Conscious Beings

Conscious Beings

What is a conscious being? Can we become conscious beings? The answer to the second question is a resounding ‘Yes’.

All it takes is transforming every suffering, every irritation, every physical or emotional agony, every impression, every relationship in every moment of one’s existence, without recrimination, without self-pity or self-deprecation, without blaming others or oneself, into self-remembering. This is the inner-meaning of the Buddha eating whatever fell into his bowl.

The following quotation from Peter Ouspensky describes what stands in our way: “We can only hope to become conscious beings if we use in the right way the energy that is now used in the wrong way. The machine can produce enough energy, but you can waste it on being angry or irritated or something like that, and then very little remains.”

In relation to the first question, ‘What is a conscious being?’, the image of the Buddha is one representation of this question. We see the Buddha sitting surrounded by people, all wanting to speak to him or in some way engage with him. They represent the many i’s that attempt to take the one away from an awakened state. The Buddha however, is completely unaffected by the various identifications and distractions. While we can appreciate the image and its meaning, even more interesting is that the artist or sculptor must have had at least some comprehension of the state of objective consciousness to have been able to represent, so insightfully and accurately, the invisible. We learn from an image from more than a thousand years ago that a conscious being is no longer subject to the whims and whimsies of his or her lower centers. He or she is the embodiment of a conscious principle.

“We consider ourselves to be a conscious being governing our own life. Facts that contradict that, we consider to be accidental or temporary, which will change by themselves. By considering that we possess self-consciousness, as it were by nature, we will not of course try to approach or obtain it.” George Gurdjieff

The above statement from George Gurdjieff sums up why the system is not so popular. If a person believes they have objective consciousness, why would they pursue it? Also, the system does not flatter us. Trying to convince someone that they cannot do, that everything in their life is accidental, or that they are nothing more than a stimulus-response machine, can be the most insulting things you can say. But it’s our condition when we meet the system.

We will end this post with two quotations. The first from Rumi, the second from a contemporary Fourth Way teacher.

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“There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this one thing, then you will have done nothing in your life.”

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“The moment you enter a school, mechanicality begins to fade and self-remembering begins to emerge.”

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Image: Stone relief in the Gandhara style, Indian 3rd century, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

Post by Charles R.