is notable about these states for most of us is that they happened to us. We did not intentionally create them. So, in ordinary life it would seem that we must wait for chance or accident to create a vivid life experience for us, to create the Third State.

In my own study of the human experience, I've come to notice that in modern life many of us seek this higher state of consciousness without being aware that we're doing so. Why is it that we go downhill skiing, jump out of airplanes for sport, drive cars or motorcycles at high rates of speed, go rock climbing or hang gliding. These can be seen as attempts to create the Third State.

It is nearly impossible to have one's attention wander when one is undertaking a life risking sport. We can't be "thinking" about our bills when we're hanging from our fingertips and toenails on a rock face two hundred feet up. We are forced by the circumstance we have placed ourselves in to focus all or most of our energies into the present moment. We are compelled to overcome our fears about the immediate future, our fear of falling, to take courage in hand, and make the move that terrifies us. The unfortunate part about these endeavors is that once we're out of the situation, we return to a diffused state of existence, a lower state of consciousness.

It is the very aim of The Work to enable the student to induce this state of awareness at will under the circumstances of ordinary life. This state of consciousness is the birthright of every human being. But we don't own it. Why that is and how it came about will be discussed at length in this book. For it is only through personal revelation of our internal illusions, or obstacles to higher states, that we can begin to have the possibility of attaining those states.

FOURTH STATE

There does exist yet a higher rate of vibrational awareness, another level of consciousness, although it is rarely experienced by most people. We have, however, heard stories about heroic deeds, remarkable feats performed by ordinary people. One that was related to me concerned a woman involved in an automobile accident. There was an infant in the back seat. When the accident occurred the baby was catapulted out of the rear seat toward the windshield. The woman who was driving experienced an extreme sense of the slowing down of time. She felt and heard the infant flying through the air and, with perfect timing, raised her arms to catch the child, saving its life. Her memory of this is profound in its detail, is broken down into fractions of seconds. She was able to hear the individual sounds of the infant as it flew through the air. She experienced her arms moving in slow motion. There was no sense of panic or haste, but rather intense intentionality, profound presence.

We hear about other such occurrences, like the woman lifting the automobile off the child trapped beneath, feats of superhuman strength performed by ordinary mortals under extraordinary conditions, the heroism of the soldier in the field of battle overcoming seemingly impossible odds. These all hint at yet another state of consciousness, another level of being. This Ouspensky defined as the Fourth State. Little is known about this level of awareness. It may be safe to say that not all of us have had any experience of it, or if we have, it may have been so fleeting that our conscious mind could not grasp it. Some artists, some inspired scientists, poets, or philosophers may have tapped into it and created from it; we cannot say. It is sufficient for us presently to know that it exists.

The principle realization to be drawn here is that there are four possible levels of consciousness available to us, and that we spend most of our lives in only two of them, without being intentionally able to enter the higher states at will. It's like owning a beautiful multistoried house and only being able to live in the basement and first floor, being unaware of the existence of the other levels, or, even after becoming aware of their presence, being unable to unlock the doors that allow access to them.

Intellectual awareness of these other levels is not sufficient. Even when we have verified through our remembrance of these higher states that they do indeed exist, we cannot begin to have entrance to them without first generating an intense desire to do so. Idle curiosity or fascination is not enough. It is not a part time undertaking. Only when our personal realization of the "terror of the situation" becomes sufficient to overwhelm us are we able to generate a level of desire that is powerful enough to begin the journey, the search, the quest.

This book is not written for the casual inquirer, but is directed toward those who seriously seek a new way of being. Shakespeare expressed it best in Hamlet's soliloquy with the question "To be, or not to be", that is our choice. Let us ask ourselves how often is it that we choose "Not to be".

If we choose "To be" then we are ready to begin The Work. Having acknowledged that higher states of awareness do exist, and that

under normal circumstances we have no control over our entry into these states, we may be ready to take on the difficult work that can lead to the ability to manifest these states under the conditions of ordinary life. The key technique in the approach to the creation of higher states is called Self-Remembering, and is connected to the control of attention.

The physical body we live in is a transformational organism that takes in the raw materials of air, water, food, and impressions, and refines them into the energy and matter required to sustain a highly complex physical existence. One of the most refined energies our body produces is the energy of attention. We can verify that attention is energy/matter simply by noticing what happens when we direct it toward someone. They turn to look at us, and may remark that they feel our attention. Pull up alongside someone at the stop light and look in their direction. They immediately return our gaze. Thus it is easily verified that attention is energy, and has an effect upon the surrounding environment.

We can also notice that our attention is an energy that flows out of us. In the Second State of consciousness we have little control of our attention. Remember, this is the state of awareness in which our life simply happens to us, where we are, in effect, sleep walkers. We will call this outflow of attention fascination and can identify three levels at which it operates.

In the first level of fascination our attention simply diffuses out of us. It is not especially directed or focused toward anything. It is just oriented toward the external environment, like watching the grass grow. Our mind may be idly turning. We may be engaged in some occupation that does not require our full attention, like driving an automobile, washing the dishes, having a light conversation with our neighbor. The mundane occurrences of everyday living. So the energy of our attention just leaks out of us more or less unnoticed.

The second level of fascination is where our attention is drawn out of us by some external event. An external stimulus "attracts our attention", a commonly heard phrase. Here the draw on our attention is more intense. A typical example in modern life is the television. This device draws our attention, and can draw it so severely that we lose awareness of all other surrounding sensory events. We are held in this level of fascination by sports events, various forms of entertainment, tragedies, and so on. Notice how out attention is consumed when we witness an automobile accident. Observe the bystanders who may be witnessing someone going through the death process. The draw on their attention is so intense that they seem empty, that the body standing there is merely an empty shell. When we experience this level of fascination, the precious energy that we have manufactured is literally sucked out of us.

It's like paying money to someone and receiving nothing in return. We just give ourselves away to whatever is occurring in front of us.

Finally, there is the level of fascination where we direct our attention with effort, commonly known as concentration. This is where the fine, more productive types of human work take place. Here we find ourselves focusing our fascination on some task. Our profession may require this. We may be engaged in some athletic activity, playing a game, or pursuing a creative activity, like writing this book. A fine craftsman may spend an hour "fascinated" with the performance of his or her craft. The skier is "fascinated" with skiing, the poker player "fascinated" with the game, the painter "fascinated" with painting, the writer "fascinated" with writing. In this fascination we're directing the flow of our energy and may be completely lost in whatever it is we're doing.

Thus it is that there are three categories in which we ordinarily expend this fine energy/matter. Our attention may just flow associatively from object to object, thought to thought, sight to sound to thought, as one or another stimulus impinges upon our senses. Or the outward flow of our attention may be caught and held by something, the flicker of a television screen, the sight of an automobile accident, the passing of a sexually attractive person. Finally, our attention may be directed by a simple effort and held for a certain time in one desired direction. These three aspects may be considered respectively to either be automatic, emotional, or intentional.

In each of these the common characteristic is that the flow of attention is one way only. In this state of awareness the person is incapable of directing attention toward him or herself AND toward the object simultaneously, and is only aware of one thing at a time. We can speak, but cannot be aware of the person to whom we are speaking, we can feel an emotion, but cannot perceive its effect upon those around us. We can feel the pain of another person or our own pain, but not both simultaneously. We can become aware of some event in the external world and become lost in it. We can be aware of some inner feeling and fall prey to its power. We cannot, however, except on rare occasions, be aware of the inner feeling and the outer event at the same time. Thus we are held in fascination by the outer world, or lost in fascination in our inner world. In none of this is there an interface between the two.

We do have some knowledge of and experience with division of attention or we wouldn't have a clue as to how to proceed. One example of this can be in our sexual interaction with each other.

There can be an awareness of touching and being touched simultaneously. In the peak of stimulation we can be both aware of the ecstasy of our inner sensations and that of our partner, thus creating a vividness of experience that can create memory for us. This is one of the reasons that the sexual experience has such power over us and why we pursue it.

To prepare for the reception of and access to a higher state of consciousness is to begin the practice of dividing one's attention. This is a practice that is difficult to sustain for any but the briefest moments at first, and will require persistent efforts. It is the practice of simultaneously maintaining awareness of oneself and an external object. It can be considered to be a form of meditation. In meditation practices we connect to our inner existence, forming a space inside ourselves that is relatively silent and neutral. From this space we are able to observe the comings and going of thoughts and feelings without becoming attached to them. Divided Attention is a similar process, but is conducted with eyes open and in the ordinary circumstances of life. In this effort we become aware of ourselves as we are speaking, seeing the effect of our words. We see ourselves acting, or feeling, or thinking in relation to the external world. Our attention ceases to be a single pointed arrow directed out toward the world, and becomes a double pointed arrow, with an equal amount of attention being directed inward.

This is the work of the Observer that we created through the exercises in the first chapter. It is through Divided Attention that the Observer is created. Socrates, in commenting that "The unobserved life is not worth living", was making an esoteric reference to the State of Divided Attention.

Initially, efforts to divide attention will be of short duration. We remember the exercise, divide our attention, then, without even realizing it, we will drift back into fascination. We may then discover ourselves in fascination and make a new effort to divide attention. If we are persistent, and continue making new efforts, our ability to sustain this state will increase. As it increases we will begin to form new relationships to both our inner and outer worlds. Perceptions of ourselves and events will gradually alter themselves. As practice of this exercise grows in depth and duration, the illusions of ordinary life will begin to be revealed.

In beginning the practice of Self-Remembering, it may seem that it is a simple, relatively easy exercise to perform. And yet, as we proceed, we will begin to discover that to master this technique will require the restructuring of our entire existence. In order to have a sufficient supply of the rarified matter of attention on hand to conduct the division of attention, we will need to give up our habits of wasting this precious matter on other pursuits, other ways of being. These consist of psychological processes that are habitual in nature, and which proceed within us on an ongoing basis. They are so insidious and so pervasive that much of the text to follow will be devoted to describing these obstacles and outlining methods of working against them. Self-Remembering is one of the more difficult inner activities for humans to perform because of these habitual tendencies. This very fact, however, also makes it the most valuable and interesting of human pursuits.

There are some peculiar things connected to Self-Remembering. The first is that it is not something that occurs naturally to us to do. We wouldn't think of it without being told about it. Then, once being given the idea, most of us do have the will and the energy to experience a moment of what it means, to become aware of ourselves while sitting reading of this idea for the first time.

Yet, the practice cannot ever become a habit, cannot ever proceed automatically, will ALWAYS require an effort. The moment the ideas of Self-Remembering, or Divided Attention are forgotten, we slip back into fascination, to where out attention flows only automatically outward. Be aware that the concentration upon some task does not, in and of itself, constitute Self-Remembering. Physical awareness of one's body, mental exercises, visualizations, all can be performed without the division of attention. Unless there is the division of attention between the Observer and what is observed, there is only fascination.

It is also important to avoid the natural tendency toward comparison. If we allow our minds to deposit this idea into some pigeonhole, if we think we've heard about this idea in some other form somewhere else, the idea will lose its power. It can only open new vistas when it is perceived as a completely new idea, when it is held apart as special from other knowledge you may possess. It truly is the key to greater things and can unlock the secrets of the universe. It can also be destroyed by cynical thinking, by the over educated know-it-all mentality that can turn even the greatest miracle into dust.

To penetrate deeper into the experience of Self-Remembering is to discover that the division of attention in two directions is not sufficient. We have proceeded from one dimensional into two dimensional awareness, but we are still in duality, we have not yet left the earth plane. We have not tapped into the power of three, have not penetrated a higher world. Our attempts to divide our

attention remain difficult because they have not taken the miraculous into consideration. The next step is to create three dimensional awareness, to divide our attention three ways and by so doing, access the Law of Three, which will be discussed later on in this book. No phenomenon is produced by two forces. Every WESTLY-40-THE WORK

phenomenon and real result is produced by three forces. Therefore, to produce a real result in consciousness requires that we manifest three forces.

Here the aim of the exercise is simply to include in our awareness the existence of some higher power, some higher world, in whatever way it is most comfortable for us to conceive of. If we move off the earth plane, the next higher world we encounter is the sun. Thus, if we divide our attention between an awareness of ourselves gazing at some object like a tree, then our awareness of the sun as it shines down on this tree will constitute the third awareness.

Our conception of a higher world can include the idea of a Higher Self, of all of creation, of an invisible world peopled with beings who guide us, of God, or some higher existence in whose presence and in whose awareness we exist. Each person must find his or her own form of it.

In fascination we are wholly absorbed in the object of our attention. In Divided Attention we become aware of ourselves gazing at the object. In the state of Self-Remembering we become both seperated from the allure of the material world, and connected to a higher world where we can experience the oneness of everything.

As profound a tool as Self-Remembering is, it is still only a tool. It is a way to make oneself available to a higher state of consciousness, but it is not the state itself. It is a method of clearing away the noise and the obstacles, a way of creating a fertile void in our inner world for the entry of something new, something powerful, something miraculous. It is through our efforts to master this technique that we raise an antenna into a higher reality, that we open a door. It is the magical key through which we can transform the base metal of experience into the gold of a higher state of consciousnes. It opens a space for the entrance of divine energy, for connection to the oneness of all creation as an experience, not as a thought or an idea.

The ability to continue to penetrate the experience of Self-Remembering to deeper and deeper levels, to sustain it over longer periods of time, to Remember Oneself under more and more difficult conditions of life experience, all leads to a greater conductivity for higher states of consciousness. It leads one out of the jungle filled valleys of mundane existence up onto the mountain peaks of ascension, to experiential realization of the true meaning of one's own existence.

The journey out of the valley of sleep up onto the mountain requires courage, sacrifice and determination. To attain it must become the focal point of one's entire existence. Nothing less is required. So, now that we're ready, let's take a look at the jungle, and what lives in it.

EXERCISE 1: Divided Attention

The human body has been provided with a wide array of sensing devices that orient it in the physical world. In a state of fascination, with our attention streaming out in one direction, we lose contact with those sensations that provide bodily awareness. Thus, to divide our attention simply requires that we maintain bodily awareness. As you are sitting or standing where you are, begin fixing your attention on some external object. Then, while still looking at this object and listening to external sounds, become aware of your feet.

Now, say you are sitting somewhere, remaining aware of your feet, become aware of the pressure of the chair against your buttocks, still maintaining attention on the external object, and listening.

Once this is established, become aware of where your hands are and what they are doing, still remembering your feet and the pressure of the chair, still attending to the external object, and listening.

Finally, expand your peripheral vision out to its fullest extent. We have available to us 180 degrees or more of vision. Yet, when we focus on an external object, we unconsciously narrow our vision down to the size of that object. Say we're in conversation with someone. Our vision may be narrowed down to the size of their face, or, if we're really intent on the conversation, down even further to their mouth. We somehow think that if we concentrate this way that we'll be able to hear better. Yet, if you experiment with Divided Attention, you'll find that the intensity of your presence will intensify your perception of the conversation.

In the expansion of your vision, don't forget your feet, the chair, and your hands. This should keep you very busy and very much in the present moment.

Consistent efforts to perform this exercise and variations of it that you may invent will enable you to begin to hear, see, and experience your external reality from a new perspective. This practice of Divided Attention is the foundation stone from which all other exercises will follow.

EXERCISE 2: Self-Remembering

As indicated in the text above, Self-Remembering is the division of attention three ways. Maintaining all the awareness described above in exercise #1, become aware of whatever it is for you that constitutes a higher world.

EXERCISE 3: Looking

In situations where your attention does not need to be fixed on a single object, change the object of your attention every three seconds, the length of a breath, while maintaining a state of Divided Attention. Ideally, your vision will move to the next object before your mind has a chance to formulate a label of a judgement of the object. This is another method for keeping our attention anchored in the Eternal Present, where all possibilities exist.

Practical Wisdom ©1993-2001 James Westly

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