COMMENTARY ON NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
page 646
When the last paper was read down here on "The difference between the object and the thought of the object" a question was asked as follows: "Is it helpful to try not to express one's dislike of a person even though one dislikes the person in one's thoughts?" I think it would be helpful to talk of this subject once more. But first of al we must review what the Work is about and what we are trying to do in the Work. it is useless acting on some small phrase in the Work unless one understands the meaning of it. For example why should I not express my negative emotions freely? Now in life this is quite legitimate, but in the Work it is not so. If you are under life with its very small chances of development, where, so to speak, the dice are heavily loaded against you in regard to any inner development, there is no reason why you should not react to everything mechanically according to your level of being. But if you seek to be in the Work you come under another aspect of things altogether. You begin to have a new responsibility and cannot behave just as you wish to. When this moment occurs to you, when this realization of the meaning of the Work begins to become apparent to you, you are no longer able to do just as you please from your self-will. This means that you cannot react mechanically in the way you always did. You begin to feel responsible to another system of behaviour, which you must begin to obey. Otherwise the Work can have no effect on you, How can the ideas of the Work have any effect on you if you simply go on behaving as you always do, which means reacting mechanically? Everyone has his or her own mechanical way of reacting to things but the object of the Work is to change this mcchanicalness. When you have a point in the Work you begin to fell uncomfortable when you behave mechanically. You begin to dislike this continual mechanical reaction to all events, to all people, and in short to everything, and when this begins to happen in you, you are beginning to pass under the laws of the Work. You begin to understand that you cannot live as before. You begin to realize you have to do something about the matter yourself. What do you have to do? You have to begin to try to do what the Work teaches. This is an extraordinary experience to realize-namely, that you have not only to behave but to think and feel differently. You must remember here that everyone thinks he or she behaves quite rightly. It takes so me time before one realizes that one does not behave rightly and never has done-that is, it takes some time to realize that one's ordinary way of behaving internally and externally is not what the Work wishes. And so gradually one comes to the rather shattering moment of realizing that what the Work is teaching all the time applies to you yourself and to the way that you behave and think and feel. It may take years before this shattering moment of realization comes to you. You may talk about the Work, you may be interested in it and feel in a sense that you are in the Work and yet not notice that you do not live the Work in your daily life. There are very considerable reasons why this moment of realization is not touched for some time. One is because no one is allowed to understand this Work until he is ready to understand it. But when the ideas of the Work become emotional and begin to relate themselves to you yourself and to all that you have observed in yourself, then you may have a moment of realization of what the Work means practically in regard to yourself. Now you know that the Work says in general that we should not express our negative emotions and that the more we express them the more they feed on us and are nourished by us. Now suppose a person simply hears this remark and repeats it to other people without realizing what it means and what connection it has with Work-ideas. I think this question is so interesting that I will spend some time in explaining what it means. Taking this saying of the Work apart from the whole context of the Work, we can easily imagine it is nothing but some kind of commandment that we are told to obey. Let us invent this commandment and call it the eleventh commandment. I believe the eleventh commandment has already been invented: "Thou shall not be found out," so let us say that we take the commandment: "Thou shalt not be negative" as the twelfth commandment. The Work says we must not be negative and that we must not express our negative emotions. Now a person who follows this commandment, so to speak, literality, a person who flatters himself that he obeys it-which of course he does not-is nothing but a fool. He is taking the Work on a very external level. He may not express negative emotions in public but he will express them in private, either to the private circle which he thinks are his friends or in his private thoughts, He will then think that the whole idea of not expressing negative emotions consists in obeying an external commandment. Let us try to grasp why the Work teaches that negative emotions must gradually be eliminated, The Work says that as long as we enjoy chiefly negative emotions we are cut off from all contact with Higher Centres, I assure you that at a certain stage of the Work even a moment's indulgence of negative emotion towards others will cause you to lose force and even destroy for the time being everything that you aimed at in the Work-sense. Negative emotion cuts us off from all possibility of help, As was said once, to become thoroughly negative is like an explosion in a delicate chemical laboratory through which everything that is being made, being gradually created, is destroyed. I suppose some of you know this already namely, that at all costs your mechanical reactions that produce negative emotions, your judgments of others and your vanities in connection with yourself, must be mitigated and separated from in order to keep any degree of inner psychological health. Now when you become aware that you cannot afford to be negative then it will no longer be a commandment you obey in this respect but it will be a matter of deep understanding. And then indeed life and its events will become your teacher. You will no longer think of obeying some external roles, some commandments, but you will see the reason why, And then you will hesitate to plunge into the welter of negative states whether expressed externally or no, Let us quote again the question with which we, started: "Is it helpful to try not to express one's dislike of a person even though one dislikes the person in one's thoughts?" where the centre of gravity in this question lies in the word 'helpful', In what sense is it helpful not to express one's negative emotions externally? The answer is that if you express them mechanically they tend to increase and form a habit-i.e. a habit of negative emotions, From the standpoint of the ideas of the Work and what we are aiming at this is obviously something that will interfere with our possibility of reaching a new level of being-i.e. it will not help us in this respect. As regards the other part of the question about disliking people in our thoughts, it will be the same thing if we continue to feel negative towards other people, even though we obey the commandment of not expressing these negative feelings, In fact, it might be better to express them. To think negatively about others is just the same as behaving negatively. To have an enormous number of negative thoughts about others and to attempt not to show them externally is a very good thing provided that you know that your task is to alter these negative thoughts by hook or crook in yourself. And this, of course, is quite impossible if you take yourself for granted, as always right. If you have had long self-observation and have become aware of a great many very unpleasant things in yourself, you will then be in a position to neutralize your negative thoughts about others through seeing the same things in yourself and so putting yourself in the other person's position, At this moment of writing to you these things I notice I am very negative towards a certain person down here but by putting myself in this person's position and also by seeing how this person must think of me I find that it is possible to get free entirely from negative thoughts about this person save when I fall asleep in myself and allow my mechanical negative thoughts to pass unchallenged in my mind. In this respect it is interesting to notice how you can be negative with a person-when you are asleep-and how the whole situation is changed when you are awake. I think this is one of the first things we realize when we alternate between life and Work-i.e. when we are in life things appear one way and when we are in a sense of the Work things appear quite differently, so much so that at times we cannot imagine how we behaved or spoke or felt as we did. The explanation is quite simple--we were asleep. Now this is a necessary experience and in fact gives you the whole practical method of working on yourself, People who imagine that having heard this Work for a short time they are henceforth going to behave in some beautiful way are simply fools. We can only learn to walk by falling, We all have more conscious and more mechanical moments but it is by the contrast that we learn, Let no one in this Work imagine that he or she has reached a stage where they cannot be made negative. In fact, the Work introduces us to the whole technique of dealing with negative states whether expressed or felt. And here lies a very up and down country that we have to stagger over with a certain confidence that we may reach another state of ourselves. But this up and down country cannot be traversed by anyone who imagines that a short issue to his intentions is granted him. The source of negative emotions is very deep in us all and there are some very sore places in us that without help we could never avoid. For that reason we must have a sense of what the Work teaches and why it teaches what it does teach. I know that when I am in a negative state, whether expressed or not, I am all wrong, and that I will be cut off from my best thoughts and best emotions. I no longer obey the teaching of the Work about negative emotions as a commandment. I know very well, I understand why this great teaching about negative emotions is given by the Work, and that it is no external commandment but one of the deepest things that could possibly be said in regard to reaching a better range of feelings and understanding. The satisfaction of being negative, even with a very good cause, no longer gives me any happiness. I know very well if I am negative beyond a certain point I will cease to have any inner happiness or peace of mind, which is what I aim at. I know it is useless to have my happiness depending only on people or external events. I know that the source of my understanding of the Work docs not He only in external conditions and I have experienced more than once that moment of understanding which one of our English mystical writers, Thomas Traherne, described when he said in a moment of Self-Remembering, when he felt that he had really reached his innermost being: "You will not believe how I was withdrawn from altering and minding outward things," This means to be passive towards life. I remember once in this connection how O. in a private talk to a few of us said that we have to become passive to all that happens to us, whatever it is, and that this was the most difficult thing because if taken wrongly it led in quite the wrong direction. Just, doing nothing is useless. O. said it was the most difficult thing to understand. It had nothing to do with Quietism, He said that the Work-phrase 'realizing that other people are machines' carne close to the idea but it was impossible to see that rightly unless we had first seen that we are machines. Now we are nearly always negative with other people because we take them as conscious beings doing things consciously, and we also think we are conscious and do everything with conscious purpose. None of you will be able to reach this viewpoint, and do not try to do so artificially. Nothing is more easy than to regard other people as machines, leaving yourself out; nothing is more easy than to see how another person is a fool, leaving yourself out. If you can see yourself as a fool and see the fool in other people without blame, you may reach this passive point which is between the swing of the pendulum, the point from where real understanding comes. This is why everyone in the Work must work on themselves, especially when they express negative emotions or think negatively about others. Just as you can see your own foolishness without being negative so you can see the foolishness of another person without being negative about it. You can see what a thing is like, you can see what you are like, without negative emotions coming in, Will you agree with me that when you are negative with another person it is either due to a feeling of superiority or lack of understanding of the conditions of the other person? But however we think of this great question, the fact remains that negative emotions are useless and lead nowhere except into hell and ultimately to violence and that one of the great teachings of the Work is that we must free ourselves from negative states as regards ourselves and other people. And here I will remind you that the more negative 'I's you have that express themselves openly or privately in your thoughts of other people, the greater danger you are in that those negative 'I's you have nourished will turn against yourself, Ail negative 'I's that attack others are in us, and when we try to raise our level through inner work we will have to meet them all one by one, because they will turn on us with the same ferocity that they turn on other people. Now I will add one thing here: people think they have no negative 'I's. They have a picture of themselves as being tolerant, they do not see what goes on in the background. Remember that the Emotional Centre should never have a negative part by birth and that all negative emotions are acquired from the example of our parents, teachers, and all those we are brought up amongst. Remember, also, as long as the negative part of Emotional Centre is active in us there can only be either no connection or a very faint connection with Higher Emotional Centre. The object of this Work is to purify ordinary centres for the reception of the influences of Higher Centres, First we must change Mental Centre and think in a new way and then change the Emotional Centre and feel in a new way about one another. This is the task that the Work lays down in so many words and it is a useless task to try to understand unless we feel there is a higher level attainable. Now as regards the Work-teaching that if you do not express negative emotions they get less, this has given rise to a great deal of discussion. It was taught at the beginning of the Work, before anything was said about thinking negatively about others. Some people used to say it was much better to have a row and get it over, and that by expressing their negative emotions they felt better afterwards. I will leave this for discussion. I would only say this: there is a way of expressing negative emotions consciously and it is quite different from expressing them mechanically. I am certain that the expression of negative emotions mechanically only leads to a worse situation, but for the time being you are relieved. You must remember that those expressed negative emotions travel round to people and excite their negative emotions in response and eventually come back to you, We have to deal with our negative emotions and feel responsible for them, It is here that working on one's private negative thinking about a person comes in. Some people say little or nothing externally but they think and fee! a great deal internally and even take a pleasure in registering a cause of fresh negative emotion although they appear smooth outwardly. In that case there is no real conscience against negative states. This is a bad internal situation and there is so much filth in their minds that they enjoy secretly. Here comes in all the close and sincere observation that is necessary in the Work, and the seeing of your own unpleasant 'I's that you project on to other people, Remember that we have a right not to be negative and this is quite different from being told we have no right to be negative. Observe yourself sometimes from the standpoint of your negative states; be sincere and admit you are in a negative state; then say to yourself: "I have a right not to be negative." Here all your understanding of the Work will come to your aid and maybe the whole negative state will vanish in a moment. This is a moment of Self Remembering because~ in all Self-Remembering we put ourselves under the influences of the Work, which come from Higher Centres in which no negative states exist.