(39.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Note on Negative Emotions and Introductory Note to Chapter on Good and Truth- p.160-163
This is number (39.) of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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Birdlip, August 15, 1942
NOTE ON NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
Let us speak to-night of the Work. Let us speak of what work on oneself means in connection with negative emotions. The Work says: "You have a right not to be negative." Notice that the Work does not say: "You have no right to be negative." One of the signs whereby you can distinguish between a false and a true teaching is that a false teaching insists upon or makes a rule about your doing something you cannot do. It is the sign of a false teaching, for example, to make you promise something, or swear to it, or take an oath of silence and so on. A man—an ordinary man—cannot keep a promise under all circumstances, because he is not one person, but many persons. One person, one 'I' in him, may promise or even bind itself by an oath. But other 'I's in him will know nothing about this. To assume that a man can promise is to assume that he is already one, a unity—that is, a man having only one real, permanent 'I' controlling him and so only one will. But a man has many 'I's and as many different wills. Suppose the Work made a rule to this effect: "You must not be negative. You must swear never to be negative. If you break this promise, you must leave the Work." If the Work said that, it would mean that it took it for granted that Man can do. But the Work says that Man as he is cannot do and that this is one of the things you have to become aware of through self-observation. If you still imagine you can do, if you still think you can always remember and keep your aim, then you will make no room for the Work in yourself and the Work will not be able to help you. You will not feel your inner helplessness. If you begin to feel your inner helplessness in a right way, you will feel the need of the Work to help you. How can the Work help you? It can help you only if you begin to obey it. To feel the need of the Work is to feel you need something to guide you. If you are going to let something guide you, you must obey it. You must try to obey the Work. Of course, if you understand nothing, you cannot obey the Work. So you have to think what it is that the Work teaches and get it clearly into your mind. You have to think, you yourself, in your most private and real thoughts, what this Work is saying to you all the time. If you have thought in this deeper, intimate, private way, you will see that the Work tells you more about what not to do than about what to do. Now people often ask: "What am I to do?" On that side the Work says only two definite things: "Remember yourself" and "Observe or notice yourself." That is what you must try to do. But on the other side the Work says many things about what you must not do. It says, for example, that you must try to struggle against being identified, try to struggle with mechanicalness, with mechanical and wrong talking, with every kind of internal considering, with every kind of self-justifying, with all the different pictures of yourself, with your special forms of imagination, with mechanical disliking, with all varieties of
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your self-pity and self-esteem, with your jealousy, with your hatreds, with your vanity, your inner falseness, with your lying, with your self-conceit, with your attitudes, prejudices, and so on. And it expressly speaks of struggling with your negative emotions taken as a whole. Sometimes you meet a person in the Work who is very eager and wishes to know exactly what to do. It is especially people who only have external attention and no internal attention who ask this. As you know, the Work begins with internal attention. Self-observation is internal attention. A person must begin to see for himself what he is like and what goes on in him—for example, he must begin to see through internal attention his own negative emotions instead of only seeing other people's with his external attention. He must see what it means to identify with his negative emotions and what it means not to identify with them. Once he sees this, he has got a key to the Work on the practical side in his hands. The first stages of the Work are sometimes called "cleaning the machine." A person who constantly says: "What should I do?", after hearing the practical teaching of the Work over and over again, is like a man who has a garden full of weeds and says eagerly: "What should I plant in it? What should I grow in it? " He must first clean the garden. So the Work lays great emphasis on what not to do—that is, on what must be stopped, what must no longer be indulged in, what is to be prevented, what is no longer to be nourished, what must be cleaned away from the human machine. For none of us have nice new machines when we enter this Work, but rusty, dirty machines that need a daily and indeed a life-long cleaning, to begin with. And one of the greatest forms of dirt is negative emotions and habitual indulgence in them. The greatest filth in a man is negative emotion. An habitually negative person is a filthy person, in the Work sense. A person who is always thinking unpleasant things about others, saying unpleasant things, disliking everyone, being jealous, always having some grievance, or some form of self-pity, always feeling that he or she is not rightly treated and so on—such a person has a filthy mind in the most real and practical sense, because all these things are forms of negative emotion and all negative emotions are dirt. Now the Work says you have a right not to be negative. As was pointed out, it does not say you have no right to be negative. If you will think of the difference, you will see how great it is. To feel that you have a right not to be negative means that you are well on your way to real inner work on yourself in regard to negative states. To be able to feel this draws down force to help you. You stand upright, as it were, in yourself, among all the mess of your negativeness, and you feel and know that it is not necessary to lie down in that mess. To say this phrase in the right way to yourself, to feel the meaning of the words: "I have a right not to be negative," is actually a form of self-remembering, of feeling a trace of real 'I', that lifts you up above the level of your negative 'I's which are all the time telling you without a pause that you have every right to be negative.
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Part II.—You have all heard of levels, but some may not understand what a higher level means in a practical sense. What is a lower and what is a higher level in yourself? The Work is to make us live on a higher level of ourselves. For example, suppose you begin to internally consider. You start making accounts, making out that others owe you, thinking that you are badly treated, worrying about what others think of you, and so on. This is an activity of a lower level of yourself. That is, you cannot live on a better level of yourself if you are going to indulge all the time in internal considering. Now suppose you begin to dislike the inner taste of considering. Then when internal considering starts in you and you notice it you will feel uncomfortable. Why? Because you have already begun to feel what a higher level is like. You feel uncomfortable by reason of the contrast. You have seen something better. You are now in a position to make an inner choice. Or again, if you are in a negative state, are you on a lower or higher level of yourself? You are on a lower level and you will not be able to taste what a higher level is like as long as you indulge unchecked in your negative states. It is always a question of inner decision, of inner choice. If you begin to be interested in your better states and study what spoils them, you will begin to work practically on yourself. Better states belong to higher levels of yourself. They are in you, as different levels. You can live in the basement or higher up. But you have to see all this for yourself and get to know where you are in yourself. Ask yourself: "Where am I?" With what thoughts and emotions are you going, with what moods, with what 'I's? One has to learn not only whom to live with in oneself but where to live in oneself.
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One note more. In dealing with a negative state, look at the 'I' in you and not at the person with whom you are negative. The real cause of the negative state is the 'I' that is speaking in you and to you and to which you are listening. If you let this 'I' go on talking and listen to it, you will become more and more negative. Its only object is to make you negative and absorb as much of your force as it can. Every negative 'I' has only one purpose—to get hold of you and feed upon you and strengthen itself at your expense. The real cause of negative states is in yourself—in negative 'I's that live only to persuade you with their half-truths and lies and to rule over you and spoil your lives. All negative 'I's only wish to destroy you, to ruin your lives. This is a very good exercise to practise.
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Birdlip, August 25, 1942
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
TO CHAPTER ON GOOD AND TRUTH
All esoteric teaching regards Man as between two levels, sometimes called "Earth and Heaven". All esoteric teaching also says that if Man on earth is cut off from all influences coming from a higher level, mankind will perish. Just as physical nature, as we behold it in the external visible world, depends for its life on the influence of the sun, so Man, in his inner world, depends on influences from a higher level. If these influences are received by no one on earth, Man is cut off and perishes. One of the problems, therefore, of esotericism is how to keep alive this contact or connection. At different times in history different ways have been tried, but all with the same end in view. For example, different kinds of schools or " churches " have existed, which for a time have maintained this connection. But sooner or later any particular school or "church" or focus created for the reception and transmission of these higher influences, has died. But a new focus always appears. The death of a "church", if we use this term, is sometimes called a flood in the language of parables. The new church is the ark that survives it and contains representations of all forms of knowledge and good necessary for a new beginning. There have been many stages of Man, in regard to his contact with influences from a higher level, and, from the esoteric standpoint, Man has degenerated, psychologically, in this respect. To speak in the language of the Work, Man no longer lives in the 3rd State of Consciousness, he no longer remembers himself, and so is out of contact with the higher centres in him and their influences on him. In the Old Testament, many references are made to different forms of teaching in "churches" in ancient times. For instance, many of those long tables of references to so and so who begat so and so and lived for so many hundred years are records of different "schools" or branches of "churches". Again, there was a school or church called "Noah". Another existed also in Mesopotamia and was called when it was dying Babel or Babylon. The Jewish Church began much later. In fact, the Old Testament is a secret record of the history of esotericism.
One of the problems of esotericism is how to raise the level of being of a man apart from his level of knowledge—that is, to raise him on the side of good, for goodness is of being and knowledge is of mind. Man can no longer see good directly or be taught directly from good. His mind must alter first, so he must be taught knowledge or truth about a higher level of being first. But the object of the knowledge is to raise the man's level of being.
During the month of September, 1942, Dr. Nicoll continued the writing of his papers on the Gospels.