THE COGNITIVE POWER OF EMOTIONS
Let us now speak of negative emotions. You must all understand that cognition means knowledge and that you can have evil knowledge or good knowledge. Negative emotions have their own kind of knowledge, particularly in regard to how to hurt people and wound them. When you are in a negative state toward someone you know as a rule how to hurt that person most and say wounding things. Negative emotions, which are acquired through imitation, form an extraordinary mess in the emotional centre which is born pure.
Since all emotions have a cognitive value, even negative emotions have their own cognitive-value which enables you to see the worst side of everything. Suspicion, for example, is a negative emotion and is often very clever. It is always wrong but at the same time it is right on its own level. Remember it is always wrong. In fact all negative emotions on their cognitive side are always wrong. They see only one side. When followed very much they lead to hell–i.e. towards the moon, towards an inferior, a lower way of taking everything. Seeing only the evil and never seeing the good, interpreting everything on the lowest level, is, as you know, called in the Gospels the sin against the Holy Ghost, in the passage where Christ is said by the Pharisees to be healing people by means of the devil. (Matt. XII 32.) Some people imagine that they do not see the worst side of things and pretend to a kind of goodness, to a kind of pretence of being cheerful or optimistic about other, whereas all the time they really believe in what their negative emotions cognitively give them. It is a quite different thing to observe a cognition that comes from negative emotions about another person and actually not believe it as portraying the whole person. You must see the cognition that come to you through your negative emotions and acknowledge its presence and than work against it–and this requires a lot of work and a lot of Self-Remembering. Pseudo-optimism, pseudo-cheerfulness, is quite useless and in fact only intensifies the power of negative emotions in the world. Each person is given his own negative emotions, as it were, with their cognitions, with their false knowledge, and each person, if he or she wishes to work, must in some way lighten the burden of the total fog of negative emotions existing in the world, which is governed by negative emotions. But they must do it genuinely and especially by seeing their own negative emotions on so “forgiving others” in the sense of completely cancelling their debts. In every case negative emotions can only see half truths–for instance, a person who is negative and who reports what someone else said may actually report what the person said but leave out one or two things and also leave out the way in which it was said, the intonation and so on. So he or she makes a dark picture, a lie. You will remember talks about lying and how the first form of lying is always putting things to your advantage, slightly twisting what happened, as when a person says: “I says to her…she says to me,” etc. now if a person is negative and therefore ungenerous, he or she may describe something that happened in regard to a person disliked and the result will be truth in a sense, but half-truth. You know it is said in ancient literature than devils are very clever and ingenious but they only know half-truths. Goodness always looks stupid in comparison with the cleverness of negative ‘I’s that are lying.
I wonder if you have ever notice negative emotions in the faces around you, notice the expressions in their eyes, and notice how they are only watching. Think for a moment from what they are watching and what they want to catch. Think of the collection such ‘I’s will make in your life album of incidents. Perhaps you all know that when you are negative and suspicious everything that is said only pours oil on the fire. I remember when I once had to deal with some insane people, who are wholly under the power of negative emotions and negative thinking, how the slightest movement I made was always interpreted in favour of their negative ideas from which they insanity deduced all sort of things that were partly true. Negative ‘I’s are really insane ‘I’s in us. A person in negative emotions always notices very quickly what you have neglected but takes no cognisance of what you have done. In this respect his negative emotions give him a certain cognition, often very deep and subtle and yet always wrong. The curious thing is that negative emotions always can find proof, and if you join all these proofs together then you will be overpowered by life. You are really stitching together a pattern of life in which you eliminate everything that really goes against these proofs and, as you know quite well, you are ignoring the good side and simply holding on the cognition of the unpleasant side which have their own truth. The result is that you come under the truth only of negative emotions and, as I say, such truth are false, because they do not take in all sides. Perhaps sometimes you may catch a glimpse of this side of your being which is negative, and what it is making in you every day. It is not a good but a very nasty little worm, a very tiresome little spoilt child, a most unpleasant thing to become aware of. People glorify negative states. They feel it is right to worry be identified. However, this is not true. One must do one’s best to climb out of this pit, if possible. It is possible. But it is not possible if the Work has no real essential hold over you, for otherwise you will feel justified in your negative and painful life-emotions. And not only this–but these negative emotions will feed you with their own cognitive side, so that you will be always be able to prove you are right.
1 Maurice Nicoll
“Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky”