Welcome to a new series of podcasts based upon the teachings of Russell A. Smith, a man who discovered an objective and accelerated way to awaken higher consciousness, the seats of conscience, pure reason and impartiality. Russell’s work expands upon the Fourth Way teachings of George I. Gurdjieff, and deciphers much of what Gurdjieff left behind. 

In this series, we play extracts of recordings of Russell teaching his classes. This episode is where we cover the subject of “labels” and our tendency to label things.

We begin with a question that was asked to describe the downfall of labeling.

Cool, the downfall of labelling is that as soon as you label something you cease to see it, you only see your label, that's one of my models about when people invented body types and any underground types or horoscopes for that fact, now we have these twelve labels or nine labels and now everything is reduced into this simple label and so my comment of a guy who was told he was a Venetian could now make thousands of manifestations that are non-Venetian but the moment he makes one that fits in within the parameters of the label, Venetian, the instructor, teacher, counsellor, whatever, see, that's the Venetian thing I told you you're a Venetian, so we cease to see reality, we don't see what things are anymore, we only see the label we put on, Gurdjieff calls them the cliche phrases and stuff that we stick on stuff, which is really just a formatory apparatus manifestation that we think the quicker we label something, the easier the breaker will understand it, which is probably the opposite of actual understanding, because understand something, to no means to know all, so a label means by labeling it, we're saying we know it by this label and therefore we know very little, which has nothing to do with, to know means to know all, so labels get us in trouble as those things you said because then we only see the world in terms of the labels we put on things instead of as actually what they are

A comment was then made concerning people needing to define things with labels, thinking that will help them understand what that thing is.

Yeah, you know, I certainly have added models of that going over the principle that you “can't do” with one of the students, and trying to really hammer that home and decide the idea that you can't do, and then the response was can you give me another word to use other than “can't do” or something, because you know the model is, “If you can give me another label maybe I can get it with that label because I'm having trouble with this one.”

So, again the problem is we just use labels and we want to avoid them, so we can see everything, like Gurdjieff  said, you look out the window instead of seeing the beautiful sunset, you see the specks on the window, so you fix onto something which is your label and then you miss what's really there, So, that's what we want to do. And don't just change one label for a new one and think we now can understand it because we put a better label on it.

Real understanding takes a lot of lines of movement, you know we got to imagine a line of movement which is something that's directing to a label, but to really understand it there must be a line of movements from this direction and from that direction, and from this direction, kind of like my Gamma Knife surgery on the tumors where they shot radiation from hundreds of thousands of different directions, and they all passed through the tumor, so they all converged at this one spot, it would be like, now that would be a good understanding if all of my lines of thinking converged into the same spot, then I wouldn't have a label.

I'd have something that was grasped from where no matter where I looked, no matter where a person was on the mountain, I could describe it from anywhere, because I can see that spot from everywhere, not just from one place, so that's that model.

A question was raised about us constantly receiving impressions, and, if in moments of no labeling and no thinking, do these impressions focus on other centers like the instinctive center?

That's a good question. The definition of what is that impression is the smallest increment of thought, feeling or sensation. So, impressions beat your heart, take in your air, your diaphragm goes in and out and your heart goes lub and dub. Somebody is there lubbing and dubbing it constantly for 80 years, 90 years, every so many seconds. Oh, my goodness, those are impressions. They're the most fundamental, rudimentary impressions. We can't live without those; stop the heart beating and you die. So yeah, impressions are constant, but when we get the intellect involved, then we start looking at the impressions of our, as you brought it up earlier, labels, that we start to affix a label on to these impressions to define the world. You know, hush-dar-dam, be present for every breath, imagine being the every time you inhaled and exhaled and that was what you felt incensed was the moment of your breathing. Instead of your anger, it's your neighbor or you wish you had a better car or you hadn't been as romantic as this week or you didn't like last week's dinner or you got that damn award-benefit thing to go to, that you're willing to go to tomorrow and you're filled with consternation about that. Oh, my goodness, everything is there except the impressions of the moment. So to get down to just the real impressions would probably be a good thing instead of cluttering all up with the ones we used to define the world by. So you cannot live without impressions, but we don't want to use just the formatory apparatus of impressions as the labeling mechanism to define what's going on in life. So that's just a toughie. You can't live without impressions, but we have some choice of which ones we then become a slave to.

A question was then asked about the exercise “Viewing Without Verbalizing,” with reference to an experience where children at a school were asked to listen to the sounds of the wind and the birds, but then someone wanted to name the birds for them, not for them to just listen.

Yeah, that's very much the model. With our labels, we never see the truth in a sense. We only see the labels. So, you can't experience the bird if you're busy labeling it, because the way the world works, as soon as you label it, you're done with it, because you've labeled it. It's already been fixed as something. And so, you don't really get to experience what it is. You only experience the label that you've placed on it.

So, viewing without verbalizing is trying to break that formatory apparatus that wants to label everything, because that's the way it thinks it needs to understand the world by its labels, instead of experiencing from what it actually is.

And the old story went back the night. I was working with a student many, many, many years ago, and we were sitting outside listening, and I said, hey, listen to that plane going above the night. Listen to that plane. And he listened for two seconds. He says, sounds like a Cessna, a three-something-something, with the dual something-something …

But at that point, my Higher  said, “You need to snap this guy.”  I said, “I didn't say, tell me what it was. I said, listen to it.” His eyes went big, and he looked at me, and he understood that, geez, he wasn't really experiencing the plane. He was too busy with his description of what it was. And, you know, we became great buds for life, and a terrific student. So, yeah, Viewing Without Verbalizing is to break the labels we put through the formatory apparatus, who doesn't see what things are. He only see the labels. She fixes on them.

A comment was made about how difficult it is to speak about reality, when one cannot be sure what particular “I” inside someone the words will fall upon.

Oh it's true, a part of the class today was all about labels and the way everybody takes something in a certain way and so no matter what you're saying they're going to take it in the label of the way they want to understand it or it might be totally different than what you actually meant so you're right we do have to dance around that and it's hard to speak to anybody because you know they're going to take whatever you say and see it in terms of whatever eye it lands on it whatever label they gravitate towards if they want to place it on.

Another observation was made that the world appears as what we project onto it and label it as, not as it actually is.

Uh, I say that's a very clear observation. You know, those reminds me of the Star Wars when Luke was on the planet with Yoda and there was this kind of distortion on the planet something, and Luke sensed there was something in this place and he looked at Yoda he says “What's in there?” and Yoda said, “Only what you take!”

Well, so that's probably the way it is, just like we only see our own labels. We only see what we gonna, what we want things to be. So, we don't see reality we just see the levels we put on, to free ourselves from that labels, starting to see the world as it really is. Yeah, there's incredible states of awareness and calmness and cleanness and observation and clarity, so much truth is available. But when you're filled with something you can't have any of that because you're filled with something. You've got to become the empty cup in order to be to be filled up with the real things. You know the old statement is, “My cup runneth over.” Well, only because you've filled up with so much garbage that you're done. We try and put any truth in there, it's gonna spill. If you were an empty cup, then it probably wouldn't runneth over.

A question was then asked if Objective Reason occurs when Impartiality has been achieved, and reaches back and frees our Conscience from being biased.

That's a really great question. We call it, there's four states of consciousness. There's sleep, waking sleep, self-consciousness, and objective consciousness. And Ouspensky applied the idea of truth to what that meant. In sleep, we can't know truth. There's vague sounds reaching the sleeping person, and we might make a dream about those sounds, but there's no truth available to him.

Waking sleep, or relative consciousness, we only know truth that's relative. Someone said, “Become a Baptist. They're the only ones that go to heaven,” and we take on that truth, and therefore the truth is just relative. Relative to where we grew up and the customs and what we were taught and told by our culture or neighborhood, our society, or where we come from. It's all relative. And so probably a great deal of that probably isn't really true either in the sense of what real truth is. It's just relative truth.

And then if we can find a way to wake up and we can get our emotional center, then we're supposed to have this truth of Self. That's when we have a conscience. We can see ourselves, “Oh, God, I lied. Oh, God, I held accounts. Oh, God, I don't like that person. No, I don't want to be that way. I don't want to think badly about these things. Ooh, conscience nags at me and eats at me and says, don't be that way. Don't yell at your daughter. Don't kick the dog. And that's not right.”  There's something my conscience preventing me from acting in the way I would have acted from my lower stories. So hopefully that's there to guide me, and I can have truth of self.

But then when we get Master, objective consciousness, then it's called truth of everything, and there it's called objective. So objective reason is a property of the Higher Mental Center. Reason can just be a property when the Intellectual Center is functioning in a man, because that center is a part of the Higher Mental Center. So, regular reason that we probably see people start wars and build bridges and write books is just down in the Intellectual Center.

Objective reason is when it's coming from the Higher Mental Center, and there's something about it because it deals with real truth and not with subjective truth, which is what it's going to function at down at intellect.

I would say that probably is a good possibility that men that function from objective reason see things the same. There's no slant to the reason there. It's just the way it is. “Why is the sky blue?"  Well, when I grew up it was blue because the ocean was blue and it was a reflection of the ocean. That's what they told me, and I believe that for years and years and years and years. And I would defend that and preach that and tell others that, until somebody came along later and said, well, actually, the molecules in the air are so far apart, and since the light that comes through is at different wavelengths, and long wavelengths, or get through the organization of these particles in the air easier, so they go straight through, and the blue light is shorter wavelengths. And so it ends up bouncing off and ricocheting back and forth against all these particles. And we see that reflected in the sky. The sky is blue because the blue light is ricocheting through the atmosphere and the long red waves make it through. So, we see the blue and therefore the ocean is really reflecting the sky. Not like you were told the sky was reflecting the ocean.

And people of objective reason are all going to agree that's true. And then I'm going to go, “No, no, no, it's really the ocean reflecting the sky,” because they're going to look at the knowledge that's probably based on a scientific way, not just a belief structure, but is able to be tested and proven over and over and over again. And therefore, things like that have a tendency to lead themselves to objective reason, so that we can shoot a spaceship and have it make it to Pluto at the right time by gravity assisting off these other planets. And everybody who does the math, thank God objective reason, depends on math is a good fundamental language for it because it doesn't lie like normal men do.

And so that's what objective reason stands as that mechanical part of the Higher Mental Center. And I'll remind you, it's supposed to function automatically. Whoa, just right reason.

But your question about impartiality is when conscience then transcends the mechanical part of the Higher Mental Center and becomes impartiality. Our conscience now has been accelerated up into a position where it becomes higher. And for it to get there, the Reason has to have cleansed the Intellectual Center from all of its biased feelings and judgments, because only the right reason that's coming from the mechanical part can allow the conscience part to really become impartial. And that means a sense of the world without labels or without models, without judgments and without opinions, that just sees things the way they are.

And Gurdjieff said this simply said, he said, “Picture a cat in your mind.” And then he said, “And now it's hard for most people to see a cat without a mouse or without some cheese, without their favorite kind of cheese.” I mean, there's all these things we bias it with and we opinionate it with, or we see a Siamese cat instead of just a cat, we see a specific kind. We want to already label it and determine it to be something based on our formulation that we want to give it, rather than as a something that it is without the formulation.

So real impartiality means no bias, no judgment, but you can't get that to be there when your Reason is clinging on to intellectual models, because remember, it's the Intellectual Center that makes up the mechanical part of the Higher Mental Center.

So, if the Intellectual Center has its own biased models that it's learned, I mean, if you really think that aliens are coming down and making crop circles, I can probably tell you, truthfully, you'll probably never become impartial, because you haven't even got rid of the intellectual models to allow intellect to become real reason. How do you expect it to reach back and help conscience move up and become impartiality?

So, we have to work on intellect first and get rid of the goofy stuff that we believe and the opinions and biases, because that's all in our intellectual models.

So, we have exercises that allow us to change our intellectual models to make our conscience respond differently, and that prepares it to not be biased in its conscience sense or the feeling about the world, but then can become impartial without that biased feeling about the world.

Finally, an observation was made that once we stop labeling things that happen to us, we may begin to see what’s actually going on, with an example given of a bodily reaction being seen as due to eating dairy, rather than previously the reaction being seen as anxiety.

It does emphasize a good point. The problem with humanity is that we like to label sh**, and labeling will keep you from joining the kingdom of heaven because you won't see any truth. You just see your own labels. So, we've got to refrain from labeling. We got to learn to View Without Verbalizing. We have to stop the formatory apparatus from affixing its label to everything.

And, as you get down to a smaller and smaller pile of stuff, you're not so apt to label because you know you verify that stuff wasn't really true. So, you can't use that for your labels. But as long as man only has his false personality, he's full of labels. And therefore, he wants to label everything this or that.

If he studied horoscopes, then, you know, the moment you see somebody with a manifestation, he goes, “Oh, he must be an Aries because that's how Aries do it.” You know, I mean, he doesn't see truth. He can only see his labels. So, something took place and he found himself free from that bias of labeling. He wasn't caught by, “Oh my God, what is this? It must be this, it must be that.” There's nobody there to label. And so reason was able to pop in and go, “It was the dairy.” Well, okay, that was what it was.

And so we got to free ourselves from our propensity to think that we know or can understand something because we can stick a label on it.

You know, that's something that all men do. And the more we awake, the less we label stuff and not labeling it is the first step to impartiality. Think about that. The moment you can not label stuff, you're starting to become impartial because you're not partial to your label.

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That concludes today’s podcast. Thank you for listening.

If you would like to learn more about Russell’s work on how to become objectively conscious, simply visit our website thedogteachings.com and acquire Russell Smith’s book, The Blueprint of Consciousness - An Accelerated Path to Awakening, which is also available as a PDF download.

There, you will also be able to listen to other talks, access transcripts of these podcasts, diagrams, animations, supporting videos, and much more.

But most importantly, you may fulfill your true potential, which is your right, and it no longer takes a lifetime to achieve.

And as a reminder, we have two ZOOM classes every Sunday to assist you; one is for purchasers of Mr. Smith’s book, and the other is for those who have additionally obtained the Master Exercises and the Double or Nothing Exercises. See under Resources/Zoom Classes for more details.

At the thedogteachings.com. 

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Goodbye, until next time.