(66.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (VIII) - On Being Passive (2) - p.277-81
This is number (66.) 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 20, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING - VIII - ON BEING PASSIVE (2)
This Work is to weaken personality. This is a disadvantage at first, because actually one feels weak when one can no longer react in the usual way. Let us suppose that you were always accustomed to fly into a temper over something, and now you cannot. You feel weak. You feel a loss. A loss of what? A loss of a part of personality. At the same time, you gain something and are really stronger.
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Let us try, in these commentaries on internal and external considering, to understand better about what it means to make personality passive. The object is to allow essence to grow. Every time you go against personality consciously, you gain something. Of course, you must not take this arithmetically. You cannot expect that you have instantly some exact gain. It is rather more complex and subtle than that. Personality keeps you where you are. It is acquired. It has become you: or you have become it. It does, it acts, it says, it finds fault, it spoils a happy time, it takes charge of you at every moment. So it keeps you where you are and your life what it is. Now where are you? You are where you are in the sense of what you have in you that is active, and so what you experience, what you think you enjoy. You see life, just there, outside you, and perhaps want all sorts of things, but you cannot get into life and get things from it save in so far as your personality allows you. You go into life according to the shape of your personality. You encounter life, people, and so on, through your personality, not directly. Is this clear? Now you do not see your personality. It is not conscious to you. So perhaps you blame life or people, or feel disappointed, and so on. The trouble is that you have acquired a certain mechanical device for making contact with life called personality that renders life to you according to its shape, as it were. And so here you are, always carrying about with you your personality, your apparatus for experiencing life, and always hoping perhaps, if you had a new environment, new people, a new house, new clothes, etc. that everything would be utterly different. How can that be? You are carrying about your apparatus for contacting life—that is, your personality. You may pack your bags and fill them with new clothes and go to the Antipodes—but you carry your personality with you, with all its acquired habits of mind, habits of emotion, habits of behaviour, habits of talking, habits of finding fault, habits of movement, habits of health, and so on. Now this Work is about how to get away from oneself, not from life. You do not get away from yourself by changing your outer scene. For this reason it is necessary to observe oneself and see what one's personality is like and study it and see what one's apparatus is like. We all have all sorts of dreams about a new life—about ideal circumstances, marvellous people, etc. But such dreams are idle because even if we were placed in exceptional and beautiful conditions, such as are said to obtain in Paradise, we would react to them through our personalities and very soon be turned out as quite unsuitable, I fancy. The trouble really is that none of us knows how to live, because none of us sees that the trouble lies in the personality—that is, in the receptive-reactive machine we use to contact life. And we shall never learn how to live even a little aright if we do not work on personality in us, and see what it is in us in each case and what troubles arise from ourselves and not merely from others and from life.
All this Work is about imitating Conscious Man. But if we do not work on personality, we remain mechanical men. Then it will act.
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The machine will speak. It will get angry. It will take charge of everything. And even if you begin to be aware that there is something else in you, something deeper, that does not want to act, to speak, to feel, to think, in the way that you do, you will not be able to alter anything—at least, for a long time. But even so, if you see this, you are in a far better position than that of a person who does not perceive that something is always taking charge of him and spoiling everything. In the Work we have to realize that we are at the mercy of something called personality in us and that this is a machine that controls us. You may lie in bed in the morning in a half-sleep state and see quite clearly what you should say or think or feel or do, but immediately you get up something takes charge of you. It takes charge of you and it begins to act and speak in a way quite contrary to what you perceived and planned. What takes charge of you? It is personality. And in a short time—in a moment—you are fully under its sway and everything you thought and planned when you were more awake, more free, that is, from personality, seems far away, or even nonsense. So you behave exactly in the same way as yesterday. Something grips you and you fall asleep in its grip. This is our tragedy, that we cannot change, and we even forget that we should change, for a whole day, or a week, or even more. Once we are in personality, everything goes by machinery. Only, once in the grip of personality, we do not see it as machinery. One thing leads to another by the easy paths of association and habit and so to-day is like yesterday and to-morrow like to-day. And it seems to us to be all logical, all reasonable, all justifiable, all natural. But when a man begins to awaken a little—that is, to be more free from personality—he has moments of seeing this machine to which he is attached, and under whose power he is. He sees he is in prison. He may even begin to be afraid of this smooth, powerful, self-acting machine, this Frankenstein-monster that insists on controlling him, which life has gradually created in him without his knowledge. And then he begins to understand what work on himself means and what his task is, and what he must struggle with for the rest of his life. This externally-created thing in him, this personality fashioned by outer life, this machine, whatever form it takes, is the dragon that is to be overcome, in the language of mythology. In the Fourth Way, which lies in life, you cannot go into a monastery or sit in a cave in the desert to free yourself from personality. Making personality passive is, in this Way that we are studying, continual work on oneself in life, by means of observation, by not identifying with oneself, by inner separation and so on. The whole work is about this.
Let me quote something that was recorded many years ago by Mr. Ouspensky, about the struggle with personality. It had been explained that a man must gradually learn to take photographs of himself as a whole, and not merely observe single details. He must begin to see himself altogether, in all centres, at any particular moment. "For this purpose," it was said, " a man must learn to take, so to speak,
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mental photographs of himself in different moments of his life, and in different emotional states, and not photographs merely of details, but photographs of the whole as he saw it. In other words these photographs must contain simultaneously everything that a man can see in himself at a given moment: his emotions, moods, thoughts, sensations, postures, his behaviour, his movements, his tones of voice, facial expressions, and so on. If a man succeeds in seizing interesting moments for taking these photographs, he will collect a whole album of portraits of himself which, taken together, will shew him quite clearly what he really is. But it is not so easy to take these photographs of oneself at the most interesting and characteristic moments. It takes time to learn how to do it. But if the photographs are taken successfully, and if there are a sufficient number of them, a man will see that his usual conception of himself with which he has lived from year to year is very far from reality.
Instead of the man he had supposed himself to be, he will see quite another man. This 'other' man is himself and at the same time not himself.
In this Work you must learn to know the real from the invented and later to separate them. And to begin self-observation and self-study it is necessary to divide oneself into a real and an invented side. That is, a man must realize that he indeed consists of two men. All this takes time. But so long as a man takes himself as one person he will never move from where he is. His work on himself starts from the moment he begins to feel two men in himself. One is passive and the most it can do is to register or observe what is happening to it. The other, which calls itself 'I', is active, and speaks of itself in the first person, is in reality only an invented unreal person. (Let us call this invented person in a man A.)
When a man understands his helplessness in the face of A, his attitude towards himself and towards A in him ceases to be either indifferent or unconcerned. Self-observation becomes observation of A. A man understands that he is not A, that A is nothing but the mask he wears, the part that he unconsciously plays and which unfortunately he cannot stop playing, a part which rules him, and makes him do and say a thousand stupid things, a thousand things which he would never do or say himself. If he is sincere with himself, he feels that he is in the power of A and at the same time he feels that he is not A.
He begins to be afraid of A, he begins to feel that A is his enemy. No matter what he would like to do, everything is altered and intercepted by A. A is his enemy. A's desires, tastes, sympathies, thoughts, opinions, are either opposed to his own views, feelings and moods, or they have nothing in common with them. And at the same time, A is his master. He is the slave, he has no will of his own. He has no means of expressing his desires because whatever he would like to do or say is done for him by A.
When a man has reached this level of self-observation he must understand that his whole aim is to free himself from A. And since he
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cannot in fact free himself from A because he is himself, he must therefore master A and make him do, not what the A of the given moment wants, but what he himself wants to do. From being the master, A must become the servant.
The first stage of work on oneself consists in separating oneself from A mentally, and then later in being separated from him in actual fact, in keeping apart from him. But the fact must be born in mind that the whole attention must be concentrated upon A, for a man is unable to explain what he himself really is. But he can explain A to himself, and with this he must begin, remembering at the same time that he is not A."
Let us notice that in the above quotation it is emphasized that a person cannot change as long as he takes himself as one. But when he divides himself into an observing side and an observed side, the first step towards possible change has been taken. That is, a man must become Observing 'I' and Personality. Everything that a man can then observe in himself he must take as A to begin with—that is, as personality. Now people suppose that only one thing acts in a man, and as long as people take themselves as one, they cannot think otherwise, so they find the idea of self-observation very difficult. "What should we observe?" they ask. The answer is: "Everything"—to begin with. "But," they will say, "Whatever I can observe is surely myself?" The answer is: "No and Yes, in the sense of the Work." All you observe you must take at first as personality in you. This personality in you governs you and the part which can observe it is helpless in face of it at first. The order of things is wrong. The command is in the wrong place. The inner cannot control the outer. What should command is subject, and what should be subject commands. The inner part which observes sees the outer part calling itself 'I' and so acting in its name and can do nothing at first. Notice here that the part which observes is always deeper than the part observed—i.e. the inner can observe the outer but not vice versa. Now, although the inner or observing side is helpless at first, it becomes strengthened by the ideas of the Work which feed it. The inner can only become stronger by the Work. Life cannot feed it. A man then begins to wish to get free from personality, from A, from the machine he is in the power of. The neutralizing force of life keeps the personality active: the neutralizing force of the Work nourishes the inner observing side. A man, in short, begins to understand that his whole aim is to free himself from A, from personality. "And," to quote again, "since he cannot in fact free himself from A because it is himself, he must therefore master A and make A do, not what the A of the given moment wants, but what he himself wants to do. From being master, A must become servant."