(65.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (VII) - On Being Passive (I) - p.273-277
This is number (65.) 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, April 3, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - VII—ON BEING PASSIVE (I)
It was said last time, in connection with external considering, that it is necessary to be passive to another person. To-day we will begin to speak of the Work-meaning of being passive. What is the central theme of the Work in regard to its practical side—that is, in regard to work on oneself? And in this connection what does inner change mean? Practical work on oneself is directed towards making something passive in oneself which is at present active, and something active which is at present passive. Personality which is active must become passive so that essence which is passive can become active. This is the central idea of practical work on oneself. The Work is a second education. First of all life must develop personality so that it surrounds essence. This is the first education. Then, if a man wishes to go further in his development personality must become passive so that essence can grow and become active. So you see that a reversal must gradually take place. First of all, a child is born with only essence which is active. Then life forms
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personality round essence, and personality is active. This situation will remain unchanged unless a man begins to work on himself. If he does so, personality will gradually become passive and essence active. There are thus three possible orientations: first, in the child, essence active, second, in the adult, personality active, and third, in the case of a man who works on himself, personality passive and essence active. The whole aim of the Work is to make acquired personality passive. In the Work-sense to become passive means inner work on personality. It means eventually separation from personality. By the action of life there has been formed in every one of you a very complex built-up thing called personality. This has been formed by imitation, by custom, by the influence of the period you grew up in, by example, by fantasies derived from novels, from drama, from the film, by attraction, hero-worship, and by a thousand and one other influences acting upon you from the outside and entering through the external senses, from outer life. All this forms the acquired side of you and is called, in general, the personality. Essence is what you are born with: personality is what you acquire. And what you are born with, or as, is changed by all these things that you acquire and accept and consent to and believe in and identify with. A new person therefore grows around the original essence. This is personality. And all this must take place because essence by itself cannot grow beyond a limited point. A man cannot grow straight up from essence. This is one of the strange things the Work teaches.
Now in consequence of the formation of personality your centre of gravity of consciousness shifts from essence (in childhood) outwards into the personality acquired from the particular circumstances you are brought up in and the particular things that have interested you on the one side or have attracted your vanity on the other side. In this way, you, as it were, lose your original basis and become something acquired, something invented. Your feeling of 'I' passes outwards into all sorts of feelings derived from life. A man feels no real inner stability when he derives his feeling of himself from life. That is, he is always afraid that something may happen to him, or to his fortune, or to his position, or his reputation. This is due to his identifying with everything that life has formed in him and this means that he only feels himself through personality. But other feelings of oneself are possible that are not derived from life and personality, and these feelings give a man a sense of stability that nothing outside him can take away. And it is from these feelings that a man begins to feel himself free, because they depend on nothing outside him, and so cannot be taken away from him. Such a man begins to be no longer so much a slave to outer things.
Now let us say that as a boy you get into the first team at school. Then you begin to feel yourself outwardly through this and you wear a cap that gives you this feeling. You become a man in the first team and this is now your greatest feeling of 'I'. Then you are thrown out of the team. What a tragedy! All this is necessary in regard to the first education. So you become this or you become that, in life, and you
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should and must. You have this or that success or triumph and so on, and you should. It is a sort of training. It is all necessary at first. All this forms feelings of yourself in personality, which, roughly speaking, lives by comparison with others. That is, you feel a loss of yourself in the presence of a person who wears a more distinguished cap and so on. I repeat, all this is necessary, but it gives a wrong centre of gravity. Let us suppose that you are a great actor or a great boxer. You will not easily listen to praise of another actor or boxer. Why? Because your feeling of 'I' is derived from personality and you will feel a loss of 'I', a loss of the very feeling of yourself, if someone else surpasses you. But all this is to train you in illusions about 'I'. For if you have any trace of real feeling of 'I', this is impossible. Real 'I' does not exist through comparison. Therefore you will understand that when it is said that personality roughly lives by comparison, you only have to study yourself or others in this light for a short time to see how easily everyone is upset or chagrined, and how brittle this feeling of 'I' is, in which people keep on trying to live—that is, in the feeling of 'I' derived from some aspect of personality.
Now let us keep for the time being to the great formulation of the Work concerning personality and essence. The third or neutralizing force of life makes, and must make, personality active and essence passive. So the Work says that if you come into the third force of the Work, which opposes life, personality must gradually become passive to let essence develop. All individual evolution, all real inner development of yourself, depends upon a growth of essence. If you are full of false feelings of 'I', of invented ideas of yourself, then there can be no growth of essence. Real inner change is a development of essence—that is, of what is the most real and the deepest part of you. For this to take place, personality must gradually become passive. This is the real meaning of being passive in the Work. It is becoming passive to personality in yourself. So when it is said that in real external considering you must be passive, the meaning is that you must become passive to the reactions of your personality. And this requires the most conscious and most concentrated work on oneself. That is, it requires a very active conscious inner state. And we must not suppose we are capable of reaching this state in a moment.
Owing to the formation of personality, you all have typical, habitual ways of reacting to circumstances and events, and to other people. If you cannot observe your typical reactions, your continual mechanical ways of taking things and people, your usual stereotyped behaviour, your ever-recurring unpleasant manifestations, your vexations and strictures, etc. then of course you have no idea that you even have an acquired personality. You take yourself for granted—as a kind of solid virtuous lump. But, although we take ourselves for granted so easily, we are not one and the same person at different moments, as we suppose. We are not solid. If we saw clearly that we are not one and the same solid person always, we would not take ourselves for granted as we do. Something of our vanity and self-conceit which binds personality
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together would begin to leave us. Remember that personality is many. It is composed of many different and contradictory 'I's that have been acquired. And it also contains all sorts of other things about which the Work often speaks: negative attitudes, buffers, pictures of oneself, mechanical associations, songs, gramophone records, typical forms of imagination, negative states, characteristic forms of lying, and, in short, all that the practical side of this Work teaches us to notice and observe in ourselves throughout life. Once the Work begins to act on a person genuinely, all these forms of feeling oneself, all these feelings of 'I' derived from personality, begin to dissolve away. But the action of the Work in this respect is very gradual, because the Work acts on people very gently and only in reference to what each of us can stand. When you really begin to see something in yourself, then it means that you can stand it. If you cannot see any 'I's it means that you are not ready. To see oneself as one really is would be intolerable. So the action of the Work is gradual. You may begin to see something—some 'I'—that you do not, let us say, quite like, but you will not be freed from it until you either see or know some better 'I' and prefer it, or until you can be freed from this 'I' without danger to yourself. But we will speak of this in the next paper.
Now let us come back to the meaning of being passive. In the full sense it means being passive to the personality, and this, in turn, means being passive to oneself. Can you be passive to your mechanically-arising objections for even five minutes? Well, I advise you to observe how your personality reacts every moment to everyone and everything. It is this constant mechanical reaction that must be worked on in order to begin to be passive to oneself. And this requires a constant conscious state of self-observation. No one can do it as yet for long. But you can practise being passive in this sense for a short time, say, five minutes. Notice when you begin to object inside—notice what reactions arise in you—and try to be passive to them, not to the people who cause them to arise. Is this clear? You must make yourself passive to your own reactions, not to the people you are reacting to. To do this you must be awake inside yourself and capable of seeing different 'I's in you and what they want to say or how they want to act at the moment.
Let us try to get all this quite clear. Do you all understand that you have acquired many things in yourselves that you take as you? Can you agree that by education, imitation, example, what you were taught, and so on, you have all sorts of ideas, ambitions, estimations, values, judgments, expectations, ways of shewing like and dislike, characteristic ways of speaking, and, in short, many typical reactions to life? And is it too much to say that all these built-up acquired reactions in you are usually taken by you as yourself? You think them necessary, do you not, or natural, because you think that they are you. But the real you, or rather, the real 'I' in you, is not all these things that you keep holding on to and taking as yourself. If you will start from this simple basis you will begin to understand what it means to be passive—that is, passive to
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yourself—or rather, passive to what you always have been taking as yourself. To be passive to oneself, one must not take oneself for granted. There is no such thing as 'I' in you. When a person, totally identified with his acquired personality, says, for example, "I think this," "I think that," the Work answer is "Which 'I' is speaking?" Do you see how powerful this idea is? And can you begin to apply the power of this Work-idea to yourself? Certainly not, if you do not begin to break yourself up into different 'I's. If you take yourself for granted as a solid, then there is no breaking up of yourself and so no change is possible. The word 'I' will come out of your mouth at every moment, but you will not see that it is a different 'I' speaking at every moment. One 'I' will shout, another 'I' will speak tenderly, and so on. Yet you do not see that each 'I' is utterly different. It is a great shock to self-conceit to realize that there is no such person as 'I'. But unless this begins to dawn on you, you will never be able to begin to be passive to yourself. You cannot begin to be passive to yourself unless you see yourself as many different people by inner observation and learn about your different 'I's and know especially which 'I's in you you must never allow to take full charge of you. Next time we will speak of identifying with oneself more fully, and the different forms of practising inner separation. Let me say here that 'I's that value this Work must never be allowed to lose their authority in you. Notice the 'I's you are consorting with. Do not keep company with wrong people in you. Remember you are a city, with slums and dangerous streets, and also better streets and good citizens. Remember you are a house full of servants under no control. Has not our first education partly to do with not going with wrong people outside us? Our second education is not to go with wrong 'I's inside us. Our first education is external: our second education is internal. Life does not give us the second education. Only esoteric teaching gives us the second education—that is, for those who are looking for something different from life.