A Record of Meetings held by P.D. Ouspensky - HolyBooks.com

We can pass differently the time in the train—do something useful orspend the time quite uselessly.MISS L. Can we see false personality without help?MR. O. There is nothing against it theoretically, only I never saw sucha case and nobody else I know saw such a case. Even with help, peoplewill not see it. You can show a man a mirror, an actual, real mirror,and he will say 'this is not me', 'this is an artificial mirror, not a realmirror, not a reflection of me'. What can we do?MRS. N. Does the realization of mechanicalness give one choice inone's actions or must one wait for will?MR. O. I would say it gives choice. Realization of one's state and so ongives choice. If one does not realize it, one has no choice. At the sametime it is wrong to think when realization comes it brings already thepossibility and power. One can know and not be able to do anything. Itis the most difficult and most unpleasant situation—one of the possibleresults of wrong development. If one begins to see things and is unableto do anything. That is why in some cases it is better to do nothing ifone is not ready to go to the end. Otherwise one remains between twochairs.Well, think about the six kinds of action.Q . What is the sixth kind?MR. O. There is no secret, but I am not sure of the formulation. If youfind something that does not fit into any of the five kinds, then youwill find it.Q . If I want to build a house, I have some sort of an idea how to setabout it, but I don't feel the same way about self-remembering. Howcan I go about it?MR. O. You can come to the understanding of self-remembering inmany different ways. For instance, when I first heard about it, Iremember it was very strange. The idea struck me as an enormousidea. I had been studying psychology for many years and realized thatin all the psychology I had studied, this idea was not known. It struckme how wrongly we think, that we had missed the biggest fact; thefact that we did not remember and could remember is the biggest factin all psychology—the possibility of consciousness a tremendous idea.Or other people I know realized they were never masters of them­selves; if one decides in sleep, without consciousness, to do a thing,then it is not one's own action, it just happens. Other people were