(63.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (IV) and (V), p.263-8
This is number (63.) 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, March 15, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - IV
When you feel that some one has not behaved rightly to you, you feel that you have not been estimated at your proper value. For example, to feel insulted is to feel that you are not estimated at your proper value. So people often say, when insulted: "Do you know who I am?" or something like that. They mean that they have a certain valuation of themselves, so they say: "Do you know who I am?" meaning that if the other person did know, he would not dare to behave as he does. Of course, if you have little or no picture of yourself as being valuable, you will not be so easily upset. A high estimate of yourself naturally will make it more easy for you to feel that others do not estimate you at your proper value. So you will internally consider more easily. A person may even be so pre-occupied with the question of others treating him rightly, and with suspicions about whether others are laughing at him, that his whole life may be said to be involved in internal considering. Or again, some persons may value themselves above others because of sufferings. People cling to their own suffering and come to regard
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themselves as worthy of special evaluation because they have had all kinds of hardships, miseries and sufferings. They are offended if another person begins to talk of his own suffering. They feel that the other person does not consider them enough and that he is selfish. It is difficult for them to realize that other people also have sufferings. Nor do they realize that to see selfishness in others is to see the reflection of one's own selfishness, for the more requirements you make from others, the more selfish will others appear to you.
What is it that causes us to begin to internally consider? Let us ask the question: "At what point, or where, do you start making accounts?" You start when you feel you are not estimated aright, when you feel you are undervalued. The waiter does not come when called. The shop-assistant serves another person first. Perhaps people do not look at you enough in the street, or, let us say, pay sufficient attention in general. Or one person seems persistently to ignore you. Or perhaps you hear what someone said of you: that is nearly always unpleasant. There are a thousand and one possible examples, less, and more, serious. Small incidents upset us easily—the waiter, the shop-assistant. These form short accounts and may eventually become a habit. But we have all sorts of long-standing accounts against others, some of them stored up in the past, unfortunately for ourselves. They all begin with this mysterious question of one's own valuation of oneself. A person with some self-observation might well exclaim: "What is this thing in me that is offended at this moment and has already begun to make accounts? Look, I can observe it at work in me collecting materials and beginning to remember unpleasant things and to find words and phrases to use against the other person so as to make him feel that he is underestimated by me—in fact, to make him realize he is so much dirt. Is it a picture of myself? Is it imaginary 'I'? Is it false personality? or what is it that is at the bottom of it all?" The answer is that what is at the bottom of it all is where you identify with yourself. All forms of internal considering, of which making accounts against another person is one form, belong to identifying. The Work says that we must study identifying down to its very roots. A man is only offended where he is identified with himself. And the Work also says that the study of identifying must begin with a study of where you are identified with yourself. It is here that you can be upset, hurt, offended, insulted. The being identified with oneself comes first, being upset and offended comes second, making inner accounts comes third.
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Birdlip, March 22, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - V
Some people find it difficult to understand what external considering means and others to understand what internal considering means. In this Work external considering must be done and internal considering stopped. To externally consider another person it is first necessary to put yourself in the other person's position. To do this you must think of yourself as being this other person, having to do the same things, having the same difficulties, the same handicaps, the same life. Now if you will begin to think of this preliminary step, you can hardly say that external considering has anything to do with being indifferent. To put yourself in another person's situation calls upon your whole understanding. It requires a directed effort of the mind and feelings and not merely once but time and again. And you will certainly be quite incapable of doing this if you are always pre-occupied with your own personal problems and woes and with the way you are being treated—that is, if you are always taking your life from the standpoint of internal considering.
I remember the case of a man who was always internally considering, always suffering, who wrote on his wife's tombstone: "From your heartbroken husband." You see, even then he could only think of himself, of his own suffering. Now if you begin to externally consider another person over a considerable period, you must again and again put yourself in the other person's place. In this way you become more conscious. The object of the Work is to become more conscious. Self-observation makes you more conscious of yourself: external considering makes you more conscious also of others. Through externally considering, things you were not conscious of before are revealed to you. Let us take a simple example of revelations of this kind: you put yourself in another person's position and after a time you realize that you expect this person to do things you would not think of doing yourself—for example, you expect this person perhaps to put up with conditions that you would not put up with for a moment. Do you see that you have gained in consciousness? Now if you have a revelation of this kind it means that you are really beginning to externally consider, to understand what it means to put yourself in another person's position.
People who make a great many requirements expect a great deal from others and if they do not get what they expect, they are disappointed and they feel they are owed. That is, they begin to form a great background of internal considering to their lives. This makes them bitter. They feel they have scores to settle. For a person of this kind to externally consider becomes very difficult. But it should not be so difficult for you
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unless you are crystallized. To realize that you expect the other person to do things you would never think of doing yourself makes a very good starting-point from which to begin to externally consider another person. It is a practical starting-point and a Work starting-point. You realize then that you expect the other person not only to do things you would never think of doing but to be different from you, behave differently, put up with things differently, and so on. Let us suppose you have always compared yourself very favourably with other people and perhaps even are sure that none of the unpleasant things you notice in others exists in yourself. It will be very surprising, then, to have the revelation that you are unjust and that you expect others in the Work to do what you would not dream of doing yourself. It is always painful to realize that there is really anything wrong with oneself. As was said in an earlier paper, you may often say that you are to blame for something, but if someone agrees with you, it is startling and you feel offended. Yes, we easily pretend we are wrong. But to see it, direct and unmistakable, in oneself, is pain. This is real and so, useful, suffering, for all real suffering purifies the emotions. It only lasts a brief time as real suffering and then gets infected by false personality and changes into some complicated negative state, some sort of unpleasant self-pity or endless self-justifying, which is useless suffering.
Now suppose you have to live with a person called yourself. I once read a story of a man who died and went into the next world where he met numbers of people some of whom he knew and liked and some he knew and disliked. But there was one person there whom he did not know and he could not bear him. Everything he said infuriated and disgusted him—his manner, his habits, his laziness, his insincere way of speaking, his facial expressions—and it seemed to him also that he could see into this man's thoughts and his feelings and all his secrets and, in fact, into all his life. He asked the others who this impossible man was. They answered: "Up here we have very special mirrors which are quite different from those in your world. This man is yourself." Let us suppose, then, that you have to live with a person who is you. Perhaps this is what the other person has to do. Of course, if you have no self-observation you may actually imagine this would be charming and that if everyone were just like you, the world would indeed be a happy place. There are no limits to vanity and self-conceit. Now in putting yourself into another person's position you are also putting yourself into his point of view, into how he sees you, and hears you, and experiences you in your daily behaviour. You are seeing yourself through his eyes. If you have no self-observation you cannot do this, because you will simply take yourself for granted as being "quite all right" in everything. But if you have become sufficiently trained in self-observation to have begun to lose your former ideas of yourself and if you already have a collection not only of snapshots but of cabinet-size photographs of yourself in your most typical roles, the case will be quite different. You will be able to see yourself to some extent as the other person sees you and so you will
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begin to realize practically what the other person's situation is and what some of his or her difficulties are and what it might mean if you had to live with yourself. Of course, the other person must do the same. Some of you may think, on hearing this, that it is quite right to say that the other person should try to see how difficult he or she is. But notice that we are beginning the other way round. It is you who have to see how difficult you are for the other person. Let me tell you that all this is not at all easy to grasp. You may think you know it all already. You may have heard it already, but a life-time at least is needed to see all that it implies.
In the Work, relationship is important. Work relationship is impossible without external considering. In general we must approach one another through the medium of the Work. The Work and its teachings must lie between you and the other person. You must look at one another through the common window of the Work. You must be related through the common valuation of the Work—but quite practically—by working. When two people in the Work quarrel, they have a great deal of work to do. They may not be ready for it, in which case sore places will be made, just as in life. They may refuse to work on themselves or in connection with one another: they then will both internally consider, both think they are owed, both think that the other should apologize. Of course if you do not work on yourself and just live and do nothing extra, the Work cannot become Third Force for you. Third Force is relating force. In this case life will be Third Force and life divides, whereas the Work should unite. Life divides because in life people do not understand one another. They have no common basis, no common language. But in the Work there is a common basis and people can begin to speak a common language and so to understand one another. But ten times more external considering is necessary in the Work than in life—and of quite a different quality, because the Work is the relating force. If two people in the Work quarrel, and are ready to work and wish to, then both of them will do so from themselves—not by meeting and talking it over—but simply as part of the Work itself. Each will put himself in the other's position and each see himself from the other person's viewpoint. External considering is very good work. It is not about whether you were right or the other person. It increases consciousness. It includes the first and second lines of work.
If you base your existence on internal considering, you will end your lives as most people do. Your lives, then, are all one-sided, undealt with, undigested, so many unhappy things just left lying about, and rotting, so to speak, in the past, so many violent or bitter feelings, so many places to which one has become glued down by past identifying. All this is certainly due to not giving oneself the First Conscious Shock, to not letting life fall on the Work in one. I think one can see so often how internal considering has spoiled life and what a terrible form of identifying it is. It is really like looking at life the wrong way round. And people who can only internally consider and feel that others should be
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different, take hold of one another so wrongly that they accumulate between one another, as it were, a mass of heavy, dense, negative material, to which they get fastened, and which they will not give up. But external considering is utterly different. It cleanses you. It frees you. It joins together what is missing by making you see the other side and realize the effect of what you do. It cancels all the feeling of being owed by bringing together the debit and credit sides of the accounts. An hour of external considering will free you from the effects of weeks of internal considering. And the more you can see yourself by observation, at the moment, and the more you can see the kind of person you have been all your life, the more will you be able to externally consider rightly. But remember that external considering can only begin, in its practical application, with putting yourself in the other person's place, and looking out, as it were, of the other person's mind and consciousness at yourself as he sees you. So do not think that external considering is merely doing something for the other person.