Girard Haven
NOTES FROM A CONSCIOUS TEACHING
1997 - 160 pages, hardbound. - $12

This pocket-sized, handsome book with excerpts from Mr. Haven's meetings during his teaching travels in Europe in 1996-97 provides a plethora of powerful angles on inner work and insights into the Fourth Way System.

Contents:
The Machine
The Many 'I's
Features
Feminine Dominance
Self-Observation
Identification and Separation
Negative Emotions, Suffering, and Transformation
The School
The Teacher
Exercices
Three Lines of Work
The Moment
Self-Remembering

From the chapter on Self-remembering:
Self-remembering is the central idea of this teaching. Simply, we are trying to have the sense of being here in the moment, of being aware of ourselves, but there are many levels on which that is possible. What the Teacher is doing when he self-remembers is very different from what we do. In the school, we are given many ideas that help us to see different sides of self-remembering, different parts of it. From this point of view, what we do in the School is practice parts of self-remembering. We can try to experience not being identified, because that is a kind of self-remembering. We can practice being present, because that is part of self-remembering. We can practice the non-expression of negative emotions, because one cannot be negative and remember oneself at the same time. We have many different sides to us, and so we have to practice self-remembering from many different sides. For a conscious being, all these dimensions are part of the experience of remembering oneself, but, as men number four, we lack unity. We experience these areas of work as separate, perhaps even separate from the effort to self-remember, because we experience ourselves as separate and isolated groups of ‘I's. But on a higher level, they are all part of the same effort to remember ourselves.

Everyone in the School is trying to remember themself—from the newest student to the Teacher. If you ask the Teacher what his work is, he would describe it as self-remembering. Even at prospective student meetings, people who have not yet joined are beginning the attempt to remember themselves. What do these efforts have in common—all these different things we do and call self-remembering? They all require effort. Self-remembering is not mechanical; it doesn't happen by itself. Whenever we are remembering ourselves, we are making an effort. The results of that effort, however, are not certain. Sometimes when we try to remember ourselves, we experience the third state; sometimes we experience a higher level of the second state; and sometimes the third state happens without us quite knowing why. So self-remembering is not the result; self-remembering is the effort.

Even students who have just joined the School are already discovering that self-remembering was not what they thought when they read about it in a book. Although my understanding of self-remembering is very different now than it was twenty years ago, I am sure that I am still very far from what the Teacher understands by self-remembering. And he would be the first to admit that his understanding is very far from the understanding of the angels. But we all share the process of making efforts and discovering that the efforts we make are not quite enough. In that sense, the newer students and the Teacher are in the same position.

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