Commentary on the Meaning of Aim

COMMENTARY ON THE MEANING OF AIM

IN THE WORK

The idea of "help" in the Work is difficult to understand. At certain moments we are all helped by life when things go well with us. In connection with this idea of help O. once said to us long ago: "Life is too easy for you all." I think he meant that we did not understand what "help" in the Work-sense meant. When life is difficult we usually feel in some way offended or depressed. Then the help of life is withdrawn from us; we feel upset; things are not going rightly according to our form of expectancy of life, of how we expect life should go according to our imagination of it. In that case we area function of life, of external circumstances. This is one meaning of the Work-phrase: "We are machines driven by life." But the Work is not exactly about this mechanical relation to life. It is not about the mechanical stability or balance that we have in life but about a new balance that can only be created by work on ourselves. This idea of the Work is very difficult to grasp for a long time. I often think we none of us grasp it deeply enough. Have you got something in you that can resist the ups and down of life or are you simply a creature of external circumstances? It is fairly evident that the Work is teaching us a new way of balancing ourselves, when, for instance, it says we must not identify as much as we do, which means that we must not take life as it presents itself to us by its ever-changing events. Now supposing you identify very much when things are good and when things are bad-i.e. you feel very excited when things are good and depressed when things are bad. Then you are a function of life-a machine, in the Work-sense. You are simply in the sea, going up and down with the sea, and you have no boat to sail and direct in the way you wish to go in spite of the weather. Supposing I find that external events do not please me very much and I begin to object to this and that? Then supposing it occurs to me that this is an occasion when I should work on myself and that I should not express my negative emotions and that I should be very careful and not react mechanically in the light of all I have been taught in the Work. You will agree with me that here a new set of ideas comes in-namely, the ideas taught by the Work. In that case I will begin to apply the Work ideas to myself and to a small extent will cease to be a machine, a mechanism driven by life and its external ever-changing events. Supposing I do this once-then it will be easier for me to do it again when more or less the same circumstances arise. This is tasting the Work and its quality, but if I never taste the Work in this way nor its quality, and expect merely that because, I hear the Work everything is going to be better for me henceforth, then I have a very naïve idea of what the Work means. To think that the Work is going to make everything immediately better for me is a very superficial conception of it, a very superficial conception of esotericism and its teaching, because the object of esoteric teaching is to produce a profound change in the person one is, a profound change in the level of being. There are many things in this Work that you cannot understand with your head but only with your heart. It takes two centers to understand anything. You may work very hard on the formatory side of the Work and try to work out each idea endlessly in formatory language, and while this is not entirely wasted it is absolutely necessary to have a practical feeling about what the ideas mean-i.e. an emotional perception of the truth of the Work. You may talk and write a long time about what identifying means without any emotional perception of its meaning: or you may have many thoughts about what lying means and yet never emotionally perceive what it means. This is because you have not applied this perception to yourself and have not seen lying or insincerity or whatever it is as an absolute fact.

Now to-night I wish to speak about Aim once more. You can never make aim unless you see what the Work is about-namely, about yourself and your relationship to Higher Centres or Real Conscience. All aim in the Work must be connected with the Work--work on yourself first of all, work with others, and with the whole meaning of esotericism, i.e. the Work itself. You should start with the first line of Work in connection with aim. Let me ask you this question: Where do you think you should work on yourself in connection with the ideas of the Work? Have you yet got some fairly clear conception of your life and what you should try to change in your life in view of what you have been taught? Unless you start here at this place you will never have an aim of any practical use in regard to yourself. What is it that you think you ought to change in yourself? Now this question is very interesting and I want to dwell on it for some time. You may, from acquired conscience, from buffers, from pretences, from False Personality, have an idea that you should change something or other. What I want to point out is that if you are guided by your acquired ideas and opinions you are following the wrong mentor. You must start from what the Work teaches because the Work replaces Real Conscience for, us as we are. It teaches what Real Conscience would teach us if it were awakened in us. By having our own ideas of what we ought to do, or be like, or aim

at, we are bound to go wrong from the point of view of the Work because we are acting from our own ordinary knowledge and not from the Work-knowledge. We will then interfere with the action of the Work on us and submit ourselves to all sorts of useless privations and endeavors. Real knowledge is quite different from what we call knowledge. Esoteric knowledge is a special knowledge that we have to learn and gradually understand through an emotional development which gives us an emotional perception of its meaning. All this has to do with what kinds of effort are required to change our being. Our ordinary ideas, our ordinary knowledge, will not change our being and probably will only increase our fixity in our present state of being. If you think that you know already, then you will not take the knowledge of this Work seriously. If you are quite sure you know what is right and wrong, you will not be able to change. A person must awaken eventually to the authority of the Work and must begin to view himself in the light of what it says. You may think, for example, that many of your negative emotions are correct and you will not call them negative emotions. Yet the Work teaches that all negative emotions are wrong, no matter what causes them. The Work does not look at the causes of negative emotions but at the fact that you are negative. On one occasion O. said: "Why do you always explain your negative emotions by the causes that gave rise to them? The whole point is that you are negative and that is what you have to work on." Now you all know how negative emotions prevent all development and make it impossible for the Emotional Centre to communicate with Higher Centres. If we could communicate with Higher Emotional Centre, for example, our lives would be utterly different. We would find an entirely new set of rules whereby to live, all far more subtle than those which we follow in life. We would find, for example, that where we always take a situation in one way, there are too or 1000 ways, all quite different, and that there is no stereotyped way of taking the events of life. This is one of the greatest things to understand in connection with aim and in connection with how we behave. We behave in a rigid, stereotyped way and so we tend to make rigid, stereotyped aims. There is a certain gaiety in realizing we need not take things always in the same way.

But before we can reach this beginning of inner freedom we must realize that life is events and notice how we react mechanically to each of the different events in life. Looking out through our limited senses we see life as a number of objects but we cannot see it as changing events. I often think that this is one of the first difficulties we have in understanding what the Work is about. We cannot see events because they can only be mentally and emotionally realized. For example, we can see a table, a chair, a tree, a person. These objects are not events, necessarily, but supposing the tree falls on the table and kills a person sitting at it and smashes the chair: that is an event. All these physical objects which are not events are suddenly related in one event. A person is not an event but merely an object. But supposing

you hate this person when you see him it makes an event. Events gather together objects into a certain relationship. A table by itself is not an event, but if breakfast is laid on it it participates in an event for you, and if the egg is not boiled properly it becomes a negative event. A whirlwind that suddenly lifts off the roofs of houses is an event, but if you stare at the roof it is not an event. A thing that you have in your possession to look at sometimes, such as a gold watch, is not an event but an object. But if it is stolen it becomes an event. You get up in the morning and stub your toe on the carpet and then the carpet becomes an event. In other words, an event is something that relates a number of objects together in a certain way. This is a very inadequate description of events but you must try to see what is meant. It is towards these events that we must try to acquire a conscious behavior. That is to say, we have to see our lives as events and not objects, because it is very easy to stare at everything like horses and trees and not understand that unless they are related to you in some way they do not constitute an event. This is getting off the purely sensual level and noticing that objects are not events.

Now in making this connection with the 1st line of Work you should be able to observe events to which you react in a particular way, because it is in your reactions to life as events that your personal work lies for a long time-i.e. in the way you take events happening in the world of external objects. (If you cannot understand the difference between objects and events you should think of what is happening in this war how in the event of war all kinds of objects are re-grouped and how in another event they would be grouped quite differently. For example, millions of people are abroad who were formerly at home. The objects are the same but they are related quite differently through the event of war.) We find it very difficult to believe in events as distinct from objects. For example, we find it difficult to believe that we ourselves may be next moment in a violent temper because of some event in which we are included. We do not see that an event has happened-actually a triad of forces has suddenly acted on us and we have been incorporated into it as by a whirlwind in which different 'I's have charge of us as long as the event lasts. After the event has passed we wonder what has happened because all the objects around us are as before, but while the event lasted they conducted different forces within which we were included.

Now when we make aim we always neglect events. We do not take into consideration how difficult it will be to keep that aim in view of the different events that may happen to us. We expect a tranquil sea on which we can steer a direct course. Therefore when our aim is very superficial and momentary, formed in a moment of enthusiasm, we find that it is absolutely useless and leads nowhere. However, instead of becoming offended and beginning to blame the Work, we should begin to understand what it means to be Sly Man or, as the Gospels call it, `ppóviµoc' or wise man (wise really meaning clever). You will remember that the wise virgins were not wise but clever and

this word in the Gospels meaning clever or mentally awake is the same as the word `sly' used in the Work. A superficial aim will lead nowhere, especially if it is from acquired conscience which has behind it merit, vanity. These aims turned towards external life are of no use in the Work. They do not touch the esoteric level-that is, the level of Real Conscience. To begin to have a real aim you must already know that you cannot keep it and, as it were, not tell yourself what this real aim is. Real aim comes from something deeper in you, something emotional. As it is said in Matthew: "Let not try left hand know what try right hand doeth." (VI 3)E In the language of Parables `left' is the weak side-i.e. the Personality-and `right' means the deeper and more real side of you. Now if you make an aim with your left hand and tell yourself you will get some advantage from it, some merit, some praise from other people, that you will be better thought of (even in the Work), you will not be doing it from your right hand or your real side. For this reason real aim must always be something you never quite put into words and let your False Personality know about, and you must not expect to attain its object right away. You will have, in fact, probably to follow a devious and apparently contradictory path to fulfill real aim and above all you must not think that because things go wrong your aim is useless. But the most important thing to understand is that in real aim you cannot go directly towards it but like a sailing trip at sea which endeavors to sail to a certain goal, you must tack one way and then another way according to the wind.

Now a real aim depends on an emotional perception of something you dislike in yourself and which you wish to change eventually. It depends on a certain integrity of feeling that persists in spite of downfalls. Thus great patience is necessary in connection with any real aim. A formatory aim is quite different from real aim and although you begin with formatter aims you must realize trey cannot be kept and so must admit you cannot do, in this sense. Real aim can only arise from long observation and real evaluation of the Work, because unless the presence of the Work is constantly with real aim-i.e. unless you rely on the Work as well as yourself to keep it-it can lead nowhere except into False Personality and the feeling of merit. Real aim always nourishes you, nourishes your understanding, and then you see row it can change and yet remain the same, row it can tack from one side to the other and never go in the direct way which our natural impatience demands, because all real aim is connected with our own self-development-i.e. with the development of Essence in us, with the development of understanding in us which is the greatest force we can create--whereas false aim cannot develop our understanding and very often simply contracts us and turns us into Puritans, as it were, into a rigid keeping of some little internal decision. You can do nothing by suddenly cutting yourself off from what you have been by some arbitrary act. It is only by modification and transformation that you can change your life. When you have real aim you see the difficulties of keeping it. When you make

a little formatter aim it is quite different. We are told to make aims with the object of seeing that we cannot keep them-i.e. so that we can see second force or force of resistance. But wren we come to make real aim we are more aware of second force and the difficulties that will stand in the way of our keeping this aim. I would like to say here that real aim is a silent aim-something that you never tell anyone else or even tell yourself in so many words-and this kind of aim is of such a quality that you are not dismayed by the constant apparent breaking of it, or the contradictions that arise in connection with it when apparently you are going in a different direction from what you intended. I have given you the image of a sailing-ship setting out to cross the Atlantic, from East to West, let us say, and probably this ship cannot ever really go directly to the West but must go NEW., SAW, and even occasionally in the reverse direction for the time being, yet at the same time if it keeps to its aim it will eventually get where it intended. It does not lose rope, it does not despair, because there is a certain deep intention of getting eventually where it wants to go.