I am faced with that old problem again, how shall I begin? The Latin poet, Horace, in his famous Art of Poetry says that the way to begin a poem is in the middle of the thing, so that's where I'll start. Right in the middle. I won't lead up. The theme of this workshop is Thinking in other Categories. And there is a story that many of you are familiar with but I will repeat it because it is a story that sets the theme. The philosopher, Ouspensky, who, as most of you know, was one of Gurdgieff leading students, had been experimenting with mind altering drugs. You see, they did it even back in those days. I think this happened sometime in the 20's. And his experience is that he would take the drug and go into the drug state and experience a flooding of incredible insights. They would come one after the other. He was just uplifted and exalted. It was an incredible experience and then the drug would catch up with him and he would fall asleep. He would wake up in the morning and would find that he could remember very clearly that he had been flooded with these marvelous insights and he could remember how he had felt, but he couldn't remember the insights. So, after a number of experiments where he began to realize that was to be the pattern, he set out a pad of paper and a pencil on a table and then took the drug. Everything went according to plan. The drug took effect, he became flooded with marvelous insights, and he stumbled over to the table and began to write them down. Now he fell asleep. The next morning he woke up and the experience was the same as before. He could remember having had an incomparable flood of insights. He couldn't remember even what they were about, but he also remembered that he had written it down. So he rushed over to his table and found his pad and he had had a memory of laboriously writing for hours and hours. He found that he had written four words...thinking in other categories. That's all that was there of all of his insights.
Now, often when people hear that story they smile at the humor, the irony of it, because it is truly anticlimactic isn't it? But it is not only anticlimactic, I think it is also mind-blowing. Because, indeed, in order for him to achieve these insights, he had to think in other categories, and, of course, the drug would temporarily disorient him in such a way that he could only think in other categories, but it wasn't very productive for him. So it seems to me that all of his experimentation with the drug was useful and valuable simply because he came up with that one conjunction, think in other categories.
And it seems to me that to think in other categories is really at the very heart of what we call therapy. I think it is at the very heart of creativity. I think it is at the heart of all positive revolution because to think in other categories it to incredibly expand the limits of what is possible for us. The litany of self limiting beliefs about myself or about the world is almost endless in terms of social relations, the functioning of a society. There are beliefs like, "That group is stupid, they are born stupid." "This group are born inferior." "This group cannot be trusted." "This group has a natural bent toward being criminal."
This is, of course, the kind of stuff that supports the racist and other "by god"-isms that we have. If we look at the horror of the Nazi holocaust and what that did to the world and what it is still doing to the world, as its remnants continue here and there to function and even to grow to some extent. You know we have our skinheads and Neo-Nazis and white supremacists and so on.
It's still going on. If you look at what's been going on in just the last few months on the scene of national politics, I have to bring that in, you see, because the President is in town and some of you trying to get here were interrupted by his motorcade. The watch word that has electrified millions of people in the country is change. Well, everybody is in favor of change, it's like Mother. How can you take a stand against Mothers or anything of that kind. But simply being for change is not enough. In order to effect change, you must begin to think in other categories, because the categories in which you think establish, and they establish totally, the limits of your social vision of what is possible for our society in your eyes. It also establishes the limits of what it possible for you in your relationships with other people, whether they be intimates or other than intimates, your relationship with the universe, your relationship with what is sometimes called God, or Allah, or the Goddess, something greater than you are. All of these relationships and the relationship with yourself are strictly and absolutely limited by the category in which you think in reference to that relationship. Just think for a moment...most of you are professionals. . .and you don't have to be a professional to understand this point. . . . the people you see, the beliefs that they have about themselves: "My mother abandoned me when I was small. Therefore, every relationship I enter into must result in my being abandoned.
That thought dominates me. I know that is so." ..that is, I think in that category so I know that is so. . .and so the way I am in a relationship. ..I may be a dozen different ways, but it is all limited by that one thought, that one idea. I may respond in relationships very angrily because I know that you are going to abandon me. So I am angry even before that happens. Or I may make myself a doormat and a pleaser trying to put off that evil day, I can't stand up for myself. Or I may be completely sad because I know that I will be abandoned. That is just one example. I know that I am of no value. I know that I am worthless. I know that I am unlovable. I know that I am stupid, and so on and so on. It is only if I break out of that category that something else begins to be possible for me. Now this relates very closely to something we are going to be talking about a great deal all the rest of the day and that is the problem of the self image. We all have a self image and some of us have the illusion that we know what it is but in my experience, the self image is pretty much something that operates out of the dark unknown to me and that is why it has such incredible power over me. Some people follow Ouspensky and take drugs of one kind or the other to break out of the categories. And I think that originally many of the drugs that are common today were originally used by indigenous people as means of breaking out of one category and breaking into something else so they could begin to see what they were unable to see. Many of the Shamans, for example, took drugs to that end. . .to make their Shamanic journey, to go to another place, to see things that are not ordinarily visible to the ordinary eye. That, essentially, was to think in other categories.
Now, I am not advocating that you begin to use drugs in order to think in other categories because I think what usually happens is that the Ouspensky experience is repeated. That you experience the high of the insights or the visions or whatever it is and then you wake up in the morning and you don't remember. You don't have it. And so you develop a dependency upon a drug, which may also be also very destructive if you overuse it.
I think the challenge to us and what I am putting forth is a challenge to all of us this morning, is to learn to think in other categories without the use of drugs, without the use of something mechanical. And those categories there is no end to the possibilities. To think in other categories means that it becomes possible to think in terms of such things as telepathy, for example, or the ability to predict the future, or to read the past as possibilities. In the old categories in which most of us, perhaps not all of us, were brought up, the idea that these extrasensory perceptions were meaningful, or even possible, were dismissed as foolish.
I was an undergraduate when Dr. Ryan was making his research at Duke University. You are all familiar with that, that is very, very old stuff today. But I remember reading about it in Reader's Digest, a new magazine that was just out that was sweeping the country. This was in the first half of the thirties. And I remember reading about it there, and wondering if it was really true. Well, today, a great many people accept what was named as ESP, Extra Sensory Perception as simply a fact of life, but most of us still aren't able to use it. Now, possibly, the first step had to be that a vast...you know the story of the hundredth monkey...so it might be that a vast number of people in the world, global population, have to come to accept that as a possibility as a category in which we are thinking and it's possible then, that the possibility to actually think in those categories might develop for more people. So that's one area.
There continues to be a lot of very interesting research work done and a great deal of interest in all of these paranormal, that is the extraordinary manifestations of experience of reality. I had this client in individual session a few months ago, a man, and I asked him what he did and he said, well he made his money as a computer programmer but what he actually did, what he did seriously, was he led fire walks. I don't know if any of you have walked on fire, some of you have surely, haven't you? A couple of people. Well, it's true, not everyone has tried it. I have not tried it myself. But I also know it's true that increasing numbers of people actually have tried it and do it repeatedly. So things of that kind become possible only when you start to think in a category that makes it possible. So that's very important. Also, but my chief interest is in thinking in other categories as it applies to what we call therapy. In enabling you to,...and I am putting it that way because I don't think of this primarily as something that I will do to you...teach you to think in other categories. It is something I am learning to do myself. I at least have seen the light. I have gotten Ouspensky's message of those four words and I, for a long, long time have tried to apply it and I share that with people who seem to be open to receiving that. Those limiting beliefs: "I am unlovable", "I am of no worth," " I must always be abandoned," "I must always fail, I can never succeed," "I can never enjoy the benefits of luck or the grace of God," "I must earn and deserve everything I get, and therefore, I can never really enjoy it because how can I be sure that I am still earning it and deserving it."
Things of this kind, the bottom line in the cases that come to you for help, which is probably also the bottom line in your own case, as it is in my case, the self limiting category in which I think. And when I work with people today, I expect and I hope to be able to point out to the person I am working with and to you how often that comes up, the self limiting category. Now this is not a new idea with me, nor with Ouspensky either. It goes back more than 2,000 years, for example, to the famous myth of the cave in Plato's Republic. Remember that? In Plato's Republic there is a shallow cave and people are standing facing the cave. Say this is the wall of the cave, and you are those people, and behind you is the bright sun and behind you things are moving and changing but you are chained in such a position so that they cannot turn around and look at those things. They can only see shadows from the sunlight that is cast on the back of the cave. So they see all those shadows dancing around and because that is what they first began to see when there mothers and their fathers said, "Oh baby see the doggy or this is daddy and this is mommy," or whatever parents say to their kids when they are very little, the parents point to the shadows and they learn to function in a world of shadows.
Then Plato says, one day one of those people got free and turned around and see the reality as it was. And he was incredibly excited and he rushed to all of his friends, all of his relatives who were still looking there and living in the shadow world and tried to tell them what he had seen, and they all dismissed him, and they thought he was crazy and they pitied him. No one listened to him. That is exactly the idea of thinking in other categories in that famous myth of Plato's.
That is exactly the idea. To break out of the self limiting reality that you have created. And it is true that each of does create her or his reality. We do each create our own reality. We are told by thinkers and researchers in this field that we even create this reality of a glass of water and a revolving turning chair and an electric light, the carpet on the floor and all these faces, that we create that also. That there is nothing there except energy in one form or another. And sometimes it's energy and particles and sometimes it's energy and waves.
I read a very interesting book that I recommend to you just recently by a man named Michael Talbot called The Holographic Universe. How many of you have read that? I recommend it to you because this book brings in some of the most recent and advanced research, both from a field of physics, you know in terms of what is reality, and from the field of neurology and brain study, and makes that point, that we probably create our own reality.
For the advanced thinkers who see that they do create their own reality, it goes on and on and on. That ultimately, of course, leads us to where simpler people were long ago indigenous people, and don't you see that all of us who are Anglos in this room, that there was a time, too when we were indigenous, when we existed not in our present bodies but when we existed in the bodies of our ancestors. We were indigenous. And that basic relationship to the whole universe was simply a sense of awe and a sense of mystery.