Come back to the present

The Fourth Way and Gurdjieff’s stop exercise

This is where the app came from. The original idea was to be able to do the stop exercise on your own. In Gurdjieff’s work someone would call out “stop!” at any moment and everyone froze exactly as they were, and from that position they observed themselves. The point was not the stillness, but that the command came from outside and could not be foreseen: it caught you exactly as you had been a second earlier.

Without a group there is nobody to call out. A sound from a phone is not the same thing, but it keeps what matters: it arrives when you are not expecting it and leaves no time to prepare.

Once it was built, keeping it for that alone was a waste. A reminder that interrupts, that cannot be anticipated and that asks nothing works just as well in any practice concerned with presence. Hence the rest of this page.

Gurdjieff started from a diagnosis: we live asleep. We believe we decide and that we act, and in fact everything simply happens to us. In In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky describes trying to remember himself while walking through St Petersburg and finding that he could go hours, and whole days, without a single moment of self-remembering. It was not that he was not trying: it was that he forgot he was trying.

Hence the image of the alarm clock. Gurdjieff said a sleeping man can be woken by an alarm clock, but that he grows used to it far too quickly and stops hearing it: you need several, and they must not always sound the same. That is why Revenir offers a random interval: a reminder every half hour on the half hour becomes predictable within days, and one that might arrive at any moment between twenty minutes and an hour does not.

It is worth saying what the bell does not do. Self-remembering is not thinking about yourself or taking inventory of your feelings: it is the divided attention Gurdjieff described as an arrow with two points, one towards what you are doing and one towards the one doing it, at the same time. No sound produces that. The bell only marks the moment; what comes after is up to you.

There is a second use, simpler and probably more useful at the start: self-observation. When it rings, before correcting anything, notice where you were, what posture you were in and what you were chewing over. Without judging it. Most of the work begins there.

Our infinite thanks to the Gurdjieff groups that keep the Master’s teaching alive today.

Mindfulness and vipassana: the bell of mindfulness

The bell of mindfulness is exactly this. At Plum Village, the community Thich Nhat Hanh founded, it rang several times a day: on hearing it, everyone stopped whatever they were doing, breathed three times and carried on. In time they treated the telephone the same way: nobody answered before the third ring, and those two rings were for breathing.

The word says it: sati, the Pali term we translate as “mindfulness”, comes from a root meaning memory and would be better rendered as to remember. It is not concentrating harder, but realising — after twenty minutes on autopilot — that you are here and that this is happening now.

On a vipassana retreat the whole day is held up by bells, which mark the sitting, the meal, the walk and the silence. It is one of the reasons it feels easier there. Back home that structure disappears and the practice has nothing to lean on. That is the gap Revenir fills: it does not replace the morning sitting, it keeps it company through the other twenty-three hours.

Zen and the bell of the zendo

A zendo runs on sound, not on clocks. The han, a wooden board, is struck before zazen; a bell opens and closes the sitting, and another marks kinhin, walking meditation. Nobody watches the time there: they listen to it.

Outside the zendo there is none of that. Dogen devoted an entire text to instructions for the monastery cook, the tenzo, because he insisted that practice is not separate from washing the rice or scrubbing a bowl: the sitting and ordinary life are the same place. Holding to that on a day of work and screens costs more than sitting for forty minutes.

A reminder spread across the day is a modest support for that, and it fits Zen’s suspicion of anything that turns into routine: the bell does not reward you, does not congratulate you and does not keep a streak. It rings and falls quiet.

Sufi dhikr and the bells of the monasteries

In Sufism, dhikr means remembrance or mention: the practice of not forgetting, sustained by repetition until it stays there while you walk, eat or work. The word turns out to be the same one as in Buddhism and the Fourth Way, and that is no coincidence: what gets lost is not information, it is presence.

In Christian monasteries the day had been cut up by bells for centuries — matins, lauds, vespers, compline — for an almost identical reason: to stop whole hours going by without anyone lifting their head. The Angelus rang at noon so that whoever was out in the fields would stop for a moment, and Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection wrote a short book about practising the presence of God while scrubbing pots in the monastery kitchen.

The theologies could hardly be more different and the mechanism is the same: an outer sound so that the inner one does not get lost. If you come from any of these traditions it will feel familiar; if you come from none, it works just the same.

Self-enquiry: Ramana Maharshi’s question

Ramana Maharshi reduced the whole of practice to a single sustained question: who am I? It is not a question to answer — answering it with a name or a job is how you dodge it — but one to hold: to turn attention back towards the one who is attending, and stay there.

The practical difficulty is that the question dissolves within minutes: you resolve to hold it when you get up and by mid-morning you have gone hours without remembering. A reminder at an unpredictable moment brings it back without your calendar deciding when, and that matters: if it always arrived at eleven o’clock, at eleven o’clock you would be ready.

Yoga and ordinary life

What holds on the mat tends to fall apart the moment the phone rings. The visible part of yoga — the asanas — is the easiest to fit into a timetable; what costs is the rest: pratyahara, drawing the senses back from the noise, or svadhyaya, the study of oneself, neither of which has a fixed hour because their place is the whole day.

And there are those who follow no tradition: people who want to cut off rumination before it becomes anxiety, who have spent eight hours at a laptop and are glad of something that reminds them to drop their shoulders and breathe, or who reach seven in the evening with no idea where the day went. That use counts just as much. You do not have to belong to anything to want to be present in your own life.