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24651 |
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Date: July 05, 2017 at 22:38:08
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: the sealing of oneself from life. |
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Quaremead, Ugley, March 23, 1946
THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSERVING MECHANICAL
DISLIKING
In the recent Commentaries the main subject has been the sealing
of oneself from life. The Work cannot be formed in a person if he puts
it right on the wayside of his life. The seed of the Work will not grow
if it is scattered on the wayside, as is clearly shewn in the parable given
by Christ of the Sower and the Seed in which it is said that "the sower
went forth to sow, and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the
devil came and devoured them." The devil, of course, is ordinary life
and the world of the senses, and so the outer mechanical side of us
which is occupied with all the cares and anxieties of life. We under-
stand so far that the Work must be protected in us from outside effects
and must gradually penetrate more interiorly until finally it leads to
contact with Higher Centres and Real 'I'. In this connection at a
recent meeting we spoke about things that help to isolate us from the
outer influences of life. All that the Work teaches comes in here. First
we spoke about how knowledge of our Being helps because we no
longer trust ourselves or take ourselves for granted or live on the surface
of ourselves but begin to realize how we are many and how there are
very dangerous 'I's in us from which we must separate. The next
point was how we must practise non-identifying. Then we spoke
about the importance of remembering oneself in the midst of life and
through that feeling the difference between life and oneself. Self-
Remembering is, of course, the supreme thing to use. And finally we
spoke about how necessary it was to stop internal considering, which
always arises from life-situations and which keeps us down in mechanical
'I's which cannot possibly understand the Work and will only destroy it.
It is obvious then that we have to create a special place for the recep-
tion of the ideas of this Work. To-night I will add one or two other
comments on this question of how we must begin to seal a place in
ourselves from life. I will mention first mechanical liking and disliking.
If a person has very strong disliking he will only reinforce his Person-
ality. When you reinforce your Personality you do not seal yourself
from life but increase your vulnerability to life. Some people admire
their strong dislikes and prejudices but that is a mistake.
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Responses:
[24652] [24673] [24675] |
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24652 |
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Date: July 06, 2017 at 10:49:40
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: the sealing of oneself from life. |
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Let us reflect for a moment on what is the ultimate object that we
have to attain. Before a man can be re-born, the Work teaches, he must
realize his own nothingness. A person who has very strong dislikes and
justifies them certainly does not realize his own nothingness. He feels
himself very much to be something. It is a good thing to work on one's
mechanical dislikes. But first of all it is necessary to be able to observe
them. This is always the starting-point. If a man could really begin
to feel his own nothingness he would be moving inwardly towards Real
'I' and certainly he could not be so full of mechanical dislikes. A strong
feeling of dislike simply strengthens our mechanical Personality. We
are told, in fact, to like what we now dislike, for this is acceptance, and
all acceptance means the giving up of useless suffering. If you persist
in dislike and justify it and make a mass of internal accounts in con-
nection with it, you are simply adding to your mechanical suffering and
wasting your force and stopping the development of understanding.
One of the ways towards feeling one's own nothingness genuinely is to
begin to try to like what we dislike. To live in mechanical disliking is
to live mechanically and in that case your Being will remain exactly
the same and you will therefore attract exactly the same events. Or it
is a good thing to say to yourself: "What is my Being like in regard to
disliking?" This is a practical way of beginning partly to see one's
quality of Being. You get a man, for example, who objects to most
things, who dislikes most people. This arises from his level of Being.
He may find life very difficult but he does not connect it with his state
of Being. He does not see that, as long as all these dislikes and prejudices
and narrow attitudes exist in him, his Being cannot change, and cer-
tainly such a man will never be able to get near that point called in the
Work the realization of one's own nothingness. Such a man will
probably think that everyone dislikes him and that if he could only go
to a new environment and start over again things would be different,
but actually his Being would at once attract the same situations and
after a short time in which he felt enthusiastic at meeting new people
he would find the same difficulties. For this reason it is important to
work on one's dislikes, especially on one's strong dislikes, which only
increase the power of the Personality and through that the power that
life has over us. There will then be the question of sealing oneself from
the effects of life, because strong dislikes will connect oneself with
life continually, at every moment. There will be not even a break-
water and certainly not a sea-wall in such a man. In observing your
disliking, start with your strong dislikes and try to make a list of them
and write them down. Then say to yourself: "How is it that I dislike
this person or that nation?" Now I will tell you a way of beginning to
deal with your strong dislikes, once you have observed them. There
are such things as irony and humour. I will only add that it is a good
thing to begin to be ironical about yourself and amused by your
prejudices.
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Responses:
[24673] [24675] |
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24673 |
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Date: July 09, 2017 at 23:07:44
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: the sealing of oneself from life. |
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Now you will remember that we have to live more consciously in
life. All this 4th Way is based not on faith, or hope, or love, but on
increase of consciousness. Faith, hope and love, which have been in the
past the basis of three major religions, are not excluded, but the
emphasis in the 4th Way is laid upon increase of consciousness, and
that is why the 4th Way begins with self-observation, the object of
which is to make us conscious of ourselves, of what we are like—namely,
to make us have real impersonal knowledge of our Being. If a man has
strong mechanical dislikes and is controlled by them he is not living
consciously. On the contrary, he is living mechanically. But if a man
observes himself and becomes aware of his strong mechanical dislikes
and the prejudices and attitudes that lie behind them, and begins to
struggle with himself and refuse to go with them in a completely identi-
fied state, he is then breaking new ground in his own Being, and
attempting to live more consciously. A moment or two of conscious
behaviour in the midst of life each day can give one increase of force
and alter things a little. We can all work for a few moments every day
in a real way. As I have told you repeatedly, we cannot work con-
tinuously because we have not sufficient force of consciousness. But
every moment in which you behave more consciously and see clearly
how you might have behaved mechanically gradually increases the
force of consciousness in yourself. You may not see any particular result
for the time being, but you will gradually see the result—that is, you
will gradually notice that some mechanical reactions, mechanical
thoughts, by which you had been chained down hitherto, have less and
less mastery over you and with that will come a change in the feeling
of what you are. You may imagine that you used to be a stronger kind
of person but you are wrong, because your strength lay in mechanical
reactions. You thought your violence was your strength. Violence in
the Work is always weakness. And so you begin to see a little what it
means to realize your own nothingness. It is this realization of nothing-
ness that can attract new Being. But this feeling cannot be invented.
It is no good saying that you are merely nothing for such phrases conceal
a great picture and so belong to False Personality. One feels it but does
not say it. No one speaks of real feelings. When you begin to have
traces of feeling your nothingness and dislike of your hitherto-ness, you
find yourself flexible and so more capable—in fact, you feel released.
Released from what? In my case, I feel released from Nicoll. As I said,
strong Personality is always a sign of weakness in the Work-sense. When
a man cannot separate himself from himself owing to his strong mechani-
cal system of likes and dislikes, of thinking he is right and others are
wrong, he is a weak man in the Work-sense. Such a man cannot
change—he cannot seal himself from life—i.e. from himself—and so
the Work can never find its right soil. The seed of the Work will be
sown by the wayside and so his mechanical centres, the devil, will come
and snatch it up. In general, it is the Personality that is the devil.
Good soil is that which stands behind Personality, that more interior
understanding which is not influenced at every moment by the flickering
events of life and by the mechanical responses of the Personality to
these events.
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Responses:
[24675] |
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24675 |
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Date: July 10, 2017 at 19:45:12
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: the sealing of oneself from life. |
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Let me remind you what self-observation is, because without self-
observation no sealing can take place. A man is composed of many
'I's amongst which sits Observing 'I'. These 'I's are all looking at a
play on the stage: the play represents life. This is the situation of Man
asleep. When a man begins to observe himself, Observing 'I' turns
round from the stage and looks at the audience and notices how each
one is reacting. Some of these 'I's are perhaps jumping up and down
and shaking their fists at the play, others are absorbed in it, others
snoring, and so on. Observing 'I' begins to notice all these different
reactions in the audience. This is self-observation.
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