(61.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (II), p.257-60
This is number (61.) 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, March 1, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - II
The more requirements you make, the more internal considering you will have. You will always be disappointed and feel that somebody else is to blame. People who make many requirements make life very difficult for themselves. Nothing is right: they are not surrounded by the right people, they are not treated properly, and so on. In this Work we must gradually feel our own nothingness by observation.
The opposite to internal considering is external considering. External considering is thinking of others. It is one of the few things in the Work that we are actually told to do. We are told not to internally consider and not to have negative emotions, and so on, but we are told to externally consider just as we are told to remember ourselves. When we are in a state of internal considering (and this is our usual state) we are really thinking only of ourselves. We regard ourselves as the centre of the Universe. Like Copernicus, we have to realize that we are not the centre of the Universe. To internally consider gives us only self-emotions and as these increase the character becomes more shut in. You all know people, surely, to whom you cannot speak for a moment without their beginning to tell you what troubles they have, what a hard life they lead, and so on. Such people are ruined. They are dead. You know that the Work says that it is negative emotions that govern the world, and not sex or power. Just think how many people are completely ruined by constantly indulging in negative emotions. Internal considering is a branch of identifying. It is closely connected with negative states in us. You must not think that the opposite to internal considering consists in a hearty, optimistic manner and loud laughter. This is not external considering.
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I will now quote what Mr. Ouspensky once said about external considering:
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"The opposite of internal considering, and what is in part a means of fighting against it, is 'external considering'. External considering is based upon an entirely different relationship towards people from internal considering. It is adaptation towards people, to their understanding, to their requirements. By considering externally a man does that which makes life easy for other people and for himself. External considering requires a knowledge of men, an understanding of their tastes, habits and superstitions. At the same time external considering requires a great power over oneself, a great control over oneself. Very often a man desires not to express or to shew to another man what he really thinks of him or feels about him. But if he is a weak man he will of course give way and say what he really thinks and afterwards justify himself and say that he did not want to lie, did not want to pretend, but he wanted to be sincere. Then he convinces himself that it was the other man's fault. He really wanted to externally consider him, even to give way to him, not to quarrel, and so on. But the other man did not at all want to consider him, so that nothing could be done with him. It very often happens that a man begins with a blessing and ends with a curse: he begins by deciding to externally consider, and afterwards blames other people for not externally considering him. This is an example of how external considering passes into internal considering. But if a man really remembers himself, he understands that another man is a machine just as he is himself, and then he will enter into his position, he will put himself in his place, and he will be really able to understand and feel what another man thinks and feels. If he can do this, his work becomes easier for him. But if he approaches a man with his own requirements nothing except new internal considering can ever be obtained from it.
Right external considering is very important in the Work. It often happens that people who understand very well the necessity of external considering in life do not understand the necessity of external considering in the Work. They even imagine that just because they are in the Work they have a right not to consider others: whereas in reality, in the Work—that is, for Man's successful work—ten times more external considering is necessary than in life, because only external considering on his part shews his valuation of the Work and his understanding of the Work—and success in the Work is always proportional to the valuation and understanding of it. Remember that work cannot begin and cannot proceed on a level lower than that of ordinary life—that is, it must begin on the level of Good Householder. This is a very important principle, which, for some reason or other, is usually forgotten. People must behave as Good Householders."
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In the Work external considering is more necessary than in life. It does not make "self-emotions", but "others-emotions." The second one of the Work, Work in conjunction with others, brings in the necessity of external considering, of putting ourselves into another person's
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place, of realizing other people's difficulties. In the practice of external considering it is necessary to realize that other people are mirrors of ourselves. If you have taken an album of good photographs of yourself through long self-observation, then you will not have to look far in it to find in yourself what you object to so much in the other person and then you will be able to put yourself in the other person's position, to realize that he has also this thing that you have noticed in yourself, that he has his inner difficulties, just as much as you have, and so on. External considering can be practised when you are alone. I will give you one example: go over carefully what you said to someone and put yourself in his place by visualizing him saying the same things to you and using the same intonation. External considering is as vast and as varied in its range as is internal considering. There cannot be right development of the Emotional Centre without the practice of external considering: valuation of this Work, and the practice of external considering develop Emotional Centre. The more you value this Work the less can false personality govern you, the less vanity can you have, and the more you externally consider the less important will you think yourself.
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In this Work there is no such thing as pretending to do good when you really will bad. It is no use pretending to be nice to other people when you hate them in your heart. All this Work depends on inner sincerity. External considering is not hypocrisy, it is not "good works," but it is a question of inner attitude. Remember that when you find the same thing in yourself that you are blaming in someone else it has the magical effect of cancelling the whole situation out. This is real "forgiving". You know that our natural state is to be very surprised that there is anything wrong with ourselves. Of course we often blame ourselves, as it were. We say, for example: "Yes, I am afraid I was very much to blame for that incident." "Yes, certainly you were," says the other person. Are you not then very startled? Why, you will be hurt and offended at once. All this is because it is very difficult to think that anything is wrong with us and it is all part of the sleep we are in, the deep sleep that covers all humanity. Now self-observation is very harsh and becomes more harsh. If it is done sincerely it will hurt. But it lets light in and stops all sorts of rank weeds from growing within, and amongst them all the strange growths due to internal considering and self-pity and song-singing. And then at last we begin to see what it means that a man must realize that he is nothing before he can expect to be something.
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With regard to that form of internal considering which is based on feeling that life has cheated you, that you should be in a different situation, you must remember that the Work says very emphatically
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that everyone starts from where he should be. It says that the conditions under which you encounter this Work are the right conditions for you. Nothing is more absurd than to think that one's life is being wasted in this Work. It is extraordinary that people have very narrow opinions as to what life should be like. They have as it were one or two prescriptions for life and if a person's life does not correspond to these prescriptions it is regarded as being wasted or useless and with such an outlook a person may internally consider a great deal and feel that everything is against him, even God and the whole Universe, and it is simply because he does not take his life in the right way. He makes requirements which cannot be satisfied. He is like a person who goes into a grocer's shop and asks for a top-hat or a sewing-machine and does not take what can be sold to him. The forces of hypnotism which keep Man asleep are the same for everyone. If awakening is your aim, then whatever your circumstances are, it should make no difference to you, unless perhaps you are forcibly deprived of the Work. You heard the section on Karma Yoga read out a week or two ago. No better formulation has been made as far as I know about how to avoid internal considering in connection with the ordinary circumstances of your life. Since internal considering is a form of identifying you will realize that the practice of non-identifying which Mr. Ouspensky outlined in terms of the word detachment is the cure for internal considering. If you realize that internal considering can become a real illness and can ruin you, if you can see it at work in yourselves, then you will do all in your power to try to escape from it. It is no good saying, for instance, "Oh, so and so has no idea what life is like for a person like me." It will only increase your internal considering. It is the internal considering in yourself that has to be stopped or else it will grow and grow and grow. It will spread a fire over everything young and growing in you.
Do not ask what is the remedy for internal considering please. You have got to study it in yourselves and notice what harm it does you and from that gain a real desire to free yourself from it. You have got to see it first in yourself and then you have to take it seriously, in conjunction with all the other things that you are told in this Work to practise. For the whole Work is necessary. The application of all the parts of the Work is necessary, for the whole Work is a living organism.