Remember Yourself

from Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous," p. 118

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 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 self-remembering.

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

I <---------> the observed phenomenon.

Having defined this I saw that the problem consisted in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed at something else. Moreover this "something else" could as well be within me as outside me.