Welcome to a series of talks about objective consciousness, an objective Universe, and an objective way to awaken, expanding upon the works of George I. Gurdjieff and Russell A. Smith.

In this new series of podcasts, we will present short discussions on various aspects of the Work, and answer questions raised during our weekly Zoom classes, which are available each Saturday, freely for everyone who has either purchased a copy of The Blueprint of Consciousness, or who has attained to the Master and Double or Nothing exercises.

This is part 1 of a 2 part podcast, and in this first part we will start by going back to basics, and discussing the nature of consciousness, attention, our states of “I,” what sleep is, and how we can become free. In the second part we will describe the history and background of THEDOG, and the reason we created THEDOG Teachings, what it offers, and what this objective way can specifically do for you. As a bonus we provide a 10% discount code for you for the books and audio guide for the remainder of August 2022.

So, let’s begin:

There is a simple structure behind all phenomena which can lead you to higher states of consciousness.

We will describe these states of consciousness, our states of “I,”, our types of attention, and why awakening is not only important, but is your given right in this life, and the next stage in psychological evolution for a human being.

If you have been following these podcasts for a while, and have pondered the nature of existence, you may have already realized that life as it usually stands does not always offer personal and long-lasting contentment, nor does it feel as purposeful and as meaningful as you may have intuited that it should. 

We are meant to realize our full human potential in this life, to become present, mindful, open and free beings. To exist in a state where automatic thoughts cease, where anxiety falls away, and where a confident and calm inner state is realized. THEDOG Teachings provides a proven method to awaken to this true nature of self and of reality. To become a fully functioning and conscious being, able to repay back to the world everything that has been given so freely, and which is often taken so much for granted.

What is consciousness?  

It is a spectrum of awareness of an immediate personal experience, ranging from no awareness at all, to being fully present, aware, awake and conscious.

We are capable of four states of consciousness or awareness – Sleep, Waking Sleep, Self-Consciousness and Objective Consciousness. We usually only experience the first two, and occasionally the third in rare moments of shock, surprise or high intensity activity.

Sleep is just us simply being unconscious, fast asleep, or even comatose.

Waking sleep is also known as relative consciousness, one where we are not “here”, but are wrapped up in worries, anxieties, regrets of the past and fears of the future, or simply caught in an endless bout of revolving thoughts and narration. Everything is subjective. This is not “awake”, and awakening is our right.

Self-consciousness is the first state of awakening, and is one where we are conscious of ourselves, our thoughts and the reason we act in the ways that we do. We become an impartial witness to ourselves, seeing ourselves as we really are, not what we think we are or what we are told we are. We can begin to fully purge every inexactitude within us, ridding us of all the falsities and notions built up in us over years. We become real, and we develop conscience. Useless thoughts and inner commentary ceases, and we cease to lie to others or ourselves.

Objective consciousness is seeing the world as it is, and seeing ourselves and others as they really are. We are free of placing labels on things, free of prejudice, free of biased opinion, free of ideas that, when scrutinized fully, don’t actually make sense, or have any basis or foundation in truth…simply free. Life becomes objective, and we live with pure reason and impartiality. This is the most fulfilled and highest potential of a human being. We are free to be, and our will is our own. We are our own person, delightfully idiosyncratic, perfectly unique and absolutely genuine. We command our attention, with control, direction and aim, and live a life unencumbered by outside influences and impressions.

What is “attention?”

We have four types of attention – None, Scattered, Drawn and Directed.

No attention is deep sleep, out for the count. We are not even there, and unless we are stirred by a strong stimulus, we usually remain in that state until we naturally arouse and recover from it. We are meant to spend around ⅓ of our lives in regular sleep, because after every push in life, there must come a pause. If you wish to find out more about this, we explain in our teachings why there is a minor one third and major two third structure to our life.

Scattered attention is the second type of attention, and is our usual state, thinking one thing after another, over and over until we are exhausted. Triggered by anything external that disturbs us, and having no long term focus, just random, reactive thoughts. In this state, we jump when things surprise us, when loud noises occur, or when we are startled by others, and we often say things like “Gosh, I was miles away,” or “Where was I?”

We miss so much of real life in this mechanical and habitual state. We can even drive for miles, changing lanes, braking, accelerating, indicating, thinking about life, who said what to us, what we should have said back etc, and imagining all manner of life scenarios, but where we have been totally oblivious to what has happened during the last ten miles or so. We do the same when walking, so scattered in our awareness, that we hardly ever alight on anything of significance, and miss most of life that passes us by. When out walking, if we were in this state and were asked “Did you see that man’s hat?” “What man?” would be our usual response.

When we are like this we are just like machines, unthinking habit-driven automatons. We do not know what we did, we do not know the reason why we did things, they just happened to us, automatically. We have no real conscious choice, we just drift. 

In this state we often forget where we put things, forget what was said, and months or years later cannot even remember a single thing from that specific day. If the days of our lives were pages of a book, and each conscious moment wrote a line in that book, on days filled with scattered attention the page would be blank. Our lives looking back would seem shorter, less full, less momentous, just less. Perhaps that is why Gurdjieff had aphorism number 37 - Man is given a definite number of experiences—economizing them, he prolongs his life.

Drawn attention is when a loud noise or disturbance causes us to focus momentarily on something before we go scattered again. Video games or rapidly changing television scenes exacerbate drawn attention. We are not in control of it. Something controls us. We can be drawn as long as our energy is sustained. It is not of our own doing.

Directed attention is conscious and intentional and locks us into something where we feel a “flow”, and where we take in all that we focus on without distraction. According to Ashwin Sanghi, we used to have an attention span of 12 seconds. A study by Microsoft found that since the last decade it is less than 8 seconds, and that a goldfish now has a longer attention span of 9 seconds. We truly can and ought to have better attention than a goldfish. Constant stimulus from social media and incessant drama in life, from news and television and from gossip, does not help this. Mark Twain was reported to have quoted: “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.” 

We are hard-wired to look for danger in life, as this was what kept us alive in ancient times when wild animals roamed the plains, hills and forests. To know what berry tastes better than another was nice to know, but to know what animal could outrun us and kill us was vital to know. News capitalizes on our need for novelty, and very soon our senses get dulled to the same stimulus. So News needs to sensationalize everything, and feed us with more and more new things, an unending stream of drama we would do well to be without. Give up the News, gain inner peace. If something is important enough, and affects your immediate world, you’ll soon notice it naturally, or someone will tell you, for you to check for yourself.

Gurdjieff told us to believe nothing unless we can personally verify its veracity, and to not judge someone by the tales of others. Advice we would do well to heed nowadays.

We are meant to live from reason, impartially and objectively. Too often we live from our emotions, reacting to impressions that our intellectual center embellishes with all manner of imagination, fantasy and catastrophe, and which our emotional center frequently reacts to, alarmingly and irrationally.

Our five states of “I”

We have five states of “I,” and we use the word “I” quite automatically, without thought, and often very incorrectly. We sometimes state “I” to mean all of us, at all times, when it actually usually refers to a part of us, just in a particular moment. For example, we might say “I am cold,” implying all of me is cold, when in reality it may mean that just a part of me is cold right now, such as my hands or nose. Stating “I” like this is like claiming to be the founder and owner of a whole company, when in fact it’s just an intern. Speaking for us as a whole being, when we are actually fragmented and scattered. We are not meant to be Legion, we are meant to be one. Not partial, but impartial. It is better to be a subject in an objective world than an object in a subjective world. To achieve objective reality in our lives, we will experience an evolution of our sense of self, or personal “I.”

The five states of “I” as described in the Fourth Way, are: Multiplicity, Magnetic Center, Deputy Steward, Steward and Master.

It is a series of conscious evolution, and throughout this teaching we explain in careful detail, the connection between a diatonic musical octave and universal phenomena, including conscious phenomena. This evolution can be mapped to an ascending musical octave with notes: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti and Do

DO -  Apes are below man and are simply a law-conformable organism. Magnetic Center moments transform Apes into Man. Man lives between Apes and Magnetic Center as a Multiplicity — an Ape…spiritualized by the ability to have Magnetic Center moments, i.e., to perceive something higher than himself.

RE - Some of these Men risen to Multiplicities, make efforts in pursuit of these higher Magnetic Center moments. These efforts create good and honorable Deputy Steward postures in them (“I”s that want to make efforts to UN-be what one has been), which raise some of these Multiplicities, from living as Multiplicities, to living as pursuers of Magnetic Center moments.

MI - Enter…the Objective Exercise, otherwise known as “April Fool’s Exercise” as it was first presented by Russell to his students on 1st April one year. This exercise gives some of these Magnetic-Center-moment-pursuers the taste of Steward, i.e., self-consciousness. This ‘taste of Steward’ will raise some of these Magnetic-Center-moment-pursuers, from living as Magnetic-Center-moment-pursuers, to living as Deputy Stewards, i.e., beings with empowered, real, effort making “I”s in them that can now make real being-efforts to UN-be what they have been.

FA - Some of these effort-empowered-Deputy-Stewards, who have had the ‘taste of Steward’, will actually make efforts to attain it…and, with right exercises and the guidance of someone who has made the journey, they will hear the voice of Master and be raised, from living as effort-empowered-Deputy-Stewards, to living as Stewards, i.e., with a presence in them apart from the presence of their sensing, living organism.

SO - Some of these Stewards, who are present in the presence of themselves, in the process of exercising their presence in the present, will sense the completing principle, i.e., God … and with the sensing of the completing principle there will come a knowingness of obligation which, in turn, will raise them, from living in the presence of their presence, to living in Master, i.e., in the presence of all that is present, wherein there is reason and impartiality.

LA - Some of these Masters can go further but, in order to be raised, they must glimpse what is beyond God.

TI - After which, God starts over!

DO - a new octave. Indescribable from a lower position, and only genuinely known through experience and knowledge. 

What does being “awake” really mean?

Most things in life do not make much sense when we sit down and reflect upon them. We get told contradictory things, get filled with all sorts of opinions, and nowadays we sadly cannot easily tell the truth from the false. We hold grudges. We worry too much. We are concerned over trivial things that at the time seem huge, but years later we cannot even recall. Our lives are filled with the most unfortunate things in our minds, that rarely ever happen in reality.

Our body is always in the here and now, but our emotions and minds are not. We ought to seek being “bodyful” rather than mindful. Our minds are too cluttered as it is. Being awake is being present to all that is occurring to us in the moment, in our body, mind and emotions, free of tension, and able to respond in the most appropriate way, rather than react according to habit or programming.

Being awake is being in control of your own mind, body and emotions, rather than being subject to every trigger and impact that life can throw at us. It may not make life simpler and easier, but it changes your whole relationship to it, so that you are at peace in yourself and see things objectively, and see people without labels. Usually we only see the labels our minds bring up, and we only remember the last time we remembered something, not the original event itself. That’s why memory distorts grossly over time.

Being awake is being free to be who we are, what we are. We are not at the mercy of life, but we learn to master life and ourselves. We gain inner peace, and the ability to stop unnecessary thoughts, and transform emotions. If you think you already control your thoughts, try to stop them, or watch what happens when falsely accused of something, or if your sensitivities are touched.

When asleep, we remember nothing. When we are awake, we remember everything. The pages of the book of our life are full and vibrant.

In fact, our life even feels longer. How many times have you been bored, and time drags by so much, but afterwards, looking back, it seems like an instant, full of only vague memories that an event even happened? When awake, time flies by, in a natural flow state, the world is more full and rich, and when we look back we remember so much more of it, and more accurately.

Become what you have a right to be – awake, living life to the full, being what you essentially are, not what you are told to be, and treating others and yourself with kindness and respect. This freedom is available right now, and the replicable and provable method to achieve it has been captured in a single book, The Blueprint of Consciousness. 

Now, we no longer need retreats, teachers, guides, false prophets and false ways. We can have in our hand the means for our own personal liberation, and it can take as little as eight days to achieve.

An Objective Way to Awaken.

Until now, all ways to enlightenment or awakening have been subjective and unpredictable. All awakened teachers awoke subjectively, and often by surprise. As such, their schools died when they died. Why? Because no one can pass on to others the subjective way in which they themselves awoke. They can advise and guide others, but their subjective way was utterly unique and personal. People who follow that subjective way may get close, and perhaps may even succeed. That is, after decades of long hard work, but very few actually awaken – because each subjective way depends on chance, not on what is actually being taught. What is actually being taught is not the way, because it was not intentionally walked; it just happened.

An objective way is based on verifiable truths; ones that everyone can see, understand, realize, and repeat. There are very few things in this world that are like that, aside from numbers. One plus one is two, everywhere in this universe, and for everyone.

Russell A. Smith’s method of objective awakening is based upon a discovered structure and how that structure works. A structure that describes both our inner world of thoughts and emotions, and the outer physical world in which we live. If we could just align ourselves with it, we would be able to attain a natural state of being, and begin to feel all that comes with it. This teaching dispels all falsehoods and subjective ideas, shows us objective reality, and culminates in an objective exercise that will unify our lower centers, and allow us to awaken.

The awakening exercise is based on the structure of the Diatonic Enneagram, and has been tried and tested on hundreds of people, as part of an eight day inner journey. It is objective. Everyone can learn it. Everyone can do it. Everyone can awaken.

Russell thoroughly described the intricacies of that structure in his seminal book “Gurdjieff: Cosmic Secrets.” And while teaching it to others, formulated an eight day inner journey to awakening. He shared that journey with hundreds of people hundreds of times, then captured it in his current work The Blueprint of Consciousness – An Accelerated Path to Awakening, which not only contains the journey to awakening, but also the objective exercise to acquire it. 

The Blueprint of Consciousnesses is a distilled, edited, approved amalgam of the best parts of the best of these inner journeys. It is objective in its method, because there is no other version, no different way of doing it, and the inner journey itself is locked down at the highest level it can be.

This is Russell’s gift to the world, and enables him to speak to you as he would a student on an inner journey, but at your own pace, and with the highest possible input, spanning worlds 48 to 6, from self-remembering, to purging our falsehoods, and ultimately to attaining objective consciousness.

And this month, our gift to you is a ten per cent discount on the price of The Blueprint of Consciousness book and PDF, and also the audio guide of The Objective Exercise. Please use podcast10 (p-o-d-c-a-s-t-1-0 all lower case) as the discount code at store checkout on our website, valid for the remainder of August 2022. There is one code per person per product.

Your personal journey to awakening is now in your hands.

Thank you for listening.

That concludes part 1 of this podcast into the background and nature of THEDOG Teachings.

If you too would like to learn how to become objectively conscious, simply visit our website thedogteachings.com and acquire Russell Smith’s book, The Blueprint of Consciousness, which is also available as a PDF download.

There, you will be able to listen to other talks, obtain diagrams, animations, supporting videos, and much, much more.

But most importantly, you may fulfill your true potential!

In addition, you can also find us on Instagram and Facebook under THEDOG Teachings.

And as a reminder, we have two ZOOM classes every Saturday to assist you; one is for purchasers of The Blueprint of Consciousness, and the other is for those who have obtained the Master Exercises and the Double or Nothing Exercises. See under Resources/Zoom Classes for more details.

That’s at thedogteachings.com

T H E   D O G   T E A   C H I   N G S  Dot Com.

Goodbye, until next time.