Book Description

With hundreds of books on the market today urging readers to develop mindfulness, pointing to the condition of “awakening” that most religious/philosophical traditions aim toward, this new addition by Red Hawk stands head and shoulders above the crowd. It offers detailed practical guidelines that allow one to know with certainty—not from imagination, theory, thought, or lying—when one is Present and Awake; it details the objective feedback mechanisms available to everyone for attaining this certainty: Am I awake now? How do I know? Sincere readers will find that help in answering these two questions is invaluable and life-changing. Written from the perspective of a practitioner of more than thirty years—one who has studied the significant work of his predecessors, received instruction from two spiritual masters (Osho Rajneesh and Mister Lee Lozowick), and trained rigorously within daily life. This book is the first detailed examination of the Practice-of-Presence (called “self remembering” in the Gurdjieff tradition). The author’s aim is to give general guidelines in this practice, discuss its implications, and then offer specific instruction. Self Remembering: The Path to Non-Judgmental Love is meant to be a companion piece, volume ii, to the author’s previous book Self Observation: The Awakening of Conscience, which is fast becoming a classic. Taken together, they present the most detailed examination of the practice available in English. He clearly points out that self remembering is only one half of a foundational spiritual practice called “self observation/self remembering.” Where other authors/teachers have gone wrong in the past is to take only one half of this practice and consider it the whole, entire unto itself. Mister Gurdjieff’s student, A.R. Orage (1873-1934), made this mistake with self observation; contemporary teacher Robert Burton made a similar error with his book, also titled Self Remembering. While P.D. Ouspensky speaks of the practice of self remembering in his seminal book In Search of the Miraculous, and Rodney Collin in The Theory of Celestial Influence, there has not been a book-length study on self remembering that examines the practice from the many angles that Red Hawk’s does. His chapters cover such diverse yet integrated topics as The Removal of Self Importance; Kaya Sadhana or the wisdom of the body; and Separation Grief, i.e., addressing the terror of our current situation without denial or dramatics.