Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Volume 1

THE TEACHING ABOUT PRAYER IN THE WORK

SELF-REMEMBERING

Part I.—In the teaching of the Work the idea of Prayer and the idea of Self-Remembering are so closely connected that the one cannot be separated from the other. Without Self-Remembering, Prayer is impossible. Let us look at what this means. A man as he is cannot pray. That is, a man in his ordinary daily state cannot pray. In order to pray a man must be in a state of Self-Remembering. To pray as one is, in one’s ordinary state, is to pray in a state of sleep, and to pray in a state of sleep is useless. Nothing can happen. Such Prayer cannot be answered, because it does not get anywhere. Let us recall what is said about states of consciousness in the Work. Four states of consciousness are possible, but ordinarily Man knows and lives in only two, and both are called in the Work states of sleep. The first state of consciousness or the lowest is that of bodily sleep, which is a passive state in which a person lies in bed almost without movement. In this state a man spends a third or even more of his life. The second state of consciousness is the state in which people spend the remaining part of their lives, in which they move their limbs and walk about and talk and also write books and take part in politics and kill one another, and this state they regard as active and call it “clear consciousness or the waking state of consciousness”. It is not too much to say that the terms clear consciousness or waking state of consciousness seem to have been given in jest especially when, through your own self-observation, you begin to realize what clear consciousness ought in reality to be, and what the state in which a man lives and acts really is. For in this so-called waking state a man is neither conscious of himself nor conscious of another. He lives and dies in darkness. And it would be better for him in one way if he remained passive in the first state of consciousness for then he could not move about and kill his neighbour. The third state of consciousness is Self-Remembering or Self-Consciousness or the state of Self-Awareness. It is usual to consider that we have this state already and are always aware of ourselves and that we act, think and feel with full consciousness of what we are doing. But Western science has overlooked the fact that we do not possess this state of consciousness. And we cannot create it in ourselves by immediate desire alone, or decide that we will henceforth always live in a state of Self-Consciousness. But this third state constitutes the natural right of Man as he is and if Man does not possess it, it is because of the wrong conditions of his life. To-day this state of consciousness occurs only in the form of rare flashes and it is only by long practice, by trial and error, that a man can begin to re-establish a state of Self-Remembering in himself.

Now help only reaches to the third state of consciousness. It cannot reach down to the darkness that people live their daily lives in and in which they are so often content to exist. Therefore to pray from the state of sleep—to pray from the so-called waking state—is like dreaming that one is praying, for in this second state of consciousness we are also dreaming and everything is unreal, only we do not notice that we are doing everything in a dream unless we experience a moment of consciousness belonging to the 3rd and 4th states of consciousness and see the contrast. So when a man prays he must remember himself. He must be conscious of himself and of what he is praying for. He must feel the meaning of everything he says and feel himself saying it. He must feel it is really ‘I’ in him that prays and not a set of frightened little ‘I’s or a set of mechanical ‘I’s formed by habit. And finally a man can neither pray nor remember himself unless he feels there is both a higher state of himself and something higher than he is.

Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky