Happiness in relation to the 'committee meeting' model of 'self'

Both happiness and despair can be interpreted as the state of compartmentalisation operating between "selves". "Efficient fences" can suppress "problem characters" as in Freudian repression.
Transcendence of the committee to "higher levels of consciousness" are captured perhaps by Kipling's lines fom "If"....

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

...which I believe are written up in the competitors section in the Wimbledon club house.

And with respect to "desire" and "attachments" leading to ephemeral happiness/despair, I recommend Siddhartha by Hesse (free internet book).

A fiction.

Thank you. Kippling: good.
What are 'efficient fences'?

Efficient....?
Who was it who said "good fences make good neighbours" ?
Gurdjieff talked about "buffers" which we might interpret as "insulated walls" or "blinkers" in the horse sense...anything which holds dissonant views apart.

Ah see now I'm confused a but. Surely what holds them apart is just the fact they're different/incompatible?

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

No..what holds them apart is that they are held by different "selves". For example, the vegetarian self and the leather wearing self can be members of the same committee.

My smoking-self has been getting a lot of stick from my health-self recently. The argument continues to rage.

Where did this theory of the "committee meeting model of self" originate?

Isn’t there an over-arching self though, rather than a collection of selves?

Is there not a dominant self, and on the periphery there exists the "under-selves", each vying for a position within the dominant self?

Rather than just having a committee, there must be a head of the committee...

The idea was expounded by G.I Gurdjieff and later P. Ouspensky in "In Search of the Miraculous". Its likely origin is Sufi.

According to G "ordinary man" is in a state of "waking sleep" with his myriad of little "I's" popping up as in a dream. In order to "awake" one must start by observing that situation and then electing one of the selves as a temporary chairman. But natural forces are against such "self-observation". (G claims this is a cosmological law of nature). There is a slight possibility for "progress" to be made towards "wakefulness" (higher states of consciousness...enlightenment) but as in the bad dream we attempt to awake from, we are easily misled by another dreamlike state.

In G's system, the temporary chairman may need "help" from an outside source, (a bit like a shaky government needing US aid !) and this may be from one who has already awoken, and can keep nudging the sleeper. It is interesting to contrast this guru-type approach with that of Krishnamurti who rejects " organized help" as being beneficial to enlightenment. K merely advocates "non-judgemental observation" as being the key to releasing (spiritual) energy.

Google references to Gurdjieff abound. Do not be put off by the weird cosmology. The psychology makes sense in its own right.

I like the term 'temporary chairman'.



This is indeed interesting. I don't know how such 'organised help' works- does it attempt to find 'resolution' between the selves, instead of accepting them/recognising them for what they are?


Ha

None of the selves (small s) can evolve to Self (capital S). Think caterpillar to butterfly. The "help" consists of delegating the wake-up procedure to an external person or exercise technique e.g. TM (transcendental meditation), or organized religion.
Krishnamurti rejects this on the basis that the striving to "become" is a property of one of the little selves. He claims we are all capable of recognizing selves for what they are but "the mistake" we make is to slip into a judgemental mode, which is just another self.

Sorry...
...DONT think "caterpillar to butterfly" ...think "gestalt". The selves are to Self as meandering blood cells are to "the body".

I suppose K is right however, in that in order for us to develop that awareness of how our lives are determined by this "dreamlike" state, we need to have "non-judgemental observation" in order to transcend the little selves that we have no control over. it may be that external help will be interpreted by one of the little selves, or even that a new self will develop to absorb this information, without it having any real effect upon our awareness.

This has some similarity to memetics in psychology. Just as we are "under the spell" of our various selves, when we acquire a meme, which is any piece of information that can be passed on from human to human, it becomes something which we are determined by. Consciousness itself is considered to be a collection of memes (Dennett), which produces the illusion of the self as having free will and the capacity to think independently, when in reality, memes do our thinking for "us".

Just as Gurdjieff talks about "help" from the outside, which can guide us to fuller awareness, memetic engineering is the process of deliberately altering the memetic structure of someone’s consciousness, through teaching, therapy etc.

When it comes to the committee meeting, there isn't much happiness when it's in session. Whether or not the committee is in agreement has little effect, the committee is only in agreement with itself. The critical step between the committee meeting and happiness is acceptance.
When happiness occurs, the selves are in a state of acceptance.

Thanks for that. I'll look up memetics.

Checked out memetics yet Fresco? What do you think?

Yes, it makes sense to me from the point of view of self (or selves) being an epiphenomenon of culture. And it also parallels Maturana's biological view of language users. In short "memetics" has an air of scientific repectability.

So then the question becomes "can happiness issues be reduced to a scientific (style) analysis ?" Against this we have the leanings towards "spirituality" being pursued by Krishnamurti which focus on "Self" as a transcendent state. Within such an ethos, "scientificism" itself is seen to be a limit to "progress" because it panders to human "lower level" aspirations to predict and control.
I have no answers to that dilemma, but certainly Gurdjieff has a go at it via his rather strange cosmology of "vibrations".

Yes...I concur; In simple terms....qusetions such as these suck, ( presuppitions ) . What is the dialog ( if any ) between happiness-relation-committee-meeting-and SLEF....the terms should first be qualified [email protected],

Can the 'transcendental I' ever be expressed in language, or is it only expressed in sensation?