Gurdjieff:
Man is born…with a mechanism adapted for receiving many kinds of impressions. The perception of some of these impressions begins before birth….
The construction of these receiving apparatuses is the same… (A)ll the impressions…are noted down, from the first day of life and even before. Besides this…all newly received impressions are connected with those previously recorded…
(I)mpressions once experienced never disappear; they are preserved…where they are written down… —Views from the Real World, New York, February 1924 – For an exact study
By itself a center has no consciousness, no memory; it is a chunk of…meat… which merely possesses a special capacity of recording…
But it does not understand… Later, if I ask it a question, it repeats in reply what I have said. It will not change in…a thousand years—it will always remain the same. Our mind has no critical faculty in itself, no consciousness, nothing. And all the other centers are the same.
What then is our consciousness, our memory, our critical faculty? It’s very simple. It is when one center specially watches another, when it sees and feels what is going on there and, seeing it, records it all within itself. —Views, New York, February 24, 1924 – Influences
A.R. Orage:
10,000 impressions of three different kinds…enter…our minds every second. These make chemical impressions; the body registers, remembers them all. This is the fact of memory. The ability to recall…(t)he power of recollection, is quite another matter… —Gurdjieff’s Emissary in New York: Talks and Lectures with A.R. Orage 1924-1931, Monday, 28 October 1929, Threefold Brains
Maurice Nicoll:
All through this Work…the effort of remembering must be made. Memory lies in all three centres. Let us suppose a man…makes an aim and then decides to keep to it. But in order to keep it, he must remember. He must not merely remember what his aim is, but he must remember why he made it, and what led him to decide to keep it. If he merely remembers his aim as words, as a sentence—namely, that his aim is not to do this or that, not to react in this or that way…it is not enough. He is only remembering in a very small part of the Intellectual Centre. To remember in a real way he must go back and re-create the situation where he made his aim, and think of its meaning, and re-feel the circumstances when he decided to keep it, etc. Full memory is a question of all three centres working together, and an aim includes all three. —Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol 1, Birdlip, January 3, 1942, Commentary On Effort
Mr. Ouspensky explained…that we must try to observe different kinds of memory in ourselves. He said each centre, each part of a centre, and each subdivision of a centre had its own kind of memory… that each ‘I’ has its own memory because ‘I’s are arranged in a certain order, and live in these different parts of centres…
Since every centre and… part… and…subdivision of a centre has a different kind of memory we should expect to observe different kinds of memory in life…
For example, some…have a very good memory for tunes but…not…the words of a song, whereas some…remember… words but not the tune… .
(S)ome people have a very good memory for faces, probably with no names attached; on the other hand, people may remember names very well…
There are many examples… but…see where your memory is good and…bad. All memories have their uses. The main point is to realize there are many different kinds of memory, and that (they)…have different qualities…
Self-Remembering is on a quite different level… (I)n Self-Remembering all…memory of the Work enters, not necessarily consciously but by a high level of association. ‘I’s that are in higher parts of centres have a far more comprehensive memory than that of little ‘I’s… These bigger ‘I’s can take in two or three things together and relate them, because they have a wider vision. That is why the memory of these ‘I’s is quite different…
You get into bigger ‘I’s either through an emotional state or through attention. Directed attention…can…make…it possible to remember yourself because it puts you into a chain of conscious associations, voluntarily acquired…by choice. Here the memory of everything is quite different because everything is in the right order… This is special memory where things are joined together by similar emotional states, by a similar taste…
Now you will see why, in the Work, memory is taken as one of the most important of all things and why the purification of memory is so important. To keep the memory of useless things alive is not the right use of memory. Memory must become selective… —Psychological Commentaries, Vol. 2., Birdlip, January 7, 1945, Commentary On Memory