Amwell, 7.4.51
A NOTE ON BUFFERS
Maurice Nicoll
If you are negative, you remember one lot of things: if you are not,
you remember quite different things. This shews how the internal
arrangement of our psychology or
mind depends very much on the
emotional state. Negative emotions, of course, belong to the emotional
state, and as a rule they are practically the only emotions that we can
experience. This is why so much work has to be done on the terrible
state of the emotional centre. Of course, if we loved God with all our
hearts and souls, and our neighbour as ourselves, we would then no
doubt have a different emotional centre. In fact, I am certain we
would. In the present state of darkness and obscurity of our emotional
centre, we do not love God or our neighbour. Have you ever thought
about this ? Probably not. To change
the terrible state of our emotional
centre as it is in mechanical life, we must have some idea of something
higher than ourselves. As we are,
we do not think that our neighbour
is higher than ourselves, and we certainly do not think that God is
higher, because we take ourselves as God and only pretend to think
that there is anything higher than ourselves.
All this is very difficult and it takes a long time to understand even
a little about it. However, if we begin to break ourselves up from the
illusions of ourselves—the illusion, for
instance, that we are one, that
we have Real I and Will, that we
can do, that we are never negative,
never identify, and have, in short, a
Real I that controls us at every
moment—we will begin to see that there is something higher than
ourselves. Once we realize this, we
will know that these terrible imperfections, which we regard as being so excellent, are heavily concealed
by illusions, and, as the Work says,
if you were suddenly to see what
you are like, you would go mad.
If, for example, you suddenly saw
all your contradictions, you would go mad. Fortunately, we are not
allowed to see more than we can stand. In fact, we are only allowed,
in this Work, to see a little way ahead, where, so to speak, we can
stand what we see. But if we had all buffers taken away we would go
mad at once. Buffers prevent us from
going mad and give us the sense
of being perfectly all right, day by day. A little child has the misfortune
of being born among sleeping people, an
d at first it feels contradictions,
but after a time all this is smoothed over by the formation of buffers.
Buffers are, as G. said, things that ease the collision of contradictions.
So much so that one does not notice them. But a very small child has
conscience in an obscure way whereas sleeping people do not have
conscience—I mean, Real Conscience
—but of course they have acquired conscience and social conscience. Now if conscience grew in us
from the very first we would go mad with the state of the world. We
would see the contradictions. But we are not allowed to see them.
Buffers take the place of conscience. No matter how big or little, grand
or poor, you have all got this disease of buffers, and you will not face
the truth. In short, you will always lie. So, therefore, we see from this
short paper, that really to have conscience we must see buffers, but it
is impossible except with prolonged self-observation, and often, I
must say, indirect self-observation, by which I mean retrospective
observation.
The Work teaches that we all have Real Conscience quite apart
from acquired conscience, which latter is merely a question of how we
were brought up. G. said we all have
Real Conscience but it is buried.
How then to bring it to the surface? Now listen carefully. The memory
of Observing I is quite different from
the memories of little 'I's that
pop up at every moment. Observing I should, and does, eventually
make it possible for you to remember what the other 'I's said lower
down in the scale of your machine. Through the memory of Observing
I, which I tend to call Work-memory, as you may have noticed, we
see contradictions—
and what is it that frees us? Conscience.
If I become
conscious through the memory of Observing I, begin to get freed from
my buffers, it means that I begin to see my contradictions and will
become freed from them—namely, from what has prevented me from
seeing them before. What has prevented me from seeing them before?
Why, buffers have prevented me from
seeing these contradictions. The
memory of Observing I is now beginning to change, and then after a
time Higher Centres will see that you are trying to work on yourself
in a real sense and will begin to give you traces of Real Conscience,
which is utterly different from acquired or educated conscience. G.
said that Real Conscience is the same in everyone, whether they be
pink, yellow, blue or green. What is my state then ? If my buffers get
a little weaker do I feel so confident in myself as before? Or do I
begin to see the illusion in myself which has haunted me all this time ?
If so, it will then begin to be
possible for me to love God and my
neighbour instead of myself.
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