maurice nicoll
Amwell, 9.4.49
COMMENTARY ON NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
We speak to-day about different kinds of negative emotions. It has
been said several times that the object of the Work is to awaken the
Emotional Centre. It has also been said that because the Emotional
Centre does not work properly it does not give real emotions. It has
been overlaid by the imitation of negative emotions in others and by
those arising from False Personality. Mr. Ouspensky said some years
ago: "We do not know real emotions. Our Emotional Centre is fed
with paper money, by novels, films, and so on." It is especially due to
the Work that O. did in connection with the teaching received from G.
that the negative part of the Emotional Centre has been so much
emphasized to us. In other words, through his particular work on this
part of the system, the study of negative emotions has been brought
into the foreground. Now G. taught
that the human machine is capable
of very great experiences, far beyond those that we ordinarily know.
If all centres were awake and doing their right work, we certainly
would not know ourselves. As we are, we lead a thin and rather
meaningless life from day to day, because our apparatus for living is
in such a poor state. O. emphasized
that one reason for this is that our
Emotional Centre is in such a bad state. It is swamped by various
kinds of negative emotions. For this reason it is interesting to pick out
from ancient esoteric literature some of the things which were written
about negative emotions and see what particular negative emotions
were especially mentioned as requiring to be worked against, so that
the Emotional Centre could become
purified. You must understand
first of all that the purifying of the Emotional Centre has to do with
these negative emotions. One must not mix the idea of the purity of
the Emotional Centre with purity as
it is understood in a moral sense.
People think that impure emotions always refer to sexual thoughts and
that pure emotions consist in never having these thoughts. Now just
before I quote some paragraphs from
O., I will say that one of the
most impure emotions is envy. We will return to this shortly.
Mr. Ouspensky says (in Tertium Organum)
: "There is a division of emotion into pure and impure.
We all know this, we all use these words,
but understand little of what they me
an. Truly, what does 'pure' or
'impure' mean with reference to feeling? . . . Only an analysis of
emotions from the standpoint of knowledge can give the key to this. . . .
Impure emotion gives obscure, not pure knowledge, just as impure
glass gives a confused image. Pure emotion gives a clear, pure image
of that for the knowledge of which
it is intended. This is the only
possible decision of the question. The arrival at this conclusion saves
us from the common mistake of moralists who divide arbitrarily all
emotion into 'moral' and 'immoral'. But if we try for a moment to
separate emotions from their usual moral frames, then we see that
matters are considerably simpler, that there are no
in their nature pure emotions, nor impure in their nature,
but that each emotion will be pure
or impure according to whether or not there are admixtures of other
emotions in it. There can be a pure sensuality, the sensuality of the
Song of Songs, which initiates into the sensation of cosmic life and gives
the power to hear the beating pulse of nature. And there can be an
impure sensuality mixed with other emotions good or bad from a
moral standpoint but equally making muddy the fundamental feeling.
There can be pure sympathy, and there can be sympathy mixed with
calculation to receive something
for one's sympathy. There can be
pure love of knowledge, a thirst
for knowledge for its own sake, and
there can be an inclination to knowledge wherein considerations of
utility or profit assume the chief importance." (p. 201. American Edit.)
All negative emotions are impure
in the Work-sense. They distort.
All of us should know by now what it means to become negative. One
knows by inner taste. You suddenly feel quite different. Why do you
suddenly feel quite different ? I refer
of course to those who have some
internal self-observation. Such people know that something has happened to them inside. What ha
s happened to them? They have
become negative quite suddenly. We we
re speaking about this recently,
I think in the last paper, about a man rising from the breakfast-table,
having received a telephone message and coming back to the table
quite changed. The point is that even an unpleasant
thought that you
allow to have power over you can cause you in the pleasantest circum-
stances suddenly to turn negative if you identify with it. Everything,
as it were, drops in you. Now if
you are so unguarded within by the
defences of the Work, if you are so much a function of life, if all your
inner life depends on outer events and on how outside people treat you,
then indeed you have no individual
ity. You have nothing in yourself
that can maintain itself apart from external life and how it behaves
towards you—nothing in you with which to resist life.
Now of course if you had Real I
in you—that is, if you became
conscious, and Real I became Master in you—what happened in external life would very little affect
you, because your centre of gravity
would be in yourself.
We know that when we are negative we see everything in a certain
way, from a certain angle, as, say, from suspicion. We know how
spell-binding it is, how we cannot believe what we vaguely remember
we believed a short time ago, how everything has been turned suddenly
the other way round. This witchcraft, this spell-binding power that
belongs to negative emotions, cannot be checked right away. Begin
with the slight negative emotions
and begin to separate from them—
not go with them. Since we have no
real centre of gravity in ourselves
and since our so-called conscious life is a manifestation of different
shifting 'I's, we must realize how awake we must keep in order to work
on the Emotional Centre, especially as there is a certain pleasure in
being negative. If you were to take away all negative emotions from
most people, they would not have
any source of happiness left. The
Work says we have to give up useless suffering—that is, our negative
emotions. And have you given up any trace of them ? Negative emotion causes us to suffer and yet we enjoy it.
Now it helps us to notice negative emotions if we make a list of them.
This you must do. I will mention only a few. I mentioned Envy. It is
interesting to try to define what Envy is. Xenophon, speaking of Socrates, says that "considering what Envy was, he decided it to be a
certain uneasiness, not such as arises however at the ill success of
friends, nor such as is felt at the good success of enemies, but those
only he said were envious who were
annoyed at the good success of
their friends." You will remember th
at recently we quoted Pindar's opinion of Envy, phthonos, as "the worst of all the basenesses that disfigure Man", the desire to depreciate excellence being the meanest
part of his nature. Bacon in his
Natural History
says: "Envy emitteth some malign and poisonous spirit which taketh hold of the spirit of
another, and is likewise of greater
force when the cast of the eye is
oblique", which agrees with the saying
in Ecclesiasticus: "The envious
man hath a wicked eye" (xiv.8-10). (I
t is interesting to note that the
Latin origin of the word, "invidia", literally meant "a glance of ill-will".)
Paul speaks of other negative emotions, such as enmities, strife, jealousies,
wraths, etc., but his final adjuration
to the Galatians is: "Let us not
be vainglorious, provoking one another,
envying one another" (v.26).
Likewise in the Old Testament, in
Proverbs, the greatest power is
attributed to envy: "Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous, but who
is able to stand before envy?"
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