What Keeps Me Asleep?

What Keeps Me Asleep?

At the outset of the Work, a big question is: what keeps me asleep? There are many mechanical tendencies and sleep-inducing habits to study in the Fourth Way. Start anywhere you suspect sleep; no effort is wasted. Efforts to struggle with these obstacles to consciousness eventually also provide insight into what is called “chief feature,” the hub of a person’s particular form of sleep.

Chief feature is the go-to, always ready to fill the gap, mechanical part of us. When I experience friction or stress of almost any kind, my chief feature fills this void. It expresses itself through imagination, identification, or expressions of negative emotions, but my experience revolves around a form of chief feature. When I am struggling, suffering, or experiencing day-to-day frictions, my machine reverts to chief feature. I want to say it's comfortable, but it's better to say it's normal. It is the part of our sleep that is determined to fend off the world with a ready-made orientation and to place ourselves in the center of it.

For me personally, my chief feature is nonexistence, which is common for many passive and positive types. (Using the word “my” is a funny pronoun because it's not mine; sleep is no one's, no more than the air is mine.) When the heat gets turned up, I disappear. People with nonexistence are often the folks who you forgot were at the table or are wallflowers at a party or, in some cases, are so preoccupied with “caring” for others that they don't take care of themselves as they should.

I want to keep this essay brief. The machine likes to talk about itself even when it is describing weaknesses or mechanical tendencies. According to my teacher, if vanity is not your chief feature, it is your second feature. My ego, my sense of self, views the world exclusively from a singular point of view. It makes sense, obviously, but ego or vanity misses the mark: a machine celebrating being a machine. If you were trying to wake up, it is not competition; it is not something one shows off; it is not a badge of anything on the level of life.

So, my advice to the reader is to pay attention to how your machine reacts in moments of stress or friction. This might provide a clue on what your chief feature is. Knowing your chief feature is a way to get ahead of the curve. How so? You can anticipate your mechanical response if you understand your machine better and insert self-remembering at that moment. For a passive type like me with nonexistence, there are times when I need to manifest more to take space when I would naturally avoid the limelight or confrontation. But don't mistake working with features and resisting the mechanical pull as a substitute or antidote to sleep. The answer to sleep is a higher state, not a higher performing person. We're not trying to create a perfect machine that runs without any errors or weaknesses.

We want knowledge of our lower self to inform our levels of effort at achieving a higher state of consciousness. When you are remembering yourself, you can do anything, in a sense, without disturbing the state. What I mean is that working with features is not about fine-tuning the machine so that it produces higher centers. It doesn’t work that way. The machine is a machine. When we remember ourselves, we are operating from our higher centers, our higher self, and in a sense, in the context of this topic, we no longer are a machine. The machine is what is observed; the observer is our higher self. You are not your chief feature.

I hope this is not too jumbled up for you to understand working with chief features. Let me know in your comments if you had any observations you would like to share or questions about finding your true self through work on chief features.

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Ulysses and the Sirens, Leon Auguste Adolphe Belly