Self-remembering

This form of self-remembering usually works more effectively if it is preceded by a more specialized practice in the morning. This practice, the morning exercise, has benefits in and of itself, and leads direcdy into sensing, looking, and listening. 

Close your eyes. For the first half minute or minute, just relax and gently pay attention to the fact that you re there. If you usually begin your morning with a short prayer, this is a good time for it. Now you are ready to begin. 

Now focus your attention on your right foot. You are not going to do anything with your right foot you will just pay full attention to whatever sensations there are, at this moment, in your right foot. 

These considerations apply to the entire morning exercise. 

When you are in touch with your right foot, just keep paying attention to it for about half a minute. Sometimes it will take you a while to feel in contact with it, sometimes, especially as you get more practiced, you will focus in on the stream of sensations there right away. When you have focused in for about half a minute, you are ready for the next step. I emphasize about half a minute here the point is to get in touch with 

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Developing the ability to detect sublimations grows from a general development of the ability to self-observe and self-remember, discussed later in Chapters 17 and 18. These processes lead to increasing awareness of and growth of your essence, so what you really care about becomes clearer. 

At this point in the morning exercise you begin a broadening of your attention span that leads you directly into the form of self-remembering that we call sensing, looking, and listening. 

There is a useful analogy here for understanding initial difficulties in self-remembering. Our attention is like a muscle, a muscle that hardly ever gets used because our mental machinery has been automatized so that it easily conveys our attention along its automatic pathways without any real effort on our part. Now you are staning to use that flabby muscle for deliberate attention, but, being unaccustomed to deliberate effort, it tires easily. 

There are a number of accessory techniques that can assist you in the process of sensing, looking, and listening. Remember that they are not ends in themselves, but only ways of assisting self-remembering. Eventually they may just become habits or otherwise not help. Then it is time to modify or discontinue them. 

I have described self-observation and self-remembering as distinct practices. They are different in some ways, but in others they are rather similar, such that self-observation can start to become selfremembering. Both involve the deliberate use of attention, and both can give you clearer perceptions of your world and yourself. The major difference is in the source of the attention. 

Self-remembering can observe the same contents of world and experience, but the level or source of observation is different. The deliberate volition employed in splitting attention, so that you are observing much better than ordinarily while keeping something else in attention simultaneously, such as the sensations in your arms and legs, creates functioning... 

Again I am not satisfied with these words. Yet I know they will communicate quite well to someone else who has some experience in self-remembering. I am trying to communicate some knowledge that, to refer back to Chapter 1, is pardy state-specific. So take as much as you can from this description, but make it real by practicing self-remembering. 

I do not like the melodramatic sound of it, but the truth is that longterm practice of self-observation and self-remembering can totally change your life. 

Sometimes in the writing of this book I have thought, This whole effort is wasted. No one will believe he has to work very hard to create faculties he believes he already has Yet the need to do this is crucial for our survival will automatons in consensus trance bring peace to our planet. Certainly argument alone, no matter how cleverly I do it, will not really communicate our condition, but if I have enticed you to begin practicing self-observation and self-remembering, your own experience will get my points across. 

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