(Self-remembering and the conditions that block it)
Real self-remembering is not in centers, it is above centers. It can’t interfere with the work of centers. Daydreaming, lack of aim or wish, considering, identification, negative emotions, weakness, ego, etc., all keep us from self - remembering. If I observe myself and find things I dislike about myself, I must wish to see more. I can tell myself, “I am in the work,” make occasional efforts, and think I am getting somewhere, using this to calm myself when I occasionally see something I don’t like – this will get me no result. I must be willing to keep the picture of myself as I am in front of me, accepting it as truth before the picture can change. Awakening does not depend upon what is born, it depends on magne tic center, and magnetic center depends on what one is interested in. People have different capacities, but not for awakening.
No one says, “Increase what you do enormously.” You have to increase the quality of the thinking and the effort which goes into this Work. It should not be a random effort.
You could not possibly realize all the different people in you fighting each other. They do not even know each other or know they are fighting each other. Until there is some acquaintanceship between your emotional center and mental center, and one or the other of them with your physical body, what can there be but this chaos?
One always wants a quick answer; it doesn’t matter whether it is right or wrong.
My life hangs in the balance. I get to these important places but I don’t do anything important there. I please something in myself, instead of feeding something in myself. Mrs. W: I realized when I came back after the Christmas vacation that I was badly out of touch because I hadn’t worked consistently. Mrs. Benson: Don’t complain about what life offers you if you can’t make an effort.
What a fool to take fifth-best, to take inequality and be nobody, when I needn’t. To me the worst tragedy is not the fool who sits and pretends, but the person who has struggled successfully in the past and doesn’t put forward a strong effort, who doesn’t see that it is there, that it is possible
(Accepting one’s nature and facing inner difficulties)
Being frantic is part of your nature. You will always be up or down. It is nothing. Some people are phlegmatic and some people are very volatile.
have to take the material that is there.
The whole purpose of this work is to find out your difficulties, be willing and able to face them. You have conceded that you have seen this.
takes many years to finally arrive at the place where I recognize and accept this one grain of truth.
isn’t even useful to you to constantly bring material that point up something that you have to know better. I begin to educate my parts to accept that thing that I see; physically, emotionally and mentally. It takes years.
Don’t come here and talk about what you see, but know you should understand why that
Don’t be taken by children, husband, this time, that time; you do what you have to do with them and don’t let it touch you. Everything touches people, everything, and robs you.
One relies on the illegitimate accidental experiences and think something is there, but in 15 minutes it is all over. You have to know that for yourself.
The brain is largely atrophied. It only works mechanically, just enough to keep me going, enough for me to write a book, paint pictures, make a scientific experiments; but with an atrophied brain the rest of the story is unimportant.
It is worse for you than it is for those people who never can know anything about this work, because some part of you will know that you are doing this.
Mr. B: I am beginning to understand that there is a lessening of a certain kind of weight that I have carried previously which I don’t carry about with me anymore, because I am able to see myself a number of times during the day.
(Centers, sensation, and waking up in an instant)
You do everything in your mental center from your emotional part, not from the intellectual part. These things I must no longer know entirely theoretically. They must be food for me. I have to get hungry for this truth. You are living where you are living; you are what you are. I am but what I am, not what I might be. It is a misunderstanding to think that one means here to be different all the time, to be a different person who always controls himself. It is not even possible. This I have to comprehend in all my parts. I am what I am! I’m a certain type; I have certain particularities, I simply do not know it; I don’t want to know it. I hide like a child who is playing hide and seek.
Sensation is a very important thing. If I can achieve even a weak kind of sensation very quickly I can come to the place where I can wake up.
You have no idea how much can happen in one second, or two, or three. The whole cosmos can happen in those few seconds.
That is a mechanical way of solving it; try not to be mechanical while doing it. The mechanicality does it. It is one of the reasons you preach. You use your brain. All this preaching and the mechanical thinking you do – all this calculus to get it all written down in your mechanical notebook – it is all so that you have something to preach with.
People can eat you and take your energy – Chicago seems to induce that in you. You do nothing about it, evidently.
(Force, identification, and the trap of self-love)
Mrs. D: It seems to me when I reach a certain level and I am able to do some kind of work that I always identify with a kind of force I connect with at that time, which at the time I think it’s “the real thing” – a kind of inner power, very strong.
extremes.” When one lives in darkness for so many years and suddenly something opens a little bit, one wants to go overboard, to do too much. If, the minute that impulse appears, if it isn’t strengthened and grasped, one begins again to doubt and to feel unhappy and that there is no hope. The thing is to recognize that this is your pattern. It is everybody’s, but is exaggerated in you.
You speak about is a force, what kind of force do you see it as? You immediately think of force as destructive because it has always been that for you. But force is not necessarily or even habitually a destructive thing. Force is what one can live by and orders one’s life with by taking an entirely different attitude. That is force.
But to take it for granted that it is destructive because for so many years it has been…? The past is the past. When you get further into the work you can have an inkling of yourself and what elements you have to guard against. In the meantime, don’t be too hasty or excited at the prospects. Let it simmer. Let well enough alone. Be satisfied with small things, gradual things, and the fact that you know you have your chance. Everything I have been before is in me. I am what I am. I don’t try to hide from it. At least you have a perspective to tell you where you are. So, when you speak of a force within you, stay present to it, bide your time and try to find out what kind of force – is it benign or otherwise? Mrs. D: When I identify with it, it becomes something else. Or something happens. It became self-love, self-pride, vanity. Mrs. Benson: So, it is. Good. You see the fact that it is there; human beings slowly build themselves up again, with self-love or self-pride. This is the process. Be pleased to see it. I have to tear myself down, and so I have to build myself up again – unless I have a different force, a third force, to bring.
Then the kind of understanding of a greater discipline will come. It is unending. You are never finished with your responsibility.
This is related to what I was trying to say weeks ago. I have no respect for my insides; they are a mess of emotions, confusion. I have seen a connection with this: most of my life and energy are put into things that I really have no interest in, or spent in daydreams, which is a big waste. And somehow I have lived with the idea that I was presenting to people what I think I am; I thought I was getting that over to people. I would like to know how to think correctly, to bring myself to a better state.
Mr. Benson: We don’t know, directly, how to do anything. Putting one’s jigsaw puzzle together… Suppose you
You are getting some kind of satisfaction out of something in order to just carry on your daily life. Not that you have to go overboard on these things, but know they exist. You do have to have a certain amount of food – impressions. But even if you feed upon impressions they have to stay with you – not just ‘go through’ – and you lose that for carrying on, for your memory.
With this work you have the opportunity of gazing upon yourself in order to make yourself better, not through cursing yourself and not through going overboard on little things or drowning under big things. With your force – by virtue of being alive – just living – that is what the demand is.
Not that you are – none of us are – but that ‘I have to be,’ for my salvation. It is not done ordinarily; you have to reach something better than ordinariness, and what you think is a curse now may be a blessing for your growth. Maybe you go through these things to cut down certain barriers, to grow into something better and better – not through imagination.
We are all in the same boat; we wish to be
When you look at this greater goal or aim, you can say, “This is not my goal.” It is one step toward your understanding; if it is done objectively there is a little added. It is a catalyst. You are creating something, objectively. This is the force. You have to have the guts, the courage, when the time comes – not before – objectively to accept this. You are creating something. That is not the goal of your existence; this is a little step toward it – it is the way we grow.
I am knowledgeable enough about the process not to throw myself against the barrier as I have done in the past, but what has been said is particularly useful because it recalls to me that the one thing that I can believe is ‘I’ – that something is available if it is possible to remember and believe in ’I.’ I think a good deal of my trouble could be saved if I didn’t lose sight of this.
When one is ill, the strong thought is saying, “This is forever.” But it is not! At the time you are not in a normal physical condition – but not forever; and at the time you are not in a state of work, except for one thing: you can remember.
You can revivify one’s “can’t do” – give a shock where you can’t, a shock enough to do the impossible. But it must be done when you can’t do it. It has to be done if the thing is desperate, but not through desperation but through your whole way of understanding.
Why do we have to sleep? Why do we have to awaken? You have to look at things in their ordinary sense, work on it objectively, with understanding – if you know how – we have to arrive at places where we can do something.
I worked with men together for eight years until I came to the conclusion we are never ready for the plunge into the cold sea in order to do. The doing can’t be done on a whim or a wish. It is a state one can meet. ‘Doing’ is an attitude one takes.
(Self-will, chief feature, and the refusal to change)
The reason you don’t understand it is that you are not ready yet. Who is? It means giving up one’s self-will, giving up needing to be the way one is. The way a hungry person needs food we need to remain as we are – disgruntled, stupid, heavy people that we are – we wish to remain that way no matter how we proclaim that we do not. Until this is seen ad nauseum, and accepted by all our centers, we can never begin to take that hurdle. The main thing that blocks us from seeing this is our chief feature that guides our entire life – we hang onto it as if we would be lost without it.
I may weep for the fact that I am as I am, but while this is going on, unbeknownst to me, in my bloodstream there is a terrible need to be the creature that I am, ‘clutching’ to my way of going on.
My self-will is in my bloodstream. I have been this way hundreds of years, and I hang on to my death – and it doesn’t mean until I die – it makes me die, not being able to go forward. This could be understood since so much was received tonight of a very high-powered nature – I go direct to my death. I don’t mean my physical death. Everybody goes to that. I am not willing to see what blocks me so I can’t ‘give up the ghost.’ Inwardly there has to be complete self-abnegation.
“Does anyone ever make a demand? Pay? Experiment? You are the laboratory. You want to talk about it in conversation; but you must feel it in your guts.” “Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come back to you a hundred-fold.”
It is very subtle. Know your automatism. Why in certain circumstances does one ‘I’ arise, and then circumstances change and so do I?”
Mrs. Benson: Why aren’t you willing to make a mistake instead of fiddling around? My whole life is spent that way. First conscious shock is to try to remember yourself; when you remember yourself it should be a shock to you. If you can’t relate your functions to that, where is the picture? Everybody breaks off little isolated things from the technique instead of realizing one thing follows another. Even when I don’t know it, if I am present to myself, something vibrates, something occurs. The more strongly I am present to myself, and the more I don’t turn from it or brush it aside, the more I am ‘something’ and less a straw in the wind. You shouldn’t have said that if you didn’t think you connected with your functions. You have to connect it with your functions. You have to remember yourself in order to do it.
You didn’t say, “When I am present to myself”; you said, “When I am present to my functions … that they translate themselves into other terms.”
If not, I am satisfied that I have seen something and I wait until chance brings it again. But the line is constantly broken by having a little experience and not assimilating it, not letting it go through me so that what I assimilate gets into my blood stream.
This moving forward is for that person who is trying to build a building, and not just give an impression that they are doing something.
suddenly see something. My automatism is arranged now that I see it. “Gosh” it is over.
(Illusions, compromise, and the fear of truth)
people think a good time is license to throw everything to the winds, so they never have a good time, it is all routine: routine good times, routine life, routine everything. Always ‘tomorrow’ I am going to have a wonderful job, ‘tomorrow’ I am going to do this, ‘tomorrow’ I am going to be happy; but today I am a dud, a blank cartridge.
What we are waiting for is for you make a real choice, not an intellectual choice – a choice that comes from the place that you don’t give enough gratitude to, that you neglect, don’t give its place in the scheme of things. Here you are; there is your silence; there is your flaming cauldron – and you are between. Someday you will make an irrevocable choice that has nothing whatsoever to do with your outer life. There is fear there – that you will lose something, that it won’t be right, not the same.
Everybody is afraid of something. I must be interested in what I am afraid of. I must know my particularity. It is all there for you – a struggle, maybe in the life sense. The less fear you have the better it will be taken care of. That fear creates a problem. You must see it right up to the hilt. Sometimes it will overcome you. You can’t help that. Conquer this fear. You will never have a good silence otherwise, except with a terrific effort.
Mr. W: Where I move from that, in my daily life, is a very different thing. Mrs. Benson: What are you afraid of in this movement? You are here with friends. What are you afraid of? Not expressing yourself properly? Nobody does. Mr. W: What I am afraid of now is taking an easy way. Mrs. Benson: You haven’t broken down this resistance. It will take a long time. It is exactly right. That is why I wait for you. Mr. W: Several different lines bring themselves further in my mind and I see the falsity of them. I taste the falsity of them. Mrs. Benson: You discard that. Don’t you come to something else, something more real? Mr. W: I experience myself. Mrs.
Making a living is always an abstract thing, always hoping there is going to be a little better time. The whole point is that it has got to be put in order.
You will do it well. But all this takes place on the outside. Isn’t there something terribly wrong with a person who can do that and is afraid of his own shadow ‘otherwise’ – something cockeyed, something phony? This is the whole point of Mr. Gurdjieff’s teaching. I am somebody, but I am also a little rabbit running so I won’t see how poverty stricken I am, how inept.
can do this and I am afraid of my shadow? Why? That is all this teacher wants you to do – to ask questions about this, not work constantly from personality traits. People here for 15 years still argue with me about personality traits because they have never understood what is meant by study. Study is to see this and say, “Here it is and I never face it.”
When sorry for yourself you say, “I am so shy and timid.” That is a waste, put it aside and have nothing to do with it. It is another way of running away. Instead, “why should I be shy because I am a little smaller?” That is the way you have to talk to yourself. You don’t spend the rest of your life commiserating about that.
Mrs. Benson: Everyone wants to go back to sleep. “Tomorrow I will wake up.” “I have a cold,” “I am tired.” “I will be able to suffer a little tomorrow, but not today.” Mr. H: After a weekend like this last weekend, when I felt a different kind of urgency, need to work…
The important thing is to try and find out why I don’t want to make the commitment. It is the whole idea of the teaching. It is very hard to believe – nobody will believe that they would prefer to live in dirt than cleanliness.
You ask yourself, “Why am I willing to be dirty?” There is nothing terrible about being dirty if I wish to do some dirty work. But if I am dirty because I am lazy and I think my superior intellectuality is going to carry me – is that what I unconsciously feel? I feel I have enough to carry me beyond the stupidities, non-entities, and the vagrancy of my ordinary life. Unconsciously I feel this.
that would happen now you will soon see that everything is not as hunky-dory as you think it is and that you can’t manipulate everything, you can’t work it your way with everything. This is quite a thing.
There isn’t anybody here who doesn’t prefer to stay the way he is, even the ones who are working.
We love ourselves; yet we are not a bit interested in ourselves.
This is the big paradox in the work, that everything that is said is used as a loophole so I don’t have to really do it. How can I? You were very intelligent yesterday in some of your statements.
“One does not understand, and doesn’t want to know. You have shut out the world. I should think it would make you vomit to know, yet to remain living as you continue another minute. You don’t stay with anything long enough so it can crystallize throughout all of you. Conquer your fate. The truth shall set you free. Face it!”
“Do the best you can do. Follow your own true self. Do one thing differently than you do it now; sense – observe the way you do it.
“You must be sincere in your effort, watch and pray. You have nothin g to lose, risk. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You will forget, but you can, and must, come back.”
“Make a plan for the next day. You come here with what you wish to be and not what you are. If you want something, make it God for yo u. Look at yourself as if you were looking at a stranger.” Does anyone ever make a demand, pay, experiment? You must feel it in your guts. You are the laboratory. You want to talk about it in conversation. Your self-pity will kill you.
the idea that ordinary everyday things affect one’s understanding of bigger things – of the biggest things – no one will believe it. I am getting much more interested in producing only two or three people who have something real. I don’t care about anything else. Take a life, for instance – think of what a person’s life consists of. Not one person in 50 will look seriously at what a life is.
But the fact is that I never know what my life consists of. It is what nobody wants to understand. So, they remain dopes, with the occasional jolts or high or low spots; a kind of glorified dope that comes into this and wants something different, and doesn’t know his way. The way is given to him and shown him and he is given 49 maps. He doesn’t want to be shown.
Because we will never give ourselves the small repeated shocks that are necessary.
People want to be allowed to stay the way they are, and pretend to be different. If there is anything more tragic than that I would like you to show it to me.
Until one sees the quality of one’s life, there is no use talking about that. I smell compromise; I smell compromise everywhere, because no one while they are in their 30’s thinks they are ever going to die. I don’t mean the physical body. The thing is there is no understanding yet.
Mr. M: Compromise – Mrs. Benson: Compromise is essential, but you would have to live to be as old as Beelzebub to do anything with that kind of compromise. You are making bargains with the compromise and part of you knows it. You make constant compromise; there isn’t one thing you stand for clearly, freely, indubitably. Inside yourself you have to stand for it clearly, freely, indubitably. You don’t. The way people live on this planet, what they want, they need. Always thinking next year it is going to be different. Where is my intelligence? We always put someone else as an important person. There is always someone else at the head of the firm. I always tell myself if I had his opportunity, his position, his money, I would be different. You might not have the kind of thing be has, but you would not be different from how you are now.
I hate to rob you of this illusion but this work is meant to rob one of illusions. I know those illusions; these little tender hopes that you base…
“I can live without some illusions. I try to break the addiction to illusion in people. Mr. Gurdjieff speaks all the time in Beelzebub how we cannot fathom our own death. It is a very good thing we cannot, we couldn’t take it. Only a highly developed person can recognize his death and carry on. I don’t ask that. I do try to rob you of some of your…
I have no illusions – not one. I know the stuff of which people are made. I pity them. I also think they are fools not to reach for the stars. I can’t always do that. I know that, too. I am very tired all the time. I get tired. That is natural at my time of life. Sometimes I have to be a small thing – niggardly, cheap, but I understand it and I can reach up. I can’t play games two or three ways and succeed in all of them as everyone is trying to do. Give a little bit – keep the other, put it in their pocket. Think nobody knows it. I always know it. It is…
Until I get a clear picture of my life a little bit; it isn’t a terrible life – that is another illusion. I have to get acquainted a little bit with what is true. It is the only thing I don’t want. It is…
People say to me “I have stopped trying – I can’t do it.” They even know it is a lie when they say it. That appalls me. It is pure heresy. How could anyone go to church and say a thing…
Mrs. Benson: Keep it plain, just a few basic truths. You have got them. You always want to embroider them. You make it sound like that. You know, in the end, Elmer Gantry3 had something yet he was robbed of all that. He would exalt the people who sat there. He had the gift of words. When everything was burned up he walked away from it with one or more precepts. You have got to give it up. You are too…
What do you see in your life? What are you willing to face? What are you willing to discard and say…
Mr. K: In my ordinary life it is terrible. Mrs. Benson: Endure it if you can’t do anything about it. Do it. You are knowledgeable. There are a lot of people who want this and God help them, they can’t grasp it. You can. And you play games. You are too good for it. You are letting yourself play a role that you don’t even deserve. It has nothing to do with your outer life. You live it. You have got another life. You mix the two. You confuse them. You are not clear about the two lives. You live your other life as decently as possible. And with joy and with fun and sorrow and whatever, and you have the courage to have your other life. You always confuse the two and you want everything to conform to your idea.
You won’t take the time. You get too much fun doing it this way. You should be supporting this thing in a very big way. You can’t. Why are you willing to do it this way? You can make tapes and recordings. They will all be burned when you are in the ground. This work will die when such people exist.
Mrs. Benson: You are in a very good position with yourself. It is a very unpleasant situation to be in but an excellent position for drawing very close to the truth – and it is bothering you terribly. You are like a fish caught in a net. You don’t want that.
You don’t want to be entangled; not realizing that already one is already bound hand and foot by their lives, by their customs, by their habits, by their ordinary wishes – they are hamstrung by it. You are getting to a place where you can’t be very much longer. You have to make a choice and get it clear for yourself – I have to be willing to find out what truth I can about myself or I have to suffer in the wrong way – not being able to decide.
There is a new birth. Who has the sense to know one doesn’t have to really give up anything? One has to know the position it holds. Everyone seems to think they have to give up everything. It is stupid. But one does have to give up maybe something they are not ready to give up – many of your illusions; you have to give up a few to get past this period. You have to allow yourself to be entangled. Otherwise you will continue to suffer needlessly.
Miss E: Normally, when I feel I have to do something I always want to throw myself into it and overcome and climb the barricades and fight and get it over with. I don’t know how to fight in a positive, conscious, purposive way. So what I have to do is to put myself in readiness for it to happen to me.
One has to bring it in the way it is best suited to the person who is hearing it. Yet, the rest, they are in 12 different places with themselves; each will interpret what they hear. This is one of the dangers of words –the way people are conditioned to interpret makes it more and more difficult for me to speak.
One answers a question and each person, according to their metabolism and their makeup, takes that to themselves and tries to use it in a way that is perhaps not intended for them at all. The solving of the mystery of how to bring and use this teaching is an extremely difficult and complex thing.
To be sincere is a very big thing in a work sense. To be sincere a little bit I would have to be, to a certain extent, free, and I don’t know many people who know what Mr. Gurdjieff means when he speaks of freedom – he speaks of the fact that this teaching, in its final analysis, is to bring one to a point of freedom. What would that mean? It doesn’t mean that I can work when it suits me. It also doesn’t mean I can’t make mistakes – because I do live on this planet where mistakes are very popular. It does mean that I have to have a communication with myself of a very real and unusual nature.
They become either an intellectual question that my mentality becomes very interested in; or I feel it without knowing how to analyze it or what it really means; or I have an instinct for it and I realize this is something I should be able to grasp – my own inner communication is so slender and so unrealistic that I really don’t even want that.
How often does one read or hear it? This is what Mr. Gurdjieff means when he says this work cannot be given. It cannot be put into an envelope and put in your hand as a talisman. What do I wait for to make my acquaintance with myself?
head-on acquaintance with something very real in myself, and at the same time having the courage to know that I will only free myself by being submerged by it. Only! There are very few who have ever achieved that. I will say at the beginning of any such big project as trying to be sincere with oneself, I would need to know my insincerity. Before I can make the positive step I need to be free enough to recognize the ways in which I need to be – not want to be, not wishing to be, but need to be – insincere. I must become acquainted with what nature that has been given me, formed by the environment I have lived in, with the indelible marks that have been left on me.
One thing that makes the work so terribly difficult is that I will then perhaps practice self-castigation; that is fatal! The minute I do too much of that I get very tired of it.
‘Oh, it is too much, I can’t, it is too much for the frail thing I am.” I react even then according to type. One knows very little that is happening, hoping that something will suddenly happen, like that girl who spoke at Armonk yesterday.
I don’t believe in opening the doors so wide that anybody can come in to hear and perhaps germinate because it spoils the whole atmosphere for others who have tried to work on themselves.
ways – until they die, but knowing it without excuse to themselves, without explanation. They already know the answer so that they can move a little in their orbit without the constant contradiction. You have to realize that life is made up entirely of contradictions and that they sap one’s strength, one’s energy and what is left for self-knowledge or the arduous task of facing the truth for growth? What is left? I require energy for this.
And even worse than that, unconsciously I have worked with a kind of feeling of guilt when I did anything with my hands – that it is a kind of weakness to like to do this. I realized that it was not. It took a long time to realize it and to feel it. It is one thing to see it, but another thing is to believe it and absorb it.
And only when you pay do you receive. Something that no one understands!
I am tired of trying to have people see something they don’t want to see, trying to play games with them to take them down the right road. I wish to find two or three people who mean it when they say they want to be different. To mean it a little bit every day.
not with words, but with deeds.
I am no longer young; I have 5,000 times the obligations of all you put together.
The challenge made it possible to accept that, to say “yes” to something that nothing in me – physical, instinctive, emotional, even – wanted to do, and that is why it went well. That is why it was a shock, just for that reason.
and how I live and how I let it go on as if it were on wheels, moving by itself from one pitfall to another. I need to he disgusted objectively, without self-pity – or maybe only a touch, because I am what I am and I cannot completely avoid self-pity, but without becoming overwhelmed by it.
The other thing is a very big subject. I have spoken of it often – especially to you, although it is everybody’s problem, everybody’s devil – and that is the subject of fear. Everybody is born with some fear.
But once I can come to the place, where many times I can set fear before me in an objective way, I can see what it is and what it is composed of and how shameful it really is that a human being should have to carry that for a whole lifetime in every department of his life. Our ordinary life produces fear – it is built and based on those people in power making the underdog afraid. Our ordinary life is based that way, and our psychic life. You were born with a large portion of it.
You should try to be at least as good to yourself as you are to strangers, if not better. You must sit and look at what your fear is composed of – that part that you can see – face up to. There are things you can see.
I must free myself of the necessity to make my life pursuits such as food and lodging create fear in me. It is fantastic that a being that has such potentialities puts its sights so low.
“I have already done it.” The opportunity of adventure is gone even with oneself. Life need never be dull – I am dull, not what life offers, but anyone who has such possibilities as I have… I couldn’t be dull.
But I saw just a glimpse and I don’t bother to see further or deeper.
I am content to know practically nothing. I am too tired, too unwell, too busy, too occupied. I don’t wish to enlarge my understanding. I don’t wish to wake my torpid sluggish nature.
don’t wish to know too much, to feel too much, to sense too much because it might take me away from the glorious work that I do.
What thoughts consume me? Why be guilty of what I eat, smoke or do – of what I am? I get fat, I smoke, I get gray – the ‘Merciless Heropass’; and I ‘do’ nothing. I should, I could, and I don’t! I worry what shall I ‘do’ tonight? How shall I feed ego? Not, how can I feed my Self. My work: Do I really try to use myself or do I depend on a frail talent? Do I engage any possibility or is it just for effect? I can taste what that might be, have even tasted what it is. What engages me?
Am I empty or full? There is no difference – both are complete I start with a wish. I wish to be. What stands in the way of this wish? The ideas need to become personal before they have any reality for me! Work with others!
Everything needs to be sorted out. I have been in the process of sorting out physical things all summer. If people would only realize that there needs to be a sorting out in every center – a throwing away of old finished thoughts, old decrepit feelings; clearing out the emotional attic and the mental attic. This process must never stop. You see? Otherwise, I act from impulse or from how I am that day.
True, I have to earn my living; I have got to do this and that. But for the most part we have no conception of anything more. The better attention I have – the stronger the ability I have for attention – the more gets done.
You are in a good state, much better than the eleven days but you are still forcing – be still! Be quiet! Don’t demonstrate so much. Let it come to you.
They change their tone of voice – which you haven’t done. You must all listen to yourself speak in your life. What you have is unusual for the length of time you have been in the work. Now you have to do the opposite of what most people do. They get the idea very quickly with an outward facility; they learn the ‘trappings.’ People recognize the quiet of those who are teaching this work so they put on an artificial quiet in most instances.
If a person has psychological problems they are shut; so this has to be worn down and worn down until a person will open himself and will see nothing comes from this defensiveness. How many millions of times have I said to beginners, “you are putting a tourniquet on yourself, on your brain, so no new ideas can take place there”?
earlier reminds me very much of what I began to experience during the three days, and what I begin to understand about my situation. I realize that I am still in many ways behaving as if I am trying to escape from what, in one way, I had left a long time ago. I saw particularly during the three days that the times when I could free myself from being concerned about those around me, when I was trying to do something for myself, were the times when I felt more for myself and closer to the way I want to be. And there was a different response from the people I was working with, and the results were different. I started off by reacting very strongly against the person I was working with. But I managed to get beyond that and do the work I was given to do, however simple it was, for myself. It brought me many things.
Mrs. Benson: We always look for what is wrong in the other person. The thing which you said you arrived at is very right – but it is in a sense elementary, unless one overcomes a very big thing in coping with a person you are working with. People in life have to do that too, or you don’t keep a job very long. I think you have a side that wants very much to struggle. I have spoken to you about your problem a good deal lately. You are a highly intelligent and conscientious young woman. But you have a kind of emotional chip on your shoulder. You must find out why. It will always antagonize other people. You attract the wrong thing by putting that out.
Or when you become what I call a ‘waif,’ that isn’t your fault – not at all. That is your past. That is your upbringing. That is your heredity. And you bring that out, and it is all unconscious. And you expect strangers to understand and they won’t; they don’t care. You have to care – but caring in the right way; by your upbringing of this poor little sad thing – giving it a chance. Not kicking it around – it is not a beast of burden, you know. And you are not going to put it in the mold you want to put it in. That is why it is kicking you all the time. It doesn’t want to kick you.
That is why these two sides are so alien to each other. What you do here is exactly what you do inside. You always tell yourself, “Wait until I get this fixed or that fixed.” No, believe me, your striving for other things is quite understandable and quite right, but not in the way you are doing it. You have got too much to offer to kick this around this way. You can’t ignore such an important part of yourself. You can’t deny the needs and wishes of a third of you. You have already arrived at something where you should know this forceful mental thing you produce just kills the rest of you. That is what I mean by a ‘waif,’ and you take on that appearance; it’s what makes me so sympathetic to you – the terrible difference between the waif and the intelligent person. They have never met each other – never. Do you understand me a little? Try to think about this a little and stop talking – to yourself, too.
For what do I exist - for ourselves or for our development and to see ourselves as we are?
When you go to bed at night, go over your whole body from your toes to your head and recall what happened in the day from the beginning of the day. One always returns to the functions: facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, gestures and movements. In regard to the morning exercise, when the voices have more or less quieted down, put your attention on a part of yourself; begin with the feet, and go through the whole body, the fingers and all. Then later when you return to the body, you will see how the parts quiet down by themselves. If you don’t make an effort before you sit down for the exercise in the morning, you will not be able when you do sit down. When I am in a collected state, do I see more?
And I see how little in me really wishes to be contrary to this stream.
As a fairly intelligent, thinking animal, I should know that everything is based on the degree to which I do it. Even the subject of payment is completely misunderstood. Payment cannot be made with the body alone. I come where I can find things, where I can be in an atmosphere of work, and then I don’t work there: that is a lack of payment. I want something, and when I go there, I am tired, or I am sorry for myself – I don’t have any control of this. It is a beginning; I wish to serve.
(Fear of self-knowledge as the root obstacle)
We were talking about the question of fear in people. Fear is a big thing, deep, and it is related to very big things. It is one of the reasons mankind is where it is, but not all fear is on a level on which most people can comprehend. I would say the chief thing that people are afraid of – unbeknownst to themselves – is fear of knowing the truth about oneself. That’s the most dominant fear: fear of knowing, of finding out the truth about oneself. Nobody knows or will admit it. They want to get little bits and pieces. But what really dominates their life is the denial they constantly make about themselves. That is a fear that could cripple a person. That is a psychiatric thing. It is the biggest part of all psychiatric things: halftruths, quarter-truths, bits and pieces – but not the truth. The truth is what I fear more than the devil or hell or anything that I could conjure up in my consciousness. I do not say this to myself. It is a principle in me which takes place by itself. I do not wish to know. I wish an inkling – a side-glance, a momentary glimpse; but to live with the truth about myself, no! I am too emotionally inept to face this. And therefore I spend my life in fear. Or I get upset.
And when you are emotionally or mentally sick, it is very hard to come up with anything because the truth eludes you even when you are functioning on two or five cylinders. It eludes you. How is it going to be with a person who is mentally or emotionally ill? You people take it in and do not do a thing about it afterwards, or very little. So I am still looking for somebody who really wants to go against himself and not only says so. Everybody has an excuse for staying the way they are. My feeling is that you should get corroboration and information here. With all the labor you put forth you should know this answer with every fiber of your being. It is because of all those things I mentioned, and more; mental laziness and the thinking of yourself personally instead of in a big way. People have such vanity that it is fantastic, and yet they never have enough vanity. But to make a new image of themselves – and to try to reach that – that they never think about, only this colossal vanity which they do not even understand in themselves. They are literally self-worshipping, even while they castigate themselves and say, “I am nothing.” It is not true. If one has no bigger vision then one has to plow along as best one can. Do you follow me? And a part of you already knows a little of this but nobody wants to give up anything. And the universe even punishes that – it sometimes pushes you to make yourself, your vanity, bigger because you will not move out to make your universe bigger.
I think I would almost rather die than see.
how I will have to separate myself from my sanity and end the only hope I have to protect myself from seeing this.
I don’t mean that some tears are not genuine, but many are just selfpity. Mr. H: This atmosphere is morbid, this wish to die. Mrs. Benson: It is true. Hang on to this as long as you are able. Pray that you can keep it for a little while. You can’t keep it long. But if you have a slightly different level of comprehension of this, something can come of it; not because your intellectual gifts will come to bear you out, but by keeping it for a little while to feel the ‘sick spots’ in your other centers, your lack of coordination in them. That is a very big thing. But it is a beginning.
And if I give the least amount of love to that part of myself, the childishness grows and grows and gets away from me. Everything gets away from me. I start with a good wish toward a good effort, and it gets away from me.
I am a thief of myself.
You are a very clever young man, and you know this but are not clever enough to do something about it. And it is a shame. It really is.
you’ve got the real thing in you and you settle for the phony one. You are constantly kicking, biting, and pushing away the real thing – insulting it, demeaning it. You see? And it is not easy for you. You will not thrive on that.
Mr. W: I am a child. I have no concern, like a child who goes out to play and everything is forgotten while he is playing. If somebody spanks me, I am good for a while; 99% of me simply does not want to face anything and is quite ready to accept a third-rate kind of existence. I am desperately afraid of looking at myself.
You have surely hit the nail on the head – I don’t want ‘something better’ for want of that comfort. It is why people get married half the time. Comfort is why one doesn’t mind so much. It is a way of life for a little while. Go ahead.
You are stubborn; you want to have things your own way, and yet you want to serve. Why?
You see, what one needs is activity, inner activity. But activity needs to be understood. How is one going to come by that? You know your own passivity, your unwillingness to face inner problems. You come upon problems and discard them as rapidly as you can. You have to have an active, positive attitude. Your attitude has to change completely toward what you are attempting. You hardly understand anything.
The kind of suffering you do is absolutely pointless. If I suffer, it has to be knowledgeably! Your knowledge has to be enhanced. It has to grow. You know isolated facts, points of view, emotions, that are not put together as cohesive thought and feeling that can be useful to you.
The kind of suffering that says, “I have been in the work 12 years and look what I am.” You will say that after 20 years. If you had knowledge, you would know that.
There is always more. And it is also true that unless something in you is fed by that process of growth, you are just playing games where you have a flash of inspiration occasionally to show how it could be. It is like a child that finds an extraordinary thing in the field.
One needs passivity too but without knowledge some person might take that to mean, “I should never do anything in life.” That is not what passivity means. There would be no interference in life if you would get yourself out of the way. The way is never clear for me. Our ordinary passivity is a terrible thing.
What have you built up in yourself if you can’t face your weakness? That is not even shame. Shame is a big thing. So this suffering is a little disgusting to me, because it is based on ignorance and unwillingness of the nicest people to face any truth in themselves.
One sees a large thing, like myself getting angry – and I am practically never able to stop myself from getting angry; but I have begun to see the possibility of seeing the combinations of negative emotions, the fear, the considering, all the things that combine – the habits and so forth – to produce that moment at which anger is already beyond calling back.
And that’s what this teaching is about. If it doesn’t relate to your life… if you manage something for a minute and a half or less – you know when you are trying – and the next moment you’re exactly as you were before and so you remain for the next 23 hours, it’s of no use. Now it doesn’t take terribly much reasoning to understand that. Does everybody here know… do you have any notion of what it is that I’m talking about?