The Stop, Gurdjieff and the Alexander Technique - Signs

This is my 13th post on David Appelbaum's book The Stop If you missed the first 12 go back to January 1 so you can follow the sequence.

One of Appelbaum's final concepts that I'm going to try to describe - without fully understanding it - is divinatory perception. Divinatory perception is of signs which connect the invisible, interior world with the visible and exterior. This perceiving is an interpreting of an inner meaning, the essence of things.

Appelbaum goes on at length about signs - including an illustrative consultation with the I Ching - which I won't go into. It seems to me that the important point of this divinatory perception is that I am involved in the process. Appelbaum writes, "To perceive is to be myself perceived." To describe this process requires an unusual syntax. "I touch a flower" would be "I touch myself a flower." "I see a rainbow" would be "I see myself a rainbow."

This is what William Patrick Patterson calls subject-object perception, which is the state of Gurdjieff's self-remebering. In the Fourth Way Meetings section of his  Spiritual Survival in a Radically Changing World-Time he includes this in an answer to a student's question: "We think we live in subject-object orientation, but do we? If we watch our attention we are all object; that is, our attention is completely identified with the object. Or we are all subject, completely identified, indwelling, full of self-concern. But because you are now being introduced to the idea and practice of having a double attention - having a recognition of both the subject and object simultaneously - it was suddenly realized how swallowed up you were."

Appelbaum calls the 'self' of self-remembering the submerged "I." He writes, "Whatever I perceive assists in revealing a secret identity for which my ordinary identity is a sign....Since I attend to perception as a witness, it can be said that I am attendant to my own birthing."

Image: John William Waterhouse - The Crystal Ball

Comments

[Ian]

Those are both amazing quotes. There really is no "inside" vs "outside", is there? :)

[Ann Seeker]

Hi Ian,
There's some quote I remember hearing about how you must become two before you can become one. I take that to mean that before we can truly experience that everything is One or there is no inside vs outside, we must be able to remember ourselves. Otherwise, we are just taken by the 10,000 things of the 'outside.'

Ann