Birdlip, August 20, 1944
VANITY
Let me say a few things about Vanity. First I will quote the derivation and meanings given in the Dictionary:
Vanity-from Latin Vanitas-emptiness, worthlessness-Latin vanusempty. (i) Quality of being vain, empty or worthless; futility, unsubstantialness, worthlessness, emptiness; " the vanity of human wishes," "of earthly greatness." (2) That which is vain, worthless; an unprofitable, futile thing, act, etc. "All is vanity," "the pomps and vanity of this wicked world." (g) Quality of being personally vain; exaggeratedly high opinion, pride in one's own appearance, physical or mental capacities; conceit. "An injury to vanity will never be forgiven."
Before I speak of this subject, there is one thing that everyone who has been in this Work for some time must realize-i.e. that everything
you have done genuinely remains for you and will help you at difficult moments, and everything you have done from vanity is lost to you. As you have often heard, G. always hit hard at vanity and pretence. Recently I have found that many conversations that I had with O. return to me-conversations that I had forgotten. This is one of the interesting things about memory. Memory is not one thing, but many things. There are many kinds of memory. Things are. laid down on different rolls in different parts of centres, according to their emotional reception. Under certain circumstances rolls turn, and, lo and behold, forgotten things enter' consciousness. Small `I's remember only small things. Bigger `I's remember other things. Memory is in scale. A person is not all at the same level. First he is a three-storey house and then each centre in each storey is again a three-storey house and then again. G. took vanity and self-conceit as the worst possible evil in regard to right relation to centres. What is the reason? The reason is that False Personality is composed of vanity and all its unreal imaginations and that these invented `I's cannot ever connect with Real 'I'. Vanity is the contrary of inner sincerity and only inner sincerity can lead to Real Will or Real `I'. However, in all of us vanity is difficult to notice and separate from. I recalled, recently, a former conversation with O. He had spent two or three meetings of the older group in asking what was the most important thing to work upon and make passive. Some people said negative emotions, others sleep, others internal considering and so on. Someone said False Personality. O. still shook his head. At last someone, who, let us say, was called Mr. Robinson, said that the most important thing to notice and work upon and separate from was Mr. Robinson. O. nodded. I thought the answer good but had no realization of what it meant. Afterwards I was speaking to him privately and he said: "People can be divided in a .very rough way into those who are living the life of False Personality, with all its intrigues, illusions, pretences, and ambitions, and those who wish for something different and are tired of themselves." He added: "However, this is a useless definition save for those who can catch some glimpse of what is meant. It is useless to argue about it and if you mention it everyone will argue."
You will remember that it was previously said that arguing is useless. One either sees the truth of something or does not see it. The point has been emphasized so many times in the Work that arguing is useless. To argue is not to understand. It is necessary to avoid a person who wants always to argue about the ideas. He does not see their meaning. He will never be convinced. He is not ready. He does not wish to cook a dish of the Work but to smash up everything in the kitchen. Literally, to argue means to turn things into argentum, which is the Latin for silver. Silver in parable represents truth. But mechanical arguing turns things into lead, into dirt. If you have no inner perception of the truth of any idea of the Work, if you do not see it is so, then it is in the wrong part of a centre and has become sown in the wrong place-
by the wayside. On the other hand, to argue in order to make things clearer, more silver, and more shining, is different, but this is not the ordinary mode of arguing. The ordinary mode is not positive but negative-to negate what you hear, to pick holes, to use words and not meaning as a weapon-in fact, to argue. Now, if you know by experience 1 that China exists, you will not argue. It is so.
On one occasion years ago I was sitting with O. in a small oldfashioned inn in which were many old coloured prints of former bucks and generals and grand ladies, all dressed in the most extraordinary costumes, wigs, hair-fashions and so on, belonging to the period. I pointed them out to him. He said: "Yes, you can see how everyone represented there has a mental disease-namely, vanity." And then he turned to me with a smile and said : "You are a psychological doctor, whatever it is called. Why do you not write a book about real mental diseases?" I said, as carefully as I could: "Whom should I begin with?" His eyes twinkled-and I knew of course that he meant with myselfand then he said: "Well, with Hasnamous men. Start with Lentromuss." This term G. invented and formed out of Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini. Hasnamous men are people like Napoleon who derive their wellbeing from the ill-being of others. He went on to say: "Actually, no one is sane. To the Circle of Conscious Humanity we on this Earth are all insane-much more insane than the vain monkeys appear to us. In the East it was once the custom to regard lunatics as sacred and visited by God. I have often thought of this. Are you sure that our ordinary ideas of what a lunatic is and what a sane man is are not wrong? Are not we perhaps the lunatics and the lunatics sane? To really see what we are like ourselves..." He shrugged his shoulders, and became silent.
Having begun to notice my own forms of vanity, after being certain for a long time that I had none, I often used to try to get him to speak more about vanity and its forms and power over people. He said once: "Vanity is an unnatural, outward manifestation of yourself." He used to remind me of the Magician-Farmers who hypnotised the sheep and told them they were eagles, etc., and finally that they were men.
On another occasion I was telling him of a patient I had had, an extremely rich woman, who dressed expensively always in new dresses every day. He said: "Yes, now, that is a disease, you know. She is really insane, from vanity. You will find nothing in her save this illness of vanity. But no doubt she thinks she is charming and imagines she is a woman." I agreed that this was so. He nodded and said-well, something (but not to repeat) which referred to the Egyptian custom of embalming dead corpses expensively. He said that men had vanity as much as women and that in different ages it might take rather similar forms but usually different forms. He said: "People always dress up owing to vanity. But a few may dress apart from vanity. Vanity separates us from everything real in ourselves because it is unreal. So it prevents all real inner connections. A person may have the moment's reward that vanity gives but, feeling nothing real, must continue to
produce an effect. Nothing can grow from False Personality save increasing inventions of oneself, increasing falseness." He said-and this reminded me of something G. had said-that vanity by causing continual, unnatural, outward manifestations of oneself produced a certain formation or psychic substance that surrounded a person's inner life and shut him or her in, as in a prison of their own daily manufacture. A person becomes enclosed in his or her vanity-pictures and then cannot make contact with anything real, after a time, even though he or she wishes to. Their own creations, their own posturing and pretence and self-absorption, that they have nourished with so much force, render them impotent to understand anything or be anything. O. said once, about serious people, people who do not appear vain but take themselves very seriously, all day long, that it was just the same thing -they enclose themselves in their own seriousness of which they are vain.
As you have heard, G. said he had found that his task, in trying to teach Western people the Work-to quote his actual words-lay in "quarrelling ruthlessly with all manifestations dictated in people by the evil factor of vanity present in their being." G. said also: "We should be really god-like creatures capable of entering into and understanding the position of others-of understanding the psyche of our neighbour." But, he added, in so many words, this is impossible because of the factor of vanity which, admiring only itself, feels itself better than others and so produces not only wrong impressions and wrong results outwardly but causes wrong connections internally, preventing any deepening of man or woman. The Work also teaches that through the terrible power of vanity, of pretending, of affectation, we ascribe to ourselves all sorts of qualities, capacities and values that we do not possess. The Work must undo this in a person. We believe we can help others when we cannot help ourselves. We believe we have some extraordinary merit or value which is not the case. We imagine we know ourselves and can do. We believe we are capable of devotion, and so on. To gain an insight into vanity in oneself-that is, into this imaginary pseudo-side =is to begin to become more free. It is half-pleasant and half-painful. One part is glad. One part suffers. Consider the endless enslavements that vanity compels you to be under, both in yourself and in relation to others, inventing yourself and inventing your relation to another. When you think of the meaning of freedom you must ask: "Freedom from what?" What do you ask to be free from?
Vanity, conceit and so on, all lead to manifestations that are not only unnatural but, by making wrong inner and outer connections, prevent any further development of understanding and so prevent any evolution of Man on Earth. We should already be tired of the manifestations of "Man on Earth" and our own. Suppose we were to ask ourselves the meaning of the Eucharist and then consider how such
a feast would be impossible if everyone present were occupied with vanity, with being first, with intrigue, and sly unpleasant things, with getting power over another and with inner hatreds and negative states and so on. The meaning of the word Eu-charist is good-grace, or good charity-Ed meaning in Greek good or well, and ______grace, mercy, a sort of inner beauty. You know that the word Evangel means "good news". Suppose that no real inner and outer connections can take place without good-will. Will originally in our language had the meaning of "choice", to will was to choose, and good meant "rightly put together". It would seem therefore that goodwill has always had the meaning of something conscious. The feast of the Eucharist, which is the commemoration of the Last Supper, was originally only possible among people who had in some sense good-will to each other. Now think how this can ever be with vanity, conceit, and False Personality.
1 Maurice Nicoll
“Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky” Vol. 2