(22.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - WRONG WORK OF CENTRES - Part V. - pp.84-87
This is number (22.) of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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Links to each commentary will be put on the following Contents page, as we progress through the book:
Birdlip, November 28, 1941
Part V.—In this paper, which is the last of the series on the Wrong Work of Centres, we will begin with the Emotional Centre in regard to its negative side, but I am going to digress a good deal on the subject of negative emotions themselves.
It was said in the last paper that the Intellectual Centre has, naturally, a negative part. But this is not the case with the Emotional Centre. The negative part of the Emotional Centre is the seat of negative emotion. But naturally there is no such part in the centre: it is acquired. And it can be said at once that whenever this acquired negative part of the Emotional Centre is active, it means wrong work of the centre. And it is no exaggeration to say that the Emotional Centre very rarely works in the right way, owing to the action of this acquired negative part with which it has become, as it were, infected from its contact with life. For negative emotions govern life, perhaps especially to-day, and people cling to their unhappy negative emotions more than to anything else. Now the infection of negative emotions (like the infection of negative thinking) introduces itself gradually into a growing child, for a child is born awake (on its own scale) into a world of sleeping people, and, by imitating them, learns only to fall asleep in its turn: and among many other things it imitates negative emotions—that is, the facial expressions, the intonations, the words and phrases that spring out of the negative states of other people. The child imitates all these and so gradually begins to feel what they represent. In this way, the negative feelings of its elders gradually communicate themselves to the child and after a time the child begins to shew negative emotions and to sulk and brood and nag and feel sorry for itself and so on. After all, what else can the child do? And again, what else can those who are already infected with negative emotions do, since they are entirely unaware that they are negative and have never heard of the idea, and, as a rule, if they ever do hear it, are certain that they are never negative. So you see how difficult it is to alter this repeating, ever-recurring chain of cause and effect, this continual inevitable infection and reinfection, which is worse than any other infection, physical or moral. Who is going to break it? Or what can break it? The only thing that can break it is for a man to hear, see, understand and realize what negative emotions are and start with himself. For if even one person shifts his position in this respect in the close mesh-work of life, in the immoveable jam of human beings, he will give room to others. But this will only be the case when he works on his negative emotions genuinely from the deepest, inner, individual perception of the truth of the horror and uselessness of negative emotions, for that is the point where real work starts, from this inner vision. You must all understand that you can work from different places, or, as it were, depths, in you. You can work for superficial reasons or for deeper reasons. When a man
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works on himself for rewards or praise or position or duty, or from a certain kind of conceit or pride or self-merit, or some picture of himself, or from honour or from trying to please, or imitation, or fear, as from fear of loss of reputation, fear of criticism, fear of losing friendship, and so on, and so on—all these motives or sources of his will in him (some better and some worse) are not yet the man himself working from himself. He is working externally to himself. These motives are a series of substitutes for the real 'I' in a man—substitution 'I's, some of which form Deputy Steward and, as I said, some are better and some are worse, some are useful and some are hindrances—that is, some are more internal and so more towards essence or the real part of a man and some are more external and so towards false personality or the imaginary person we take ourselves as and on whom we all spend so much force, thought, time and money in keeping going, amidst such clouds of negative emotions and frictions.
It is only real work and not imaginary work on personal negative emotions that will allow others to shift their position for otherwise the negative emotions are still there, in another form, for they resemble Proteus who was always changing his shape and turning into something else. But it is a necessary part of this Work, that everyone must eventually pass, to see in himself by sincere observation, how he clings to his negative emotions with one hand and tries to free himself with the other. The Work inevitably leads everyone to the same places and the same experiences. A man must reach the point of discerning his own helplessness—of realizing his own mechanicalness. And this, if it is not a negative experience, will bring him into a state of self-remembering. Through seeing his helplessness he attracts help. For realizing one's own helplessness puts a man into the Third State of Consciousness where help can reach us. And since I am on this subject I will add for those of you who still do not yet quite understand what it means to work more "externally" and what it means to work more "internally" that the case is like this. The object of the Work is to arouse "buried conscience"—I am not speaking of acquired conscience which is different in every race and is a matter of custom, training, class and nation. Buried conscience is the same in all people but it is buried—that is, out of reach. Unless there were this "buried conscience" in us, the Work would be useless—nothing more than a new craze, a new fashion, a new jargon. Now if we could touch this buried and real conscience, we would know instantly that all negative states were wrong—and, in fact, poison to us. It is exactly by "inner taste", as it is called in the Work, that we begin to realize this for ourselves. "Inner taste" makes a man realize when he is negative. Then a struggle starts. He wishes to say something—and cannot. When this happens, when the Work brings him to this point, the Work is then "working in him". It is no longer something he accepts, but something he must fight for in himself. Then he begins to see that he must work on his negative emotions more internally, and then conscience will help him. But if he works on his negative emotions because he is told he should, or
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because he is ashamed before others at having them, and so on, then he is working more "externally" upon them, and not genuinely from himself. But for the faint indications of real conscience that this Work begins to evoke in people, and its inner help, the struggle with negative emotions would be impossible. That is, unless we had conscience somewhere in us, negative emotions would be unconquerable. Life would be too strong. But fortunately for us existing on this earth, placed so far down in the Ray of Creation, so that it is only one degree removed from the worst possible place in the whole Universe—fortunately for us, we have within us the means of awakening, though it is buried, and on the other hand we have outside us the forms of teaching about awakening, handed on age by age through the efforts of the circle of conscious humanity outside life, that can arouse us to awaken ourselves.
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Let us now return to a brief consideration of the Emotional Centre in its negative part. It can be represented, although not entirely correctly, in the same way as in the case of Intellectual Centre.
This represents the centre after it has acquired a negative part from contact with life. I do not propose at this stage to say any more on the different parts of the negative aspect of the Emotional Centre, save that the starting-point for your personal thinking on the subject is the idea that everything in the negative part works the wrong way round, as if in reverse. Let us take suspicion. Suspicion is an emotional state which soon involves the negative part of the Intellectual Centre and leads it to form conclusions of a negative kind. I said last time that one thing we have to understand about the Intellectual Centre is that each side of it—the
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positive side or the negative side—if it works independently of the other can come to any conclusion. This must be very clearly grasped. Now if suspicion arises in the negative part of the Emotional Centre, for suspicion is first of all an emotion, then it will bring into operation the negative side, and only the negative side, of the Intellectual Centre, in which case everything will go to prove that your suspicion is right. Now suppose your suspicion is changed suddenly into a more agreeable emotion by hearing something you did not know. What happens? Then the positive or affirmative side of the Intellectual Centre will start working and your conclusions will be quite different. You know the expression "the wish is father to the thought". But this is not a sufficient formulation. Any of our emotional states tend to govern our thinking. This is an example of one centre hypnotizing another and so of wrong working of centres. So we must try to free our thoughts from our emotions when they are negative. But all this is a matter for observation and to speak about it fully would require a long time.
I will add one or two things about negative emotions. They are very powerful. They can infect everyone. That is one reason why they are so prevalent and why people like to be negative, because then they can hurt everyone so easily. You will remember that there is a very hard saying in the Work—namely, that it is always your fault if you are negative. This is difficult to realize. It always seems the other person's fault. I will also remind you that the peculiar characteristic of negative emotions is that they go on and on by themselves, always creating fresh negative emotions, long after the cause is removed. Also they take so much energy and waste it uselessly that people often become ill as a result. And finally, if a person has well-marked negative thinking and negative emotions, it is a very dangerous state to be in. If a man works at the perception of his Emotional Centre he will find his whole life takes on a new meaning and he will experience moments of awakening that he will never forget and gain a glimpse of what it might mean if the Emotional Centre worked in its right way. But by himself he cannot do this. It is only through a new force and through new ideas and a new way of looking at himself that this can begin to be possible. All the efforts that the Work speaks of are necessary, particularly self-remembering, and the whole background of the Work must be felt as well.