(Four or five kinds of human energy)
Human Energies We should understand how we do things and how far we are able to control and improve the way we do things. The start of such an understanding is to realize that the way we do things is divided into four or five different kinds.
But we are concerned with the vital energies and the higher energies.
The right use of one’s body and the creation of conditions where other parts will be free and able to act is the very start of self-knowledge.
(Anti-automatic habits and false disciplines)
For example, the habit of depending upon various things that will release nervous tensions, such as smoking, which has become a strongly ingrained habit of quite a large proportion of the world’s population and which is quite obviously an anti-automatic habit, producing bad results for the organism. There are many other similar things in the way of mental habits as well, and all of these are anti-automatic false disciplines, or anti-disciplines.
These automatisms can be perfected. For example, in speech, it is possible by right training to automatize oneself to say what one intends to say instead of simply being carried away by an automatic flow of words.
(Negative sensitivity as hindrance)
There is a negative sensitivity, which is also sometimes called considering, or weakness in one’s dealing with people; a false kind of dependence, where the sensitivity, instead of being a positive instrument to help us in doing our work better, becomes a hindrance and a weakness in our dealings with people especially, but eventually even in dealing with ourselves. In the way we lead our lives we are constantly hampered by a wrong working of these sensitive perceptions. One worries, one cares about what people think or do not think, how one is looking, whether one succeeds or fails in what one is doing – all of this is the wrong or the negative working of the sensitive level of our activity.
We need to eliminate from ourselves all the negative sensitivity which makes us wrongly dependent upon people, upon our own states, on pleasant or unpleasant experiences, and we need to develop in ourselves positive sensitivity; that is, the ability to see what objectively is required in every situation-whether it is personal or more general, or in dealing with living beings.
We are made in this way, so that our conscious direction should be available for higher purposes than directing the simple, repetitive operations of our bodies and what are called our mental processes; in other words, automatism is part of the natural and necessary equipment of man for living.
The extent of automatism in the feeling life is totally underrated. As I said, people suppose that their likes and dislikes, their desires, interests and the rest of it are spontaneous and really represent what they are themselves, whereas in reality, they are mostly grafted on to them. Now this is not altogether undesirable, because if there were not some regulation, some automatizing, the working of human societies would be impossible; people have to be more or less automatized to certain ways of valuing things in order to be able to live together.
(Changing feeling through body and mind)
Therefore I cannot rely upon one emotion to help me to get rid of an emotional habit or a habitual dislike. I have to do this through my body, and for that I have to accustom myself to relaxing the particular tension that comes into me whenever this dislikeable object comes to my attention. Through the cooperation of the mind and the body, I change my feeling state, and in this way I can certainly overcome – even quite reverse – an emotional habit. I know with my mind that it is right for me to wish for this, and I must habituate my body to behave as if I wished for it, and then the wish will by itself arise in me; that is, I will have replaced the habitual emotional habit of not wishing for this change by an emotional habit of wishing for it.
One of the great pitfalls of most people is to think that what we do in the mind, our intellectual processes, are entirely autonomous; that we can change our way of thinking by thinking. This is a fallacy; thought cannot change thought. What can change thought is a sincere desire coupled with bodily changes, and this is very difficult to bring oneself to at first.
In order to think differently, I realize that I must no longer sit in the way I am automatically sitting; I have got to change the way I hold my spine, the way I support my head on my neck, or something of this sort.
to deal with one automatism, it has an effect on us generally. This is why it is well worth while finding one particular habit – whether of body, or of feeling, or of thought – that we decisively wish to alter and applying this technique to it, because we then shall find that other things begin to come right also.
(Seeing the visible opens the invisible)
In a more general way, seeing the visible enables us also to be more conscious of the invisible. If we really see what we are seeing, we become aware also of what we are not seeing.
You begin to be aware that what seems to be empty is not empty because it is how everything is connected.
You should really try to do this, and demand of yourself to see perspective until you are able to see the whole thing that is in front of you and not let yourself be caught by the excitement of details, or of something specific.
This is because you are not free enough in your perception. You could set yourself free in your perceptions by making this effort to see in perspective.
As I said this morning, if you break the fetters of automatism in one place, you will find yourself free in other places. This does not mean that automatism is not necessary; we could not live through half a day if we had not got automatic habits of doing the greater part of the things that have to be done. It is only that there is too much of it and we do not know how to set ourselves free where we need to.
(Sensitivity and the right use of energy)
Sensitivity The way we work depends upon the quality of the energies that we bring to our work, and also, even more so perhaps, upon using the energies in the right way. To know how to use one’s energies rightly is one of the big secrets of life.
But in most living things, and also in us human beings, in most of our states, the sensitive energy is merged with the automatic, so that our sensations, reactions, and so on depend upon the built-in automatisms, conditionings, of our nervous system.
Then our attention, or our interest, becomes very sharply intensified and we are in a state of heightened attention.
One must therefore distinguish between attention in general and the decision, the voluntary act to direct it where we choose, and in the way we choose. In order to have voluntary attention and therefore to be able to acquire a certain power of adaptation, of adjustment of our activity, which the automatism cannot give, the sensitive energy has to be disengaged from the automatic energy.
(The reminding factor and inner freedom)
This organized challenge is also called the reminding factor. When we take steps to keep ourselves in front of situations which will draw our attention out of our automatism, we remember, we notice, and the purpose of the reminding factor is to help us to notice what we are doing, to observe. This state of noticing and observing is really a state of relative freedom as compared with the unnoticing, unobserving state into which we fall when our sensitivity turns back into our automatism.
When one is doing one’s own professional job, whatever it may be, a mother with her children, a man with business work, or an artist in front of his art-there has to be a sufficient freedom of attention to notice and not to be disturbed by the automatic processes that are going on, not to be lost in what one is doing, as otherwise there will not be production of quality.
For example, someone who may be quite good at his professional work can very easily be disturbed, ruffled, distressed, by some fancied – or even real – slight insult, or some interference with his liberty or something of this sort, which means that his emotional sensitivity is totally without freedom.
(Turning disturbances into means of remembering)
What we have to learn to do is to make use of just these kinds of disturbing factors to serve us as means of remembering, as reminding factors. When once this is really understood and the importance of freedom on the sensitive level is really grasped for oneself, then all kinds of disturbances so far from being something to complain about, are valued, turned to account at every moment.
In the same way, if something happens that disturbs us emotionally, irritates, touches our vanity, excites fears and so on, and in so doing produces a certain flow of sensitive energy, we must learn that it is simply a matter of treating such factors as means of remembering, means of retaining our inner freedom. Once we have trained ourselves in this way, no kind of irritation, disturbance, or anything else will be regarded as something hostile to ourselves; on the contrary, all of this is seen as a really necessary means to acquire a properly balanced life.
one is obliged by this challenge to keep one’s sensitivity free from the automatism of that action.
For example, the way you hold your head on your shoulders; instead of allowing the position of your head on your shoulders to be quite automatic – which may well cause you a certain discomfort – set yourself to relax the muscle round your neck and hold the head a little bit differently.
The purpose of this is to provide a reminding factor to attract the sensitive energy and enable you to take up again whatever work you are doing with more free attention.
(Challenge as the opening for detachment)
Whenever we are in front of something which creates a problem or which is difficult in the sense of our automatized reaction having to be adjusted or to give way, or something much more complicated than that… in other words, when there is a challenge, there is the possibility of being either totally involved in it or really detached. When there is no challenge, this possibility does not open itself.
That is, where one’s sensitivity flows entirely with one’s automatic situation, there is no inner separation at all.
This is why it is said that whenever one begins anything new or changes one’s activity, one should invoke the name of God, because at that moment we need help. It is said: ‘There is no teacher like life.’ You do not have to help life out; life will produce challenges for you.
When you are in front of a situation and there is a decision to be taken, you ask yourself whether you are to bear it or to change it. There is no universal answer to this; it has to be judged in front of the particular situation you are in. You have to learn how to be able to judge impartially without being affected by your own likes and dislikes and so on, so that you can make a judgment and a decision which you will be able to stand by. This is a whole subject in itself, which is a different one from this question of sensitivity and noticing.
Your problem is that you find yourself in states of detachment when you do not feel yourself in contact with what you have to do. In one way this is a good thing, because it makes for freedom, but in another it is awkward because you sometimes cannot cope with quite simple things. In this situation, the way to get back is to take something that has to be done and do it very slowly, much slower than you would want to do it. You will then find an impulse to do it at the ordinary speed and your automatism will take over in the right way. You must persist in relaxing every time you notice that you are tense, and form a habit of relaxing. As long as this habit of tensing your shoulder remains, it will serve as a very good reminding factor and help you in other things.
There is another use of the Stop Exercise which aims at getting into a state of really complete detachment and in such cases the ‘stop’ may last for twenty minutes – nobody in the entire community moves a muscle for twenty minutes, and you have no idea what that is like until you have actually experienced it. When the Stop Exercise is done like that, then you must let everything go, even if a machine is going to be destroyed in the process, but now you need not and should not do it like that. If, however, it is only you that is going to suffer, then you can topple over.
If she persists in doing this for a week or two it will have left a trace so that when her shoulder becomes tense it will remind her by itself, she will not have to think about it anymore.
Of course it does not do so at first, but it does not take very long before the body learns that instead of depending upon the bed to adapt itself to you, you have to adapt yourself to the bed. A soft bed is not a challenge to our body and therefore the body does not do anything to contribute towards the required state of relaxation, it does not become passive because the bed has produced the passivity.
(Consciousness beyond sensitivity)
Consciousness Today I want to speak about the conditions for being able to direct and control what we do. In previous talks I spoke about the importance of being in contact with what we are doing, of the role of sensitivity in noticing, in the ability to hear, to see, to be aware of our bodily activity. But this, of itself, does not give us the power of control.