Magic 001 "Remember yourself"

[jorn@MCS.COM (Jorn Barger)]

(Sigh.  I guess I'm just a Fool for Kate...)

When I talk about the "Magic wars", I'm referring to a series of posts
I initiated back around March 28 this year, on paranormal topics, beginning
with a goofy partial-theory I'd dreamed up to explain how an emotional
vibe might be recorded on a cassette tape *by the event of listening
to it*.

That one proved quite a lot too much for most folks to swallow.  :^)
So here's a 'notching back' to some simpler things to think about, if
you're willing to give some credence to paranormal notions, maybe for
the first time...

Socrates said "Know thyself."  Unfortunately, this word 'know' is so 
broad that philosophers quickly got derailed into incredibly empty,
bogus, abstract forms of 'self-knowledge' that didn't end up making
them very useful to oppressed goodguys or, say, pop stars....

Gurdjieff gave this a nifty twist, saying "Remember yourself" (which
a certain pop star used as the chorus of "Full House") and the challenge
of "self-remembering" was clearly described by G. and his students to
involve a careful, lifelong discipline of trying *not* to drift off
into (relative) unconsciousness as one goes about her daily life...

This challenge is Gurjieffian nursery school-- most people encountering
the Gurjieff "Work" for the first time will never even have noticed
that they spend most of every day almost totally 'unconscious', with
moods and thoughts flitting in and out of their heads almost randomly...
But it's pretty easy to see the *beginning* of this task, once the idea
is explained, and from there you could easily go off on your own and
just *do it*, living your life as before but with the extra little
added *observer* keeping an eye on things...

Think how people blindly gobble junkfood full of additives, and never
think that their tired, queasy feeling all the time might be related
to this thoughtless diet...  One value in self-remembering is to
notice what makes you feel better and what makes you feel worse-- and
it's amazing to start noticing how many details of these relationships
have entirely escaped your notice...

PLOT-POINT ALERT:
What else you'll find, though, is that you have *inexplicable* mood
shifts... utterly baffling.  And you can shrug these off as "random"...
which is what people are encouraged to do.

But why would nature have evolved a nervous system prone to random mood 
shifts? (Don't answer that-- there surely are reasons you could think up!)

The paranormal model argues that *some* of these mood shifts involve
others' emotional consciousnesses 'bleeding' into yours-- accidentally,
through normal relationship-empathy, or in who-knows-how-many-other
different ways...

to be continued... if!

jorn