(60.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering - I - p.253-7
This is number (60.) 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, February 22, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - I
Amongst the many things that we have to observe in ourselves and work upon, according to this teaching that we are studying, there is the psychological state called internal considering. This refers to a process which takes a great deal of force from us and, like everything that takes energy from us uselessly, keeps us asleep.
Internal considering is a branch of identifying. As you know, the study of identifying in all its different branches is one of the most important forms of practical work on oneself. A man who identifies with everything is unable to remember himself. In order to remember oneself it is necessary not to identify. But in order to learn not to identify a man must first of all learn not to be identified with himself. One form of identifying is internal considering, of which there are several kinds, and some are forms of identifying with oneself. One of the most frequent forms of internal considering is thinking what others think of us, and how they treat us, and what attitude they shew towards us. A man may feel he is not valued enough and this torments him and makes him suspect others and causes him to lose an immense amount of energy and may develop in him a distrustful and hostile attitude.
Closely connected with this is that form of identifying called making accounts. A man begins to feel that people owe him, that he deserves better treatment, more rewards, more recognition, and he writes all this down in a psychological account-book, the pages of which he is continually turning over in his mind. And such a man begins to pity himself so much that it may be almost impossible to talk to him about anything without making him at once refer to all his sufferings. All accounts of this kind, all feelings that you are owed by other people and that you owe nothing yourself, are of very great psychological consequence to the inner development of a man.
A man in the Work can only grow through the forgiveness of others. That is, unless you cancel your debts, nothing in you can grow. It is said in the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Feeling you are owed, feeling debts, stops everything. You hold back yourself and you hold back the other person. This is the inner meaning of Christ's remark that one should make peace with one's enemy. He says:
"Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art with him in the way; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily, I say unto thee, thou shalt not come out until thou hast paid the last farthing." (Matt. V 25, 26)
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If you are going to exact psychologically every pound of flesh or every "farthing" from a man who owes you—that is, if you are going to make everyone apologise and make amends and eat the dust, then you will be under the exacting law that Christ warns you to escape from. You will put yourself in prison—that is, under unnecessary laws—and you will not get out until you have paid on your side for all your own faults. But there is a law of mercy—that is, an influence higher than the literal law of an eye for an eye, which is the law of the man of violence. This is an example of "putting yourself under new influences". If you want to put yourself under better influences coming down the Ray of Creation, you must behave differently, take everything differently—that is, work. You must put yourself first under the influences of the Work and try to obey them. That means, you must hear and do the Work. In the Work, negative emotions, internal considering, making accounts, feeling violent, jealous, etc. are not encouraged. Now if you make inner accounts, then you feel always that someone owes you. Try to think what this means: and then try to observe what it means in yourself and then finally try to do what the Work says—i.e. separate. And do not imagine it is quite easy. The Work means work—hard work—on yourself. Remember that this Work is for those who really wish to work and change themselves. It is not for those who wish to change the world.
We now come to a fuller description of one form of internal considering, but you must understand that you must observe this form in yourself. No one can work on himself without observing what this Work tells him to observe in himself and seeing what it is he has to work on. You must be able to perceive your inner state at any particular time as distinct from your outer physical body and what it is doing. Once people can distinguish between their physical appearance and their inner states, they can begin to work. They see that they have a body which obeys orders, and a psychology. The Work is about what a person is psychologically. Let us speak to-day of that aspect of a person called in the Work "Singing your Song". This is psychological, not physical, singing. It is based on internal considering—making inner accounts—that is, feeling what you are owed and recording it in memory. Everyone has a song to sing in this respect. If you really want to know what kinds of inner accounts you have made throughout your life, begin to notice the typical "songs you sing". When a person in the Work is called a "good singer", this refers to the songs he or she sings. Sometimes people sing their songs without any encouragement and sometimes, after a few glasses of wine, they begin to sing openly. They sing about how badly they have been treated, about how they never had a real chance, about their past glories, about how no one understood their difficulties, about how they married wrongly, about how their parents did not understand them, about how nice they really are, about how they have been unappreciated, misunderstood, and so on, and all this means how everyone is to blame except themselves. All this is making inner accounts, or rather it is the result of making accounts. This is one form of internal considering.
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Now why do you think it is necessary in the Work to get rid as far as possible of songs? Why is it necessary to notice them, to starve them, to push them away, out of a central position in one's life, until they are sung only on rare occasions, in faint voice, and perhaps, finally, never? They cripple you inside. They take energy. You smile—bravely—you all know that brave smile—and it is all lies. A good singer in the Work cannot get beyond himself. He is a victim of his own account-making. As soon as anything is difficult he begins singing. This stops him: he cannot grow. He perhaps begins to weep. He cannot change his level of being. He cannot get beyond what he is—i.e. crippled by sad songs. It is a sign of being. Being is what you are and to change being one must not be what one is. Instead of working on himself in some difficult situation, he begins to sing at once, perhaps very nicely and quietly. If he is criticized or spoken to sharply, he begins to pity himself, or gets furious, and feels he is not understood, and so on. And then he begins to sing, either softly to himself or to others, especially to people who will listen to him—or, it may be, to her. Often a person makes friends with another person only because it is easy to sing his or her song to him or her, and if the latter suddenly tells him in so many words to "shut up", he or she is so deeply offended that he goes in search of a new friend— a person who will really understand him or her, as the expression goes—as if anyone could understand another person, just like that. 'If only', they say. To understand another, one must first understand oneself, and this only begins after long work on oneself and catching glimpses of what one is really like. A good singer certainly does not understand himself. He prefers to sing the song that he is misunderstood and so he dreams of a marvellous world in which everything is arranged so that he is the central figure in it. And this attitude and these dreams create a weakness and, in fact, a real, psychological sickness, for which a man may have to pay all through life.
He has, as it were, let life overcome him. But you must realize that this does not apply merely to people who make no effort, to people who are not adjusted. It applies also to people who do make ordinary efforts and who yet are sick in this sense because they feel life owes them things that they have never attained. They feel they should be happier and very often think that other people seem to be happier. And other people think the same thing of them. And although they do not sing their songs openly perhaps songs go on in them secretly. They feel an inner sadness, a sense of monotony, a kind of inner tiredness or frustration around which thoughts gather. It is about these inner secret songs that I wish to speak to-night. For they also stand in one's way, and very often they are not observed, although they are all the time secretly eating one's life. Only deeper self-observation will reveal them. All self-observation is to let light in—to oneself. Nothing can change in us unless it is brought into the light of self-observation—that is, into the light of consciousness—and all self-observation is to make us more conscious of what is going on in us.
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You know, you must observe yourself when you are alone, just as much as when you are with people. Self-observation is inner attention. Do not think that when you are alone there is no need for inner attention. When you are alone, quite different I's, different forms of imagination, different thoughts, different moods, come forward. You must not think that you are necessarily in good company when you are alone. You may easily be in the worst company and yet not even think of observing where you are in yourself and what company you are keeping in yourself. Your most negative and most dangerous 'I's may come forward when you are alone. You may have quite well-written songs that only come when you are quite alone—when you feel no one is looking. Yes, but you must look. You must never feel no one is looking, simply because the door is shut. You must never feel that you can indulge yourself in your worst negative 'I's just because you are alone and that therefore you can behave as you like in yourself. You must cultivate quite a new idea of your responsibility to yourself in this respect. To think that you can go to sleep in yourself just because there is no one there and that you can enjoy all your inner negative talking for that reason is to have no proper conception of what this Work means. It means that you have no inner sincerity—and this Work demands inner sincerity as the first thing that is essential. In life we keep up outer appearances. But in the Work the case is quite different. It is about what goes on in you—inside yourself, in your thoughts and feelings. By inner work on ourselves when we are alone, we can often change a whole outer situation. But we cannot do that without inner sincerity and observing which 'I's in us are lying or twisting things and so on. We may make an aim not to be negative with some person, but if we are alone and let our negative 'I's say what they please and make no effort not to identify with them, then we are not working sincerely—and we can undo a week of work in a few moments. If we do not go with negative 'I's in public, but indulge them in private, what do we think we are doing? We certainly have not begun to understand what work means. We must handle a person we are working with as carefully and as consciously in our inner thoughts and feelings as we do externally from polite manners. If we cannot see what this means, then we do not see what self-observation means.
On one occasion I was sitting with Mr. Ouspensky. We had been silent. He looked up at me with a smile and asked me why I was so sad. I said I did not know that I was. He said: "It is a habit. You are listening to some 'I's that are singing some sad far-away song, perhaps a song without words or words you have forgotten. Try to observe it. It takes force from you and is quite useless." And he added: "This is an example of the Moon eating you."
I give this as an example of what I call in this commentary "inner secret songs". We know that the Work sometimes speaks of sacrifice—that we must sacrifice something in order to get anything. What does the Work say that we must sacrifice first of all? It says we must sacrifice our suffering. We express our suffering often in songs, articulate and
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inarticulate. I am calling attention here to these inner inarticulate songs that we should try to observe and which can make us easily lose force, without our knowing what is happening. They are, as it were, strange little sad private relationships we have with ourselves, that steal force from us and that we do not notice because they are habits.