http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/cultivating-consciousness-in-an-unconscious-world
Here's an interesting quote:
Proposed remedies for this chronic and widespread attention-deficit disorder vary to some degree. For Gurdjieff, the answer lay (at least in part) in what he called self-remembering: an attention that is divided between the world outside and the world within. How does this work in practice? One Gurdjieffian teacher pointed out to me how, under ordinary circumstances, when you look out the window, your attention goes with it. In a certain sense you go out the window as well. Your sense of yourself is lost. To counter this, he suggested that when you look out a window, you keep some attention for yourself, even if it’s something as simple as a conscious awareness of a hand or a foot. “When you look out the window, you don’t go out the window,” as he put it.
Remember our discussing dreams and the way to anchor a dream so you will remember it is too see your hand? There is something to this.
Here's another good excerpt:
This realisation is one of the principal goals of meditation. It will enable you, to use Tetworth’s words, “to keep contact with what is real” within you, even in the sorrows and disturbances of life. It will also free you from enslavements to such things as opinions, the current fashions of belief, and, what is perhaps most important, the subtle but debilitating attachment to your self-concept as a “good person.” If you pursue the inquiry of self-observation far enough, you will find that these opinions and self-concepts are merely what you have absorbed from the media, from advertising, from your family, from your friends. You will also discover that you have encompassed yourself in a circle. You read opinions that already mirror your own. You listen to “experts” who merely confirm what you believe already. You support politicians who appeal to your own fears and delusions.
In my book about a fictional cult, one of the realizations the protagonist has is that the cult "cultivates" the problem in the adherent and then sells the solution. That is what this is saying. The gov't provides the fear (among other ways, through fear porn) and then gives us our "choice" of politicians who will save us. We have been driven down by the fear porn and resonate with what the poli-salesman has to sell. Ingenuous. But once you realize what is really behind the curtain, the effect is broken.
Comments