In Search of the Miraculous

Some of those present said that during attempts at self-observation, what they had

felt particularly strongly was an incessant flow of thoughts which they had found

impossible to stop. Others spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing the work of one

center from the work of another. I had evidently not altogether understood the question,

or I answered my own thoughts, because I said that what struck me most was the

connectedness of one thing with another in the system, the wholeness of the system, as

if it were an "organism," and the entirely new significance of the word to know which included not only the idea of knowing this thing or that, but the connection between

this thing and everything else.

G. was obviously dissatisfied with our replies. I had already begun to understand

him in such circumstances and I saw that he expected from us indications of something

definite that we had either missed or failed to understand.

"Not one of you has noticed the most important thing that I have pointed out to you,"

he said. "That is to say, not one of you has noticed that you do not remember

yourselves." (He gave particular emphasis to these words.) "You do not feel yourselves; you are not conscious of yourselves. With you, 'it observes' just as 'it speaks' 'it thinks,' 'it laughs.' You do not feel: I observe, I notice, I see. Everything still

'is noticed,' 'is seen.' ... In order really to observe oneself one must first of all remember oneself" (He again emphasized these words.) "Try to remember yourselves when you observe yourselves and later on tell me the results. Only those results will have

any value that are accompanied by self-remembering. Otherwise you yourselves do

not exist in your observations. In which case what are all your observations worth?"

These words of G.'s made me think a great deal. It seemed to me at once that they

were the key to what he had said before about consciousness. But I decided to draw

no conclusions whatever, but to try to remember myself while observing myself.

The very first attempts showed me how difficult it was. Attempts at self-

remembering failed to give any results except to show me that in actual fact we never remember ourselves.

"What else do you want?" said G. "This is a very important realization. People who know this" (he emphasized these words) "already know a great deal. The whole trouble is that nobody knows it. If you ask a man whether he can remember himself,

he will of course answer that he can. If you tell him that he cannot remember himself,

he will either be angry with you, or he will think you an utter fool. The whole of life

is based on this, the whole of human existence, the whole of human blindness. If a

man really knows that he cannot remember himself, he is already near to the

understanding of his being."

All that G. said, all that I myself thought, and especially all that my attempts at selfremembering had shown me, very soon convinced me that I was faced with an entirely new problem which science and philosophy had not, so far, come across.

But before making deductions, I will try to describe my attempts to remember

myself.

' The first impression was that attempts to remember myself or to be conscious of

myself, to say to myself, I am walking, I am doing, and continually to feel this I,

stopped thought. When I was feeling I, I could neither think nor speak; even sensations became dimmed. Also, one could only remember oneself in this way for a very short

time.

I had previously made certain experiments in stopping thought which are

mentioned in books on Yoga practices. For example there is such a description in

Edward Carpenter's book From Adam's Peak to Elephanta, although it is a very

general one. And my first attempts to self-remember reminded me exactly of these,

my first experiments. Actually it was almost the same thing with the one difference

that in stopping thoughts attention is wholly directed towards the effort of not

admitting thoughts, while in self-remembering attention becomes divided, one part of

it is directed towards the same effort, and the other part to the feeling of self.

This last realization enabled me to come to a certain, possibly a very incomplete,

definition of "self-remembering," which nevertheless proved to be very useful in practice.

I am speaking of the division of attention which is the characteristic feature of selfremembering.

I represented it to myself in the following way:

When I observe something, my attention is directed towards what I observe—a line

with one arrowhead:

I ————————————————> the observed phenomenon.

When at the same time, I try to remember myself, my attention is directed both

towards the object observed and towards myself. A second arrowhead appears on the

line:

I <———————————————> the observed phenomenon.