(69.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Internal Considering and External Considering (XI) - On Being Passive (5) - p.288-91
This is number (69.) 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, May 15, 1943
INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING XI—ON BEING PASSIVE (5)
We continue to-day to speak on the subject of non-identifying with oneself. I remind you again that people take this thing called oneself for granted, and also take it not only as one thing but allow it to say 'I' to everything it does or thinks or feels.
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We spoke last time of identifying with oneself from the standpoint of centres and began with the Intellectual Centre. When you are first taught about self-observation, you are told to try to observe the work of the different centres so as to see the three people in you corresponding to them. The activities of the Intellectual Centre are very many. Last time something was said about opinions and thoughts which belong to the Intellectual Centre. A man usually identifies himself completely with his opinions, which are borrowed from others, from the papers, etc. Then we spoke of identifying with our thoughts. Our thoughts are not visible to other people, nor to ourselves. But they are quite definite things, composed of definite substances. We can be more, or less, conscious of our thoughts. Now when you observe a thought, you are not identified with it. What does that mean? It means that unless you observe the Intellectual Centre and what is going on in it you tend to take its activities for granted. You will believe your thoughts or take them for granted. You identify with them. You give them the quality of truth and either say: "I think" or, more internally, you take the thoughts as you. Then they have power over you and exert their influence upon you. An unpleasant thought, a dreary, heavy thought, a suspicious thought, a pessimistic thought, an evil thought, and so on—all these thoughts become you: and so you are them, through identifying with them. But you are not your thoughts. Any thought can enter the mind. All sorts of hopeless, bad, useless, stupid, formless and imbecile thoughts can enter the mind. And if you say 'I' to them all, where will you be? You will say 'yes' to them all. You will consent to them.
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You will, in short, be identified with them, because all the time you will be saying 'I' to them and believing that 'I' is thinking them and that they are your thoughts. But, as I said, any thoughts can enter the mind, just as any people can come into your house. Very few of our thoughts are worth following and in order to begin to think rightly, nearly all the thoughts that casually come into the mind have to be rejected as useless or worse. A person may indeed have very dangerous thoughts, especially when he accepts them as if they were his own. He is so naïve as to believe that all thoughts coming into his mind are his own and that he himself thought them. And so he says 'I' to them, not knowing any better. But if he begins to understand that he must observe his thoughts, he will soon have quite a different viewpoint.
I remember that many years ago when Mrs. Nicoll and I left the Institute in France and went to Scotland to my grandfather's house, I spent many months looking through the theological books in my grandfather's library, written by various Scotch divines. They were all, of course, purely formatory. They were all about matters of doctrine and about the letter of the law and they indulged in all sorts of hair-splitting arguments. But one of them struck me. The writer said that people must remember that the devil sent many thoughts into our minds and that we must never think that they are our own thoughts. He explained this idea at some length and even often emphasized the phrase: "Our thoughts are not our own." Here was a man beginning to understand something psychological and reading him was like a breath of living air, amongst all those dead and terrible volumes, in which there was no trace of understanding, and nothing was said on the psychological level, and everything was taken on the literal level—on the level of stone. This writer said that we are not responsible for our thoughts but responsible for our thinking. You can think a thought, or not. A thought enters the mind and seeks to attract you. If it does, you begin to "think it"—that is, think from it. You begin to enlarge this thought, by paying attention to it and thinking from it, until it grows in all directions, and forms, as it were, a little tree of thought in you, that bears fruit, and seeds other similar thoughts. This is clear enough in the case of suspicious thoughts.
You understand that a thought and thinking are not the same. Let us suppose that the thought enters your mind that Mr. X is lying. This is only a thought. You probably say to yourself: "I must think about that." But if you believe the thought at once you identify with it. Your thought has now transformed Mr. X. into a liar. What thoughts we identify with change things very much. For instance, some people habitually identify with a gloomy, tortuous, mistrustful class of thoughts. They like thoughts of this shape and colour. So they accept such thoughts and reject others. These thoughts alter things for them, like dark glasses. Now they are identified with these thoughts so that they cannot see them. They are these thoughts so they cannot observe them and see they are certain kinds of thoughts and that all sorts of other thoughts
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exist, with quite different shapes and colours. A man can have any kind of thoughts. Any thoughts can come into a man. In the Gospels it is pointed out that it is not what comes into a man that defiles him but what comes out of a man. Any sort of thought can enter the mind, but whether you identify with it and act from it—or rather, re-act—is another question. If you identify with a thought you say 'I' to it and you believe it. So you will think from it or act from it. How you think and how you act is what comes out of you. The thought that enters the mind is what goes into a man. What he thinks and does from this thought is what comes out of him. A thought that is a lie, a wrong thought, wrongly joined together, a false thought, a depressing thought, a thought that takes hold of one thing and ignores everything else, or that kind of thought that can only deny and contradict, etc.—if a person identifies with such thoughts, he will think and act from them. His mind will be a mess. The ideas of this Work are to build the mind up in the right order so that everything can be related aright. In the centre of the mind stands the Ray of Creation—that is, the Scale of Being. From the highest to the lowest all things fall into their places. But unless the mind is changed by the Work, it continues to think that all its thoughts are real and true. The mind is then like a tent lying in a heap on the ground without a central upright pole. All its parts are touching each other wrongly. They are not stretched out. By means of the training of the Work and learning to think from what it teaches, a man begins to be able to distinguish between right and wrong thinking. He begins to learn how to think on the right scale, and how not to mix scales, and so on. All this helps him not to identify with all his thoughts. It gives a centre of gravity to his thinking.
This Work is to make a man think aright. That is why it is so important to try to take in what this Work teaches. You know that in learning, say, Chemistry, or, if you like, a foreign language, it is very important to listen to what is taught you, and to arrange it in your mind, and think about what is being taught you. Many people never think of what they are being taught. But in the Work, it is necessary. Why is it necessary? Because it builds up a new system of thought and of thinking in your minds. Actually, it makes your minds begin to work in the right way—so that they can really begin to think.
Now let me emphasize that a thought, and thinking a thought, are not the same. A thought may enter your mind, but you may or may not think it. And even if you think it, you need not necessarily identify with it. But there are many different kinds of thoughts, higher and lower, big and little, that enter the mind, and this belongs to later teaching. What it is necessary to realize at present is that thoughts are of every possible kind and that they are not yours, but that you make them yours by identifying with them. And if you do so, then they can pull you in any direction. There is a science of thought. This Work, with all its ideas and teaching, and instructions, has to do with a right science of thought and thinking. For that reason all of you who have heard
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the Work for some years should know what it means to find fault with your thoughts and with your thinking, and should be able to see wrong thoughts and inadequate and unrelated thinking, poor thoughts, negative thoughts, useless thoughts, lying thoughts, and so on. The first change demanded in this Work, as in the Gospels, is change of mind. But for "change of mind" to take place, you must begin to think from this Work and what it teaches. Then later, perhaps, you can begin to act from the Work. But first of all a new way of thinking is necessary. Now in this paper we are speaking of what the Work teaches. It says that any thoughts can enter your minds, and they are not yourthoughts. It says you can think them or not. And it says you can identify with them or not. When you hear this, as a part of the teaching of the Work, and apply it by observing yourself in Intellectual Centre, you will see that it is quite true. When you realize this, you will be thinking in a new way about yourself.
If you can realize practically—that is, by experience—that you can be passive to your thoughts by non-identifying with them, you have already reached a definite stage of work on the Intellectual Centre. But if you take yourself as one you will never get to this point. You will remain stuck in the illusion that all your thoughts as well as all your feelings and moods are you or rather "I myself". You will have no insight into the enormous inner world of height and depth containing thousands of inhabitants, good and bad, that you take for granted as one person, which you regard as yourself, and in the customary state of sleep say 'I' to at every moment. Everything that takes place in yourself you will call 'I'. So you will never move from the position you are in, because you take yourself as one, and so you will never understand what it means to become passive to yourself.
In the above paper we have been speaking of practical work that leads to becoming passive to thoughts. This belongs to intimate work on the Intellectual Centre. This is the subject of the paper. The paper is about long practical work on non-identifying with thoughts.
Notable in its relationship to what Patrul Rinpoche said about his own thoughts, most of which he found worth dismissing.
A still mind is more receptive to higher influences and the inflow of impressions.