Spider Jerusalem

I've been experimenting with memory recall at the end of the day. Here's what I generally attempt to do: Before calling it a night, work backwards recalling the general outline of everything that occurred during the day. Do not write anything, just form mental images/thoughts in your mind. Do not interpret the events, simply note the basic details around them, in detached fashion, as if simply "replaying" the day. Work backwards trying to reach a decent level of accuracy in the sequence without any kind of reordering until you reach a point where no further recall is possible or would take too long (more than 2-3 minutes) to recall. The idea is not to recall older memories, just very recent ones, both mundane and not-so-mundane). Nor is the idea to perform some kind of analysis of the events, since that will likely interfere with the simple recall exercise. What I've found so far is that: Barring some unusual or exciting events, most events are forgotten the very next day no matter how hard I try to be "awake" during the day (following Ouspensky's idea of "self-remembering"). It's nearly impossible to recall even what I ate for lunch the previous day unless I try really hard. Recalling the events (even for the same day) backwards is hard! In some way, exactly the same distractions appear as during meditation. The mind struggles with forming a continuous "event" thread in the right (reverse) order, and wanders off within a minute or less. At times, this recall process is incredibly difficult, and I just go halfway and then stop. It gets worse when the day is filled with "usual" or "mundane" activities, which I suppose is what happens most of the time. Obviously, events that have some kind of "colorful emotion" attached to them as a lot easier to recall. It seems to me that this exercise shows that the waking state might be a lot closer to the dream state that we might generally assume. Obviously, recalling waking state events is a bit easier that recalling dream events, but it's really surprising how much of the waking state is insanely hard to recall (we all have those dreams we try so hard to recall, but just can't!). I feel that the waking state is only marginally better for recall than the dream state. Wondering if anyone else has tried this reverse mental journalling exercise (or even just the simpler forward one), and if they've had similar experiences and/or insights.

I'm stumped. Self-remembering cannot be made automatic, so it's a bit of a paradox. One technique I use sometimes (but then forget again obviously ) is to let my attention linger on objects for just a few seconds longer that I normally would. Another method is to prime my mind when I wake up by having an intention to remember myself throughout the day. These techniques might actually work, it's just that I forget to apply them consistently, so I'm back to square one.

Perhaps, this is just a choice of words. I do tend to think of "happiness" as being temporary and just another phenomenon among many others. When I use the term "happiness" I generally assume that it has an opposite emotion called "sadness". in other words, the two emotions both are probably temporary and come and go (within space and time) based on external circumstances. I prefer to think in terms of "lucidity" and "clarity" or "lucid awareness" which I think we may have a better chance of sustaining with enough practice. I think the key point that Infinite is trying to make (guessing here) is whether that state is "self-generated" or based on external triggers. As to where the lucidity actually emerges from, I don't know.

I've never tracked any of this rigorously, but the disinterest felt like it lasted a few years, nothing insanely long. all I can say is that it doesn't appear to be permanent, at least in the default case.

Yes, at least in my case, the disinterest appeared for sure, but it just wore off over time. There is some residual disinterest in many activities that used to be interesting earlier, but not a total all encompassing disinterest in external affairs. So, for example, I just refuse to be entertained by any activities which I understand very clearly to be not in my best interest (watching TV, drinking etc.), while certain things like writing, programming, and understanding how human society should be organized continue to hold great interest, even though they aren't apparently leading to the Truth in any obvious sense.

Based on my experience, this is generally an intermediate state (although I have no idea how much it lasts for any given individual). It doesn't make sense to me that internal work and external work would be separate. Granted that you have to go inward at some point to start with, but I always find that the inward and outward work have to generally progress in parallel. After all, if the issue is one about totality, it's hard to see why the "external" stuff should be uninteresting and "internal" stuff should be exciting. It seems to me that as the internal world changes, the external changes concomitantly (perhaps with some lag sometimes) My guess is that focusing on "enlightenment" (the concept) at the expense of everything else may just be another trap in path. Currently, I see no problem in meditating in the morning and watching a Metallica concert at night, since the concert experience will now be differently experienced because of the meditation. I'm assuming that experiencing is still important even on the "path," just how we experience something should change.

Agreed. I'm seriously struggling with maintaining the vividness throughout the day with some sort of consistency. I don't know I've fallen asleep until I remember to wake up at which point I realize I was asleep. The good news here is that I no longer question that I was indeed asleep, since the "asleep" to "waking" transition is very clear now (it wasn't before) It's also not clear if I'm awake or not when performing a complex task (such as programming) that requires my full attention. Apparently, even the complex tasks can be done while "asleep." which is bad news! Perhaps, this is just about practice and more practice. It interesting that Ouspensky mentions in one of his lectures that man needs several "threads" running simultaneously. If one or two threads go to sleep, then there's a good chance that the third thread will wake up the other threads that have gone to sleep. So I guess at least one (waking) thread needs to be up at any time.

I've also been reading Gurdjiefs books after listening to Leo's talk on the topic. I've been experimenting a bit with self-remembering, the details of which which I posted on this forum (in the default Self-Actualization section) yesterday. I'm not sure how to include that post here, so just pasting the link. To respond to your comment, I don't think I approached it from the perspective of a sense of peace or joy - it was more of an experiment on tracking how much I actually remembered during the day (which turns out, not much!). Still a work in progress.