(64.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (VI) - p.268-73
This is number (64.) 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 27, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - VI
As long as you externally consider another person with a view to trying to change him or her—that is, as long as you think the other person should be different—you are not externally considering, but internally considering. The basis of internal considering is thinking that others should be different, and from this comes "making accounts" against others. It is necessary to understand this point clearly. You feel another person should not treat you as he does, or should not annoy you, or should not be as he is. Are you then making demands or not? Of course you are. Now in real external considering you cannot start from this point. You are starting from the idea that you are right and they are wrong. And because you think you are right and they are wrong, you feel that they owe you something. In what sense do they owe you something? You feel they should correspond to your ideas and because they do not you feel that something is lacking which they should do. So you feel they owe you right behaviour, according to your private standards of what is right and wrong. You see that all this means that you are putting yourself in the position of a judge. You are judging the other person from your own acquired ideas of what that person should be like. This is a source of internal considering in regard to that side of it called "making accounts". In short, you feel the other person owes
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you something. Now if you start by trying to externally consider another person from the basis of internal considering, from the basis of thinking the other person should be different, your external considering will be nothing but internal considering. You are making no attempt to start from the right basis of external considering, which is putting yourself in the other person's situation. On the contrary, you are starting from your own situation, not from the other person's. And in comparison with the real external considering, this is nothing but a form of hypocrisy and you will probably end only by shrugging your shoulders and saying: "Well, I have done my best for this person and I cannot do more." So you will wash your hands of him in your own feelings of merit and virtue. But I assure you that external considering in the Work-sense is nothing like that. Take an ordinary mechanical man—that is, an ordinary person. He is full of buffers, prejudices, negative attitudes, pictures of himself, vanity, typical gramophone records, and so on. Suppose he attempts, as he is, to externally consider, really to put himself in another person's life, into his situation, into his mind. Do you think he will be able to do so? Of course not. He does not see himself. So how can he see the other person? And if he does not see the other person, how can he put himself in the other person's position? That is why it is said that before you can begin to externally consider in a real way, you must have reached some degree of self-observation and it is only according to your degree of self-observation and self-knowledge that you can externally consider another person. In so far as you know yourself, you will know aright the other person: in so far as you can see yourself you can see others aright. Do you know, each one of you here now, how tiresome, how difficult, how unpleasant, how prejudiced, how exacting, you can be? Have you noticed it? If so, then you are in a better position to externally consider other people, for when you see their faults you will also see your own faults. But as we are made, looking out from our senses, and not looking in at ourselves, we only see other people's faults and to balance the account takes a life-time of work and insight. We all have pictures of ourselves; we are all, in one way or another, smug. Let me give you the dictionary definition of smug. The word is derived from a German word meaning to dress up; smock, smuggle, and so: "to be scrupulous in keeping up the appearance of respectability, to be absurdly self-satisfied and complacent." One thing is quite certain, and that is that the more sincerely we observe ourselves and what is in us, the less smug we shall be. And from this it follows that we shall be less satisfied to think that we know what the other person should be like. So we shall judge less and in consequence be able to put ourselves in another person's position more easily. You will remember the two examples of praying in the Gospels—the man who prayed thanking God he was not as other men, and the man who beat his breast and said he was a sinner. Which of these two men do you think would best be able to externally consider ? And which of those two men would you rather be judged by? There is a saying in the Work
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that you must have heard more than once, that unless a man begins to realize his own nothingness, he cannot do this Work. He will not jump to catch the rope let down from above to save him. But all this takes time: and we must take the Work, stage by stage, in our gradual understanding of it. No one can outstrip himself—that is, his level of being. As being alters, so does understanding alter. Now external considering is work on being, as was said. Your being is roughly how you take things. In life, people do not really externally consider one another because of their level of being. If people really externally considered one another, war would be impossible. But war is possible because of Man's level of being, which is such that only internally considering, making accounts, thirsting for revenge, and so on, is understood. So you will understand that to externally consider in the Work-sense is to take a step beyond your ordinary level of being. Or, to put it in another way, if you can really externally consider, your level of being will be different.
Now all external considering, in the Work-sense, requires effort, whereas all internal considering is easy, mechanical, self-indulgent. The taste of the two is quite different. A conscious effort has quite a different taste from a mechanical automatic reaction. To be offended is extremely easy. It is a mechanical reaction. Not to be offended, or to transform being offended, is difficult. It requires conscious effort. It requires a lot of thought, a lot of inner adjustment, a lot of remembering what one is like oneself, and so on, to transform the first impact of being offended. But that is real work on oneself. Do you wish to belong to the terrific chain of cause and effect which makes up mechanical humanity or do you wish to get out of it? Then, if you do, you must work on your mechanical reactions. If you follow the law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", then you will always remain in the circle of mechanical humanity which leads nowhere. Esotericism brings a new law—the law of non-identifying, the law of self-observation—in fact, the application of the Work itself to daily life. This Work is esoteric Christianity. Christ said: "I bring you a new law". The Work says the same. Do you not see how the Work brings you new laws for behaviour, inner and outer? How then can you say you do not know what it means to think from the Work ideas?
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Now you can make it your aim to externally consider a person in the Work or in life, as you like. I would add, you should practise external considering in the Work, because it is easier if the other person is working also, but if this is not possible—or, let us say, not too easy for the moment—then you must do the same in life. Life can become your teacher. It becomes your teacher as soon as you begin to work from yourself, from a genuine desire to work, which means an evaluation of the Work. Remember the Work can become very cold and distant if you do not keep it alive and you will not keep it alive if you do not
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love it. To externally consider a person in life is just the same as in the Work, only you will not be helped by the other person necessarily, and so it will be very easy for your attempts at external considering to turn into an increased form of internal considering. You must calculate second force—that is, the difficulties. It will be useless, of course, if you start off from a superior position and try to put the other person right. Remember that when you feel offended you are beginning to internally consider. You must be quite passive to the other person and work on yourself all the time, if you can, and not get offended. If you are sincere in your aim, you may be able to carry it out. You must never find fault, or shew that you are finding fault. You must be ready to bear false accusations And of course you must be ready to bear the unpleasant manifestations of the other person and not lose your temper and begin to chant: "Here am I doing my best to be nice", and so on. Once this begins, then it means you are internally considering. And if you do that, you are starting from a very shallow basis—that is, not from a real, matured aim. And in externally considering a person in life, which means that you must change yourself, you must have already got some idea of what it means to be "all things to all men". You must be able to eat and drink and joke and listen and talk without any trace of the Work being behind you. You may have an opportunity to say something, and you may not. That doesn't matter. A person in the Fourth Way of Work must be able to be quite ordinary in life. There must be no kind of superiority, no hinting, no persuasion, no dark remarks. But if you work on yourself, when the other person is difficult, that will make the other person aware that you are different. But you must not shew it openly. When life becomes one's teacher, then the highest work is reached. And then you are right in the track of the Fourth Way. But it is difficult—Oh, how difficult!—and requires much and long work on oneself and patient understanding. You must, as it were, be able to suffer all things at the hands of men and yet keep on working. But if you externally consider a person in life, feeling superior, and so feeling a constant judgment and shewing it openly, you are not working. That is not the way of the Fourth Way. To become passive in the Work sense to another person requires very great inner work, especially so to a person in life. In some ways, it is easier than becoming passive to a person in the Work. But you must realize what I mean for yourselves, by experience. You know how in life people are always trying to improve one another by reproving one another, always finding fault with one another. This is quite useless and leads to all the endless strife in life. But making oneself passive to a person and working on oneself therefrom—for to be passive requires constant inner work on yourself—this, I assure you, can effect a change in the other person, because your work makes room for him to alter. But if you react mechanically all the time it makes no room for the other person to turn about and change. By not reacting, you leave room. In regard to externally considering a person in life, remember that you must really aim at doing this. Do you
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really want to, or not? You must have a genuine matured conscious aim that starts in the light of the Work and to which you hold on every time you remember yourself and every time you think of what you are doing practically in this Work. Only then will the Work help you. If the basis of your aim is only a life-one, it will not conduct the force of the Work. It may be easier to work from a life-aim. We are told to make friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness. In real relationship in the Work this is not enough. It is indeed far from enough. But in externally considering a person in life, what belongs to life-aim can enter, if it helps your Work-aim. I will give you an example: if you fear to lose some job, some position, and so on, your life-aim may help your Work-aim to be passive to unpleasant manifestations. This is allowed. But you must know which is which, and when genuine Work comes in, and realize what you are doing, and what life-considerations make you do. A different example is when a person may be so placed that his contact with the Work depends on his externally considering people in life. This can be done, only it requires intelligence and being passive to criticism. It especially requires the capacity of inner silence. Wrong talking will of course create difficulties. That is, a person in this Work, surrounded by people in life who have no magnetic centre, must behave in an ordinary way—he must be silent, not in an obvious or intriguing way, but really internally silent, so that others notice nothing unusual. This will be part of his work. His other work will consist in not reacting mechanically as he always did. We are speaking of those in the Work who are connected by ties with people not in the Work. Now we will speak of those in the Work who wish for a special reason to make relationship with those not in the Work. The whole question is then about magnetic centre. If you feel the Work emotionally, you will find it difficult to make contact with those who cannot feel it. After some conversations you will probably notice that a line of cleavage appears. Do not blame the Work for this fact. The Work guides you to certain people, or not. One has to listen to the Work, as it were, as best one can. You must also remember that the difference between a person who knows something of this Work and a person who does not is very considerable. In fact, a gulf lies between them. Socially you may like someone and be attracted and wish to bring him into the Work, but if there is no magnetic centre and the whole quality of conversation is limited to life, then you will feel that there is, as is actually the case, a gulf. There are quite nice people in life who cannot enter the Work. And this is as it must be. We can only meet through a common understanding, not through external appearances or physical bodies. Let us try to grasp this. A person who is beginning to understand the Work will find it not easy to unite with one who has no magnetic centre. Remember that the possession of magnetic centre is a sign of level of being. Some have it without knowing they have. But in general people of different levels of being do not unite. How can they? Understand that magnetic centre is a very big thing, in regard to the sign of a man's being. A man
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may be clever and a good scientist and so on, but have no sense of anything higher—no feeling of Greater Mind. A man in the highest position in life does not necessarily possess magnetic centre and usually does not. Life is not a standard for estimating a person in the Work valuation, save in regard to Good Householder. Neither Herod nor Pilate was fit for the esoteric teaching of Christ. All that is obvious enough surely. Life-values and Work-values are quite different: a big man in life is not a big man in the Work. You cannot talk to a highly successful man in life of this Work, thinking that he will understand you. I mean, you must never think that high position in life means a high understanding of this Work. In fact, as often as not, the case is quite the contrary. This idea takes a long time to sink into people.
Let me add one thing which is of the greatest importance in external considering. You cannot externally consider another person unless you can break him or her up into different 'I's. And you cannot do this unless you can see different 'I's in yourself. If you always think of yourself as 'I' then you will also always think of others as having one single permanent 'I'. Can you yet think of different 'I's in yourself and not say 'I' to everything in you? Then you will, in the same degree, be able to see different 'I's in another person. You will see his good and his bad 'I's. This will help you to externally consider the other person.