Recapitulation. about streams of consciousness
Very often, a kind of “shoot-through” version of the transformation of consciousness occurs, in which the entity masters a certain minimum of knowledge at each turn of ascent, without fully comprehending the laws of its functioning and striving ever higher. This minimum, as a rule, is not enough for stable promotion.
Resist and, even more so, fully function for more high level We are prevented by a lack of knowledge due to the fact that we did not get something at previous levels. At the same time, there will be an inexorable shuttle return to the spaces and aspects of life in which they are embodied, which are not sufficiently known to us. Such a return will be carried out until we “choose” for ourselves the entire limit of the knowledge contained in them. The same situation that is harmful to us, to which we try to close our eyes, will be repeated with us in various options, until we understand what experience it brings us.
The lives of each of us are replete with learning situations, but we don’t always take the chance to gain new experience embedded in them. Even if we have wonderful Teacher the main factor in the success of spiritual advancement will not be his ability to teach, but our ability and desire to learn.
Sometimes there is a conscious refusal to master some forms of experience that seem unnecessary to us. For each person in certain phases of life they are different. On modern stage For many people, this often manifests itself in the idea that spirituality does not correlate with professional fulfillment, with the ability to earn money. The postulate works that spiritual person there should be no material needs, formed in completely different spaces historical eras. Each evolutionary era involves the development of some new type of experience by humanity. In addition to individual programs for the development of one or another aspect of perception, a person’s sphere of study includes a common one for all social task. The era in which we are now embodied dictates the need for humanity to gain experience in social orientation and acquire the ability of abstract thinking, which presupposes the ability to see the general and holistic behind any particular and fragmentary.
Modern conditions require that a person achieve a level of professionalism in his business and, through this, be able to earn money, the presence of which is a measure of the manifestation of many types of social freedom. This includes freedom of movement (few people today are not embarrassed by the prices of, say, air transport), and freedom to purchase quality food products, and freedom to access information (in order to buy new book or attend a seminar on any type of practice, again you need money).
Today, for many entities, who in other rebirths have demonstrated superpowers that fit the category of “miraculous,” a real and sometimes overwhelming miracle is the acquisition of the ability to earn money for successful social functioning. Due to the fact that we can move objects by force of will, we will not have a separate apartment or the opportunity to go to study abroad. We can use all the skills and abilities we already have to work on new ones only if we comprehend the basics of the laws that make up them.
All our successes in spiritual advancement, achieved in strict isolation from the world, will be of a rather illusory nature until we master the experience of social manifestation. In order to comprehend the degrees of spiritual freedom, it is first necessary to learn to consciously be socially conditioned.
ABOUT STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
One of the most important esoteric practices that allows you to restore the integrity of all energy structures is recapitulation, or as it was called in the system of “Castaneda” teaching, recollection.
Actually, a recapitulation is that version of this action that happens, as if by itself. Without performing any actions on the part of a person directly aimed at achieving this result, some episode or period of life “scrolls” before his inner gaze. A stream of recollection can overtake us while walking or while performing asanas.
External attributes are not so important in this case. The essential thing is that this will indicate a certain quality of the state of consciousness. The very reproduction of the facts of life recorded in it happens in such a way that their perception no longer affects us emotionally.
At the same time, our feeling of “rewatched” episodes provides a high degree of awareness of their essence and meaning.
Recapitulation is not something invented by teachers for diligent and systematic implementation, but rather a self-regulating psychoenergetic phenomenon, the mechanism of which is triggered depending on the possibility of a person demonstrating a certain quality of awareness.
The flow of recollection harmonizes and aligns the subtle structures of the human being, replenishing their integrity and optimizing them functionally. The event-time streams in which our energy is represented do not exist somewhere separately, on their own.
They are directly “connected” to us, either at the level of our mental component, or at the astral level, or in the sphere of our etheric body (Fig. 1).
It would be more accurate to say that we do not “take” our energy from somewhere, but “free” the event flows of space from our presence. At the same time, the deformation of “subtle” field structures, due to our interested participation in the existence of these flows, is leveled out.
They cease to be the sphere of our conscious and unconscious attention, the sphere of dislocation of our vital energy.
Rice. 1.
Engaging in recapitulation as a volitional practice makes sense only if we have already experienced - at least fragmentarily - spontaneous versions of it. That is, when the accumulated amount of energy for awareness itself “signaled” from the inside about our readiness for recapitulation.
By engaging in recapitulation “from the mind,” we risk not replenishing energy, but, on the contrary, losing it. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to fulfill certain conditions, which, by the way, are not specified in the works of C. Castaneda.
First, consider recapitulation mainly as an exercise for developing the power of concentration, the power of concentration. As a rule, the practice of this version of recapitulation can have no more than a thirty percent result.
In such activities, when, through volitional effort, we return to past events of our life and “replay” them, the real possibility of turning on the mechanism of spontaneous recapitulation occurs rather than the practice itself being implemented directly.
Secondly, it is necessary to recapitulate the event not along the course of the time flow, but against it. In other words, it is necessary to remember not from the beginning, but from the end.
This will make it possible to “not superimpose” the additional energy of new - current - emotions, the likelihood of which in this version of recapitulation is very high, onto what is already present in the event.
When remembering events, especially important and energy-absorbing objects are the so-called emotional nodes. That is, those moments whose content caused our emotional reaction. These nodes are more complexly organized, the greater the “heat of passion” that was invested in them.
Returning to past events, not being ready to treat them with detachment, we can again react to their content with an emotional explosion, sometimes even more powerful.
Remembering is effective only if it happens to a person who has acquired a qualitatively new experience of perceiving the world in comparison with the experience that he had during his participation in the recapitulated events.
That is, if we perceive the facts of a past life, evaluating them on a new scale of values based on other criteria. If we have truly become different in the time that has passed since the events we remember, then they will be felt by us as if they happened to someone else. We will develop a detached attitude towards them.
If the content of past events touches us deeply and causes an emotional reaction on our part, then we have not changed. The amount of experience that had been accumulated by the time the recapitulated events took place did not increase.
The subjective model of reality leads to the disintegration of the image of a person. In impressionism, the image of man disintegrated. There is no single personality. A person consists of millions of small “I”s, moments - the moment dies and the small “I” dies. Unity of personality is possible only in the world of values. The unity of the world is possible only in the world of ethics.
Expressionism is a crisis of the value triad. Here there is only beauty, only an aesthetic perception of reality. Life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Proust's philosophy
Main method knowledge of reality - intuition. Reasonable means of understanding reality are considered inadequate. Living and real - unique, unique, always new. Uniqueness is the essence. Life is always a mystery. But it is understandable, because we ourselves are part of it. Being part of life, we can understand it.
A truly living, real – feeling, loving, soulful dimension of reality. Here are echoes of the philosophy of the world soul. We are part of reality. All boundaries and divisions are products of the rational. Everything is connected in some kind of super-unity. Life of this kind appears as a kind of stream (a river that is constantly new). There is a single flow between the individual and the world.
Origins: Proust's philosophy. Impressionism gravitates towards lyrical miniatures. Proust writes a 7-volume novel (experiences, feelings that make sense only in the context of this story). Proust's novel is a subjective epic.
The formula “stream of consciousness novel” is being replaced classic novel. This is an epochal big art form. The structure of a stream of consciousness novel is characterized by:
There is no plot (no plot purposefulness; there is only what is significant for internal history), the connection between impressions is free-associative.
There is no objective model of reality (the narration is from the 1st person of the main character named Marcel (as well as the author); before us is a 7-volume monologue from the 1st person, from the hero’s point of view).
The collapse of the hero's personality (there is only a flow of sensations and impressions). Before us is a world without action. The hero replaces consciousness. This is also supported by the personality traits of the hero. The hero, by his nature, is incapable of action. Marcel's social status is a rentier (a person living on interest from capital) - he comes from the middle-rich bourgeoisie, like Proust. Man only consumes and perceives. Here is the theme of spending (wasting money, wasting time). The hero himself suffers from his inferiority. Here - the whole school feelings and perceptions for readers.
Proust writes in clear, classical literary language, but it is very difficult to read (too dense). Proust's goal is the reverse holistic gathering of the personality.
The novel not only puts artistic tasks, but also existential. Our life consists of many experiences and impressions. Is there a connection with the fundamental, essential? Proust is trying to find such a connection. It is necessary to return values in order to gain unity of personality.
Proust's project is the search for foundations for values. Criticism of common ideas about values. Something must happen within us for us to come into contact with beauty and wisdom. Only we have the roots of values. We love not for objective qualities. Proust's journey into the deepest secrets of the inner self. Categories of the heroic and prosaic world are required. The war is a consequence of the fact that all people have stopped their own spiritual search for values.
The key category is the category of understanding. Understanding is independent (no one will understand for us). It depends on the person not to miss those moments of understanding that were there. If we do not understand, then something else takes the place of our “I”, then some other mechanisms begin to operate. Our life without understanding will be a world of wrongness and dissatisfaction with ourselves. Obstacles to understanding: laziness, fear and hope (Mamardashvili). These are the categories that stop understanding.
The category of time is defining, capital. What may remain accidental and unnecessary must be connected with the essential, with the eternal. There are two models of eternity: one is recognized as false, the other is true. The first model is endless life, eternity as a stopped moment. One moment is enough, but you need to truly live it.
Stream of consciousness is:
1. the object of description, what is described by modernists, it is in it that, from the point of view of modernists, human life is concentrated;
2. this new artistic medium turned out to be traditional artistic means it is impossible to describe the inner life of a person, modernist writers developed a new artistic technique, the stream of consciousness technique, is a new technique for organizing text. This technique can be used in any aesthetic school, it is neutral, and it does not belong only to modernism (for example, the modernist Kafka did not use this technique, but the realist Faulkner did).
Human consciousness is discrete. There are several layers in it: rationality, this is where the laws of logic operate, then comes the subconscious, where everything pulsates, there seems to be no connection between phenomena, but there are no logical connections, the laws of associative thinking operate there, that is, everything is connected according to the law associations. All this is actively used in modernist literature. To characterize Marcel's consciousness, Proust builds complex, refined associations, which characterizes the hero's refined, developed fantasy. Marcel's thinking is very complex and associative. His stream of consciousness is a story about time, about the situation, about Marcel himself, about what kind of person he is. We can learn all this from the endless thread of the narrative, lexically and rhythmically organized. Proust's novels are an endlessly stretching fabric of consciousness. In this case, it makes no sense to retell the content. A very often cited image from this novel is Madeleine's cookies; the smell of cookies in the early morning evokes a lot of associations in the hero, taking him back to distant childhood. Our memory is one of the most important characteristics our stream of consciousness.
It is impossible to turn back astronomical time, but thanks to memory, we can experience some events as if anew; remembering it, the stream of consciousness that possessed us then flares up in us, we experience emotions again. The stream of consciousness, therefore, is rich in our past, which is why the stream of life flowing in us is so complexly organized; the present and the future are literally connected in it, this can also be shown only with new artistic means.
Stream of consciousness literature is an artistic rendering of the spiritual world of a person that is not directly related to reality.
Predecessors. Realistic tradition
In the 19th century made (Stendhal, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky) a fundamental artistic discovery: psychological analysis. Before this discovery, the phenomenon of thinking was understood by literature as a simple response of consciousness to a fact of reality. The thought fully corresponded to the fact and was equal to it. Tolstoy showed that people are like rivers. Spiritual world fluid, thought only starts from fact, all previous human experience is involved in the act of thinking, thought connects the present, past and future; thought is the processing of a fact in the light of everything life experience person; In the act of thinking, not only the analytical and synthetic abilities of the brain take part, but also memory, imagination, and fantasy. Analytical awareness, a description of a fact going back into the past, turns out to be “symmetrical” in relation to the future, to prophecy and anticipation. Active participation in preparation artistic discovery psychological analysis at one time (XVIII century) accepted English writer Laurence Stern.
The Tradition of Inner Monologue Literature
In the 20th century the artistic achievements of realism (psychological analysis) were picked up, continued and deepened by literature" inner monologue". The term itself "mindflow" (eng. stream of consciousness) introduced by philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) in the book "Fundamentals of Psychology" (Principles of Psychology, 1890). This term combines different types internal monologue ( literary description internal thinking processes, literary technique images of thoughts and feelings passing through consciousness, images of spiritual processes). Three types of verbal penetration have emerged in the literature. inner world person: (1) realists Stendhal, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky, and later W. Faulkner created and developed methods of conducting psychoanalysis (verbal description of the process of processing a life fact in the light of a person’s entire experience; both the analytical abilities of the individual and her memory, imagination, fantasy); (2) J. Joyce, M. Proust created the literature of internal monologue (display in a work of a flow of consciousness that is not yet completely divorced from reality - thinking dives into reality and emerges from it); (3) N. Sarraute, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor created the literature of the stream of consciousness (the river of thinking is already flowing, not touching the banks of reality, thought moves only by self-propulsion, not receiving impulses from reality, except for the first impulse).
It is generally accepted that for the first time in literature, the internal monologue was creatively embodied in 1922. Irish writer J. Joyce (1882-1941) in the novel "Ulysses". However, Joyce himself believed that for the first time the stream of consciousness in literary work created by the little-known French prose writer Edgard Dujardin in the novel “Defeated Laurels” (“Les Lauriers sont coupes”, 1888), which was soon translated into English language and influenced him.
Ulysses describes twenty-four hours in the lives of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The action of the novel (if the description of the actions and mainly the thoughts and feelings of the characters can be called action) takes place on June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Joyce showed interest in the stream of consciousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). After the 1920s, stream of consciousness techniques were developed Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and many other authors.
The literature of internal monologue began with James Joyce and Marcel Proust (1870-1922). In their work, for the first time, with great attention, as if under a magnifying glass, human memory was examined as a grandiose receptacle of life experience, and this experience was affirmed in its own self-sufficient meaning. A long previous life was interpreted as something more significant for the spiritual situation of a person than the facts of reality that simultaneously enter his consciousness. Consciousness began to be detached from his life impulses and more and more treated as a spontaneous, self-developing flow.
Proust takes the fact of reality in its multiple manifestations in the human consciousness, in its changes, determined by changes in experience, memory and age-related changes (the same phenomenon is interpreted differently by the consciousness of the same person in childhood, adolescence, adulthood). André Maurois wrote about Proust:
He feels that he has only one duty left, namely... to devote himself to the search for lost time... To recreate lost impressions with the help of memory, to develop the huge deposits that are the memory of a person who has reached maturity, and from his memories to make a work of art - This is the task he sets himself. (Mauroy A. Marcel Proust. M., 1970. P. 219).
School of the "new novel"
The artistic principles of J. Joyce and M. Proust were absolutized by the school of the “new novel” that emerged in the literature of the 1950s in France (N. Sarraute, A. Robbe-Grillet, M. Butor). Based on the existentialist idea of the absurdity of life, the absence of a goal in the life process, and the “scattered” (chaotic) world, the school of the “new novel” elevated the principle of extra-plot narration, destroying all traditional organizing compositional elements works. From the story about facts of life and events, the novel turned into a sophisticated essayistic, impressionistic retelling of the nuances of the hero’s spiritual life. Psychologism was taken to the extreme. The stream of consciousness has broken the connection with real world. In realism, the hero’s consciousness, jumping across the “information gap” (from fact to fact, to hypothesis, to previous experience, to the future), retained connection with life process, in the literature of the stream of consciousness, this stream turned out to be flying above reality. The stream of consciousness has become a stream of self-awareness, a thought flowing beyond the shores of life. Thinking itself was understood as mental process egocentric personality of the hero. The narration began to stop mid-sentence, unexpectedly and unmotivated. The works became amorphous, amoeba-like, lost their outlines: the plot weakened, the denouement ceased to be the artistic result of the work, which turned into a naturalistic picture of flickering psychological states character. This direction is also called “anti-novel” for its rejection of conventional methods.
Mindflow
“Stream of consciousness is a depiction of the thoughts and feelings of characters, expressed in a free manner and not constrained by logic” (Karl Beckson, Arthur Gahz. LTD).
In the novel "Portrait of an Unknown" (1948) Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) the finest shades and halftones are revealed human relations. An unknown man, not introduced to the reader in any way, while walking through the city garden, looks at unknown girl. The emergence of unaccountable tenderness in the soul of a man and the responses occurring in the soul of a girl to his persistent views become the content of the novel. The writer introduces another motive that determines the girl’s experiences: her old father, either out of jealousy or out of despotism, tyranns her. There is no resolution storylines are cut off, as if emphasizing that it is not the events of life, but internal experiences, shades of feelings that are the valuable subject of artistic depiction.
Memory and its meaning
In the novel "Last Summer in Marienbad" Alena Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922) reveals the importance of memory in the spiritual life of the individual. Memory is always the present, it is the past existing in the present: as long as I remember, the phenomenon exists in me and with me. Therefore, Robbe-Grillet mixes the past and the present, they overlap each other and turn out to be coexisting and equivalent. A person is interpreted as an amphibian, simultaneously living in two environments - past and present.
Stream of consciousness literature captures the inner world of the individual and reveals the values of spiritual life in their spontaneous movement.
Modernism is famous for its achievements in the field of new literary devices: here is the rejection of linear narration, and the principles of editing, and the absence of the author as the ultimate truth... The text begins to speak a different language, concentrating all attention on the internal mental organization of a person, inexpressible by direct and familiar “realistic” statements. The result is a stream of consciousness - a set of thoughts and impressions that arise in an associative way in the hero’s head and are transferred to paper.
We have selected 5 main novels in which the authors used the stream of consciousness method.
Petersburg. Andrey Bely
Russian modernism is a truly bright and strong phenomenon. Then it is all the more remarkable that Andrei Bely’s “Petersburg” is considered one of the main modernist texts Russian literature, which also includes work with new form, and displaying the “dark” history of Russia during the Revolution of 1905-1907.
Academician Dmitry Likhachev wrote about this novel: “I think the main thing in this form is the constant search, dissatisfaction with the “smooth writing”, of which there was so much in Russian XIX literature V. Hence his constant desire to emphasize the “texture” of form, the “texture” of language.”
Ulysses. James Joyce
This novel is called the most complex work in all world literature of the last century, which few people can decipher. However, this is not a reason to put off reading, because James Joyce clearly was not against everyone interpreting his creation in their own way.
It's difficult to say what exactly happens in Ulysses - we see how Leopold Bloom spends his day in Dublin, how he meets Stephen Dedalus and learns about his wife's infidelity. By the way, a special place is given to the stream of consciousness in the final monologue of Molly Bloom, and not every reader is ready to withstand this test!
In search of lost time. Marcel Proust
This epochal cycle by Marcel Proust consists of seven novels, each of which appeared as a result of the writer’s struggle with a serious illness. The author wrote a work like no other, full of subjective manifestations of consciousness, a stream of fleeting impressions and reactions that cannot be explained rationally.
Time is an extremely important substance for modernism, and Proust was able to embody ideas about it in this monumental work. It is important that in the matter of time he relied on the philosophical concept of Henri Bergson and wove into the fabric of the text the contradictory modernist relations of the momentary moment of being and life.
Mrs Dalloway. Virginia Woolf
This novel, like Joyce's Ulysses, also tells about one day of the heroine, and it was written almost entirely using the stream of consciousness technique. As in her other works, in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf shows deep, subtle and paradoxical connections between people that cannot be retold in a linear and orderly manner. At the same time, the story about privacy happening in the background great history- First World War...
William Faulkner
The novel "The Sound and the Fury" (formerly translated as "The Sound and the Fury") is dedicated to the story of the destruction of the Compson family living in the American South. Four parts of this outstanding work dedicated different heroes: first the story comes from the perspective of the idiot Benji, then from his brothers, and finally from the author himself, who talks about the black maid Dilsey. Thanks to this change of points of view, we get to know the characters so closely that we begin to feel inside the events and empathize with the heroes as members of our own family.
