1. Why Keep a Record
Every other practice in the Order depends on this one. Without a record, there is no way to know whether a working had any effect, whether a method is worth keeping, whether you are changing or only feel that you are, or whether the story you tell about your practice bears any resemblance to what actually happened.
Memory is not a record. Memory revises. It keeps the dramatic and loses the dull, it smooths contradictions, and it quietly rewrites the past to agree with what you now believe. Within a few weeks of any significant working, your memory of it will have changed. Within a year, it may bear little resemblance to the event. Only what was written at the time can be trusted to tell you what the time was like.
The record is also, and this is less often said, the only teacher that cannot flatter you. A human teacher may be kind, or may want to keep you as a student, or may simply be mistaken. Your own handwriting, read back a year later, has no such motives.
2. What to Record
Each entry should contain the following, in this order:
- Date and time, including the time the working began and ended.
- Place, and any relevant conditions: light, noise, temperature, interruptions.
- State: your physical and emotional condition before you began, in a sentence or two. Note sleep, food, illness, and mood. These matter more than most practitioners expect.
- Intent: the single sentence you wrote before the working and spoke at its opening.
- Procedure: what you actually did, step by step, including anything you changed or left out.
- Observation: what you perceived, felt, and thought during the working, described as plainly as you can, without interpretation.
- Interpretation: what you think it means, clearly marked as interpretation and kept separate from observation.
- Afterward: your state when you finished.
The separation of observation from interpretation is the most important habit in this text. "I felt a presence in the room" is an interpretation. "I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle, and had a strong impression that someone was standing behind me to the left" is an observation. The second can be examined later. The first has already decided what happened.
3. A Template
Many practitioners find it useful to begin each entry from the same template, at least for the first year. The following is the one most of the Keepers have used. Copy it, change it, or ignore it.
DATE: TIME BEGUN: TIME ENDED: PLACE: CONDITIONS: STATE BEFORE: INTENT: PROCEDURE: OBSERVATION: INTERPRETATION: STATE AFTER: REVIEW NOTES (added later, dated):
Leave space after each entry for review notes. When you read the entry again a month or a year later, add what you now see, and date the addition. Never change the original entry. If it was wrong, the review note will say so.
4. The Night Pages
The record should also include dreams. Keep the notebook beside the bed, and when you wake from a dream, write it down at once, before you move, speak, or look at anything else. Dreams fade in minutes. Write in the present tense, and write whatever you can recover, however fragmentary. A single image, written immediately, is worth more than a whole story reconstructed at breakfast.
Mark dream entries clearly so that they cannot be confused with entries for workings. The Order calls these the night pages. Over months, they often show patterns that are invisible in any single entry: recurring images, figures, and places, and connections between dreams and the workings that preceded them.
As with workings, keep observation and interpretation apart. Write the dream as it was. If you think it means something, say so separately.
5. Honesty in the Record
A record is only as useful as it is honest, and honesty in a private notebook is harder than it sounds. Nobody else will read it, and so there seems to be no reason to lie. But the temptation is not to deceive others. It is to deceive yourself, and that temptation is constant.
- Record failure. Write down the workings that produced nothing, the days you skipped, and the times you gave up halfway. They are as informative as the successes, and often more so.
- Record boredom. Long stretches of the record will be dull. That is what practice is actually like, and a record that hides it will mislead you about what practice is.
- Do not embellish. If an experience was faint, write that it was faint. If you are unsure whether something happened, write that you are unsure.
- Do not pre-interpret. Describe first. Decide later, if at all.
- Note ordinary explanations. If you were tired, hungry, ill, anxious, or had been reading something vivid before the working, say so.
6. Reviewing the Record
A record that is never read is only half a record. Set aside time to read it back regularly.
- Monthly, read the past month's entries in a single sitting and write a short summary: what you practiced, what changed, what did not.
- Yearly, read the whole year, and write a longer review. Ask what you believed a year ago that you no longer believe, and why.
- When in doubt about whether a method works, whether a pattern is real, or whether you are progressing, go to the record before going anywhere else.
When reading for patterns, be careful with coincidence. Over a long enough record, striking coincidences are certain to appear. They may mean something, and they may not. Note them, and see whether they repeat. A pattern that appears once is an anecdote. A pattern that appears under the same conditions many times is worth taking seriously.
7. Privacy and the Record
The Order publishes everything it teaches. That does not mean that you must publish everything you do.
Your record is yours. It will contain things that no one else should read: your fears, your desires, the names of people in your life, and the details of your inner world. The Order's commitment to open access concerns teaching, not persons. Nothing in the Seven Tenets or the Seven Coils asks you to expose your private life.
When you reach the Open Ring and wish to give your work away, give the work: the method you developed, the insight you reached, the text you wrote. Draw it from your record, but do not hand over the record itself unless you truly wish to. The privacy of persons is not the secrecy of teaching.
Keep the notebook somewhere safe. If you keep it in electronic form, protect it as you would any other private document.