The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 14 of 125
Self-remembering and the thrill of direct action
To say I had briefly “woken up” would express perfectly what had happened. And as I read more of Ouspensky’s book, I realized I had known this strange state before. Falling in love had taken me there; so had Third World travel; so had political activism when it involved crime. I remembered how, in moments of danger, my voice had sounded as though it was someone else speaking. This was a eureka moment for me. I thought I had found in Gurdjieff’s ideas of “sleep” and “dreams” and “self-remembering” and “waking up” the basic vocabulary of the revolutionary psychology we had been searching for. Part of the thrill of direct action had always been the transformation of consciousness that being totally in the present moment brought about. Demonstrations, particularly when they turned into riots, could create just the same mental silence, even the same sensation everything was happening in slow motion. The placards, the rearing horses, the flying mud . . . and inside the quiet and emptiness, the oddly straightforward happiness. Unfortunately, like many others before me, I found I couldn’t stay in a state of “self-remembering” for more than a few seconds at a time.