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 part two of two where Russell continues to cover the subject of “Reason,” examining the process of developing objective reasoning and impartiality through rigorous self-examination, elimination of false beliefs, and the cultivation of a purified conscience, ultimately leading to a higher state of consciousness and understanding.

An observation was made regarding the reason exercises work to fulfill the aim of achieving a certain state of consciousness or self-remembering, is that they simply work.

Yes, it does. Great correlation between those. All these things are leading to our journey. If our journey, if our quest is to really become what a man's supposed to be, then we have to do things that are conducive to that. And therefore, those develop something in us just like the ability to place a tree across the chasm. These are the things we need to make our journey. And so we have to do exercises and learn the things so that I never doubled this thing over here, but I've worked on exercises to do things over here, and now I can do something similar, my Master exercises and my regular exercises. I didn't use, as Gurdjieff would say, Active Reasoning against this thing, but I did practice using Active Reasoning against these things.

OK, now I can apply the things I did that were in the vein of that thing to this thing and do the same thing. If it worked for those, it'll probably work for these others. So all of this builds our momentum and shows us how to gain the things we need to know to conquer the things that we must conquer in order to achieve the quest, if it's our quest, to become what we're supposed to become.

Anybody that's got any modicum of conscience can't read my paper and say, listen wrong. This can't be right. They go, what? This makes perfect sense. Of course it works this way.

Oh, that's where we're at. That's why we're at. And you can see some of the people here were just coming as a student and they had questions. Well, is intellect higher than they didn't understand. But once they left here, they did.

A question was then asked about what point does a formatory type of Reason become Objective Reason — is it only after achieving impartiality and thus freeing conscience from bias?

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 three 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, 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 in my conscience preventing me from acting in the way I would have acted from my Lord's 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 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 slat 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 really 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.

Then a question came, asking that by rigorously cleansing ourselves of biases, opinions, and judgments, can our conscience, which was initially burdened with false ideas from blindly accepting things, evolve into an emotional center free from personal and cultural prejudices, ultimately enabling Objective Reason with an emotional quality?

It starts with really the purging of the Intellectual Center. Conscience is instinctive moving in emotions that have been relevant to our position called conscience, Higher Emotional Center.

That's the conscience that's supposed to reach back and start to purge our Intellectual Center.

The Intellectual Center that has all the goddamn memory and all the models that trigger the emotions in us that in my three story diagram, it shows you how whatever the intellect has, it will create emotion to support it.

So the intellect has to change first before the emotions that supported can change. And then there's that picture of the lines of nine that come in from outside all these intellectual models we were given.

And then the natural way is that that's the intellectual model that I take in.

I will create these emotions that support that intellectual model who snakes are slimy. They must be because my intellectual model, you know, was given to me by Harry butts back in the fourth grade, because he told me they were. And since I believed that, I've now created an emotional model to support it.

So, we've got to purge our intellectual take on the world first, having a conscience is a way that we can reach back and start to, as we talked about many weeks ago, get down to this small palace stuff that we really know to be true, instead of all these false things that we were just told was true and took them on as, you know, because George Clooney said it, it really must be real.

And so therefore we then created these emotional models that support the intellectual of the false personality in us, these false intellectual models that have made us out. So then when we start to get rid of these false personalities, false intellectual models of the world, this intellect starts to move and gravitate to where it's supposed to be the beginning function of the of the Higher Mental Center called Objective Reason.

So, slowly by having the Higher Emotional Center reach back and rip out these stupid truths that we've got in our Intellectual Center, then the Intellectual Center starts to gravitate to real, what Reason is supposed to be, to taking the right data and doing something with it. You can't take the wrong data and do something with it, otherwise you're like me and you're still laying on the floor, calling out the words, “Mehantu,” so the head leader of the astral world can come down and take you out of your body and take you to Venus, which just happens to be the capital of all the whole universe, and happens to be right next on the next planet.

If you've got these false intellectual models, you've built a belief structure to support them. They cannot move up and gravitate up to where they're supposed to be and be real Reason, which is the ability to take the right models and say, “Well, I watched the movie once and the guy he prayed and a bridge and invisible bridge just appeared under his feet and he walked across to get to the Holy Grail. So, I'll just come to this chasm and I will pray that this thing is going under my feet and watch me. I'm going to walk right all across the chasm.”

Now that will probably be the only time that I manifest from that false belief structure, because I'll probably be dead at the bottom of the chasm. So, we don't want Reason to be predicated on wrong models because it will make us make invisible bridges under the right.

We need invisible bridges under our feet instead of right models, letting us cut down a tree and making it go across. So, we need the right Reason. Then, once we have eliminated all of this intellectual garbage that we've accumulated, Reason can start taking its right place to construct the environmental center to then reach back to the conscience, which is now not encumbered by all of these false belief structures, because it's reached back and helped the Intellectual Center get rid of them. And then the Reason can say, OK, hey, we're supposed to feel differently about the world now.

I get Reason. We're not supposed to have a project. The right Reason says, we're not supposed to think that about that. I don't have to say short people are inferior, or people with green eyes or better than people with brown eyes, or the people from the west coast know so much more than the people from the east coast.

So what the hell? That's stupid. And now, with the right Reason, I can purge the belief structures. Because again, I need the intellectual model to be there first that creates the belief structures. Well, right Reason means that conscience is being purged of its wrong belief structures because there's a right Reason in place to allow that to happen.

And so then it naturally starts to gravitate to where it belongs as being the emotional part of the Higher Mental Center, and therein becomes elevated to Impartiality.

And then with both of those working, the mechanical part, Reason, and the emotional part Impartiality, I become a being of Reason and Impartiality of a real eye and a real am, and maybe can withstand the shock of death.

This was followed by a final realization from a student that when they try to analyze what they truly know, they find that they don't know much at all, since they can usually trace their ideas back to unverified sources, leading them to conclude that they know very little, and they wondered if this recognition might invite their conscience to become more present.

That's exactly what you need to do. That's exactly what everybody on this objective journey will do. Once they get conscience present, it starts to become uncluttered of the intellectual models that have plagued us and made it into what it's not supposed to be.

I know for myself, I thought I knew a lot of shh about a lot of things. You know, if your car didn't work, I'd be going, I know how to fix cars and I read that book and I know about that thing and I know about this thing and I got all this wonderful knowledge that I've acquired.

But like you, when I really woke up, and I look back at these intellectual pieces that I had, it was, “Oh my God, I don't know any of these to be true.” I never did that. I never read that book. I never fixed that car. Just because I read one place that they said solenoids cause the bump, bump noise and this guy said his car is making a bump, bump, bump sound. I said it's probably your solenoid.

“Oh my God, I had no knowledge of that!” And so this is what I mean about getting down to our little foul of stuff. There might not really be a lot in that intellectual stuff that we've got. But by eliminating it, we are elevating our conscience to a higher place because remember, our conscience is predicated on centers that are built based on what our intellectual models are.

So, as we clean up our intellectual models, that is realized, I really don't know these things. I really don't know that. But remember, and I think I've told most people that the day I woke up, I ran around. Everybody I knew hoping that it asked me a question. So, I could say, “I don't know. I don't know. I don't know nothing about that. I don't know,” because that was the first time in my life. I could really say, I don't know because I thought I knew something about everything.

So, we have to get to that state. And yes, the more you get down to your small pile, the greater your conscience will be because it's not being influenced by false personality.

—--

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. 

That’s T H E D O G  T E A C H I N G S  Dot Com.

Goodbye, until next time.