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A. We cannot take such extreme cases and speak of 'always'. But if a man were to become even a little conscious, if he were able to control himself occasionally for half an hour or even for a few minutes, it would make such an enormous difference that all we know about ordinary man would be inapplicable to him. About doing wrong, that is a different question. If a man can remember himself even to this extent, you can say definitely that he will do nothing more or less serious without knowing what he is doing, and at a moment when he is doing something particularly important he will become conscious. Q. Could you tell me the difference between two men on their death-bed, one of whom has learnt the art of self-remembering and one of whom has never heard of it? A. No, it needs an imaginative writer to describe this. There are many different possibilities—the men may be very different and there may be different circumstances. I think I had better tell you a story. It is an old story, told in the Moscow groups in 1916 about the origin of the system and the work and about self-remembering.—It happened in an unknown country at an unknown date that a sly man was walking past a cafe and met a devil. The devil was in very poor shape, both hungry and thirsty, so the sly man took him into the cafe, ordered some coffee and asked him what the trouble was. The devil said that there was no business. In the old days he used to buy souls and burn them to charcoal, because when people died they had very fat souls that he could take to hell, and all the devils were pleased. But now all the fires in hell were out, because when people died there were no souls. Then the sly man suggested that perhaps they could do some business together. 'Teach me how to make souls', he said, 'and I will give you a sign to show which people have souls made by me', and he ordered more coffee. The devil explained that he should teach people to remember themselves, not to identify and so on, and then, after some time, they would grow souls. The sly man set to work, organized groups and taught people to remember themselves. Some of them started to work seriously and tried to put into practice what he taught them. Then they died, and when they came to the gates of heaven, there was St Peter with his keys on one side and the devil on the other. When St Peter was ready to open the gates, the devil would say, 'May I just ask one question—did you remember yourself?' 'Yes, certainly', the man would answer and thereupon the devil would say, 'Excuse me, this soul is mine'. This went on for a long time, until they managed somehow to communicate to the earth what was happening at the gates of heaven. Hearing this, the people he was teaching came to the sly man and said, 'Why do you teach us to remember ourselves if, when we say we have remembered ourselves, the devil takes us?'
The sly man asked, 'Did I teach you to say you remember yourselves? I taught you not to talk.' They said, 'But this was St Peter and the devil!' and the sly man said, 'But have you seen St Peter and the devil at groups? So do not talk. Some people did not talk and managed to get to heaven. I did not only make an arrangement with the devil, I also made a plan by which to deceive the devil.'
CHAPTER XIV Personal difficulties—Necessity of finding one's most urgent and persistent difficulty—Negative emotions, imagination, formatory thinking—Creating new points of view—Struggle with identification— Three categories of negative emotions and how to deal with them— Transformation of negative emotions—Irritation—Laziness—Dull negative states—Different forms of imagination—Giving up suffering— Voluntary suffering as the greatest force we can have—The role of suffering in organic life—Man is specially made for evolution— responsibility in personal work—Necessity of working on many lines at once—Formatory thinking and its characteristics —Associative thinking—The need of higher centres to understand truth— Meditation—Right thinking—Imaginary conversations—Different meanings of faith—Life after death NOW THE TIME HAS COME for you to think about personal things that are near and practical We have spoken much about theory and you use too many words without asking yourselves what you mean by them Now we must deal with facts, we must understand where we can start from as we are At any given moment there are things we could control but do not control through laziness, lack of knowledge, suspicion or something else We must think about these things—that would be right thinking Try to find your personal difficulties I do not mean difficulties of an external kind, but inner difficulties—personal features, personal inclinations and disinclinations, attitudes, prejudices, activities which can stop your understanding and prevent you working All the difficulties you can meet with in your personal work can be roughly divided into three categories or classes First of all, negative emotions For some people this is the first and perhaps the chief point, so they have to begin with the study of negative emotions and study of methods of non-identification Some people cannot stop being negative, generally in some particular direction, and when negative emotions become hardened and permanent they usually stop every kind of work, everything becomes mechanical and a person cannot progress The second point is imagination, particularly negative imagination, for it is as bad as negative emotions By imagination I do not mean day-
dreaming; I mean rather imagining things that do not exist cither in oneself or in other people. Everybody must try to find this kind of imagination in himself and the particular things to which it relates. The third point is formatory thinking and formatory talking. If one does not have a picture of what is formatory and what is not formatory, one cannot progress. It is necessary to get this picture. It is very useful to find some good examples of formatory thought and to keep these examples in mind. Then it will not be difficult to recognize it when you catch yourself thinking formatorily or hear someone else speaking formatorily. These are the chief kinds of difficulties you have to find in yourselves. For one person one thing is more permanent; for another person another. Later you will probably discover many more things, but in the beginning you will find that it is roughly one of these. One can have a difficulty that is most urgent, and everybody can find which of these three is theirs. You must find what is most pressing to struggle against and concentrate on that. There must be reasons for deciding on one or another, but all three refer to everybody. For most people it is necessary to begin with negative emotions. For some others it is necessary to begin with imagination, for they invent things and so never come to real things. And for yet others it is necessary to struggle with formatory thinking, for if they don't they will always remain in the same place. Q. You said there were many ways of destroying negative emotions. What are they? A. First you must know them. You must know in yourself the most important negative emotion, because everybody has a pet one and you must begin with that. You must know where to begin, and when you know that, you can study practical methods. But, first and last, when you find negative emotions in yourself, you must understand that the causes are in you and not in other people—they are internal, not external. When you realize that they are in yourself, results will begin to come according to the depth of your conviction and the continuance of your memory. You see, what I want you to understand is that each person separately has a certain definite point which prevents him from working rightly. This point must be found. Each person has many such points, but one is bigger than the others. So each of you separately must find your chief difficulty and, having found it, work against it. This may help you for a certain time, and then perhaps you will have to find another difficulty, and another, and another. Until you find your difficulty of the present moment you will not be able to work in the right way. The first difficulty for everybody is the word 'I'. You say 'I' and do not think that this is only a small part of you that is speaking. But behind and beyond this there must be something else, and this is what you have
to find. It may be a particular kind of negative emotion, a particular kind of identification, or imagination, or many other things. You must understand that all the difficulties people have are such because people are such. Difficulties can disappear or change only when people change. Nobody can make their difficulties easier for them. Suppose a good magician came and took away all their difficulties, it would be a very bad service to them, for people would be satisfied to remain as they are because there would be no reason for them to wish to change. Try to think what makes things very difficult or takes much of your attention. Q. I think my difficulty is self-pride. A. Self-pride makes a good servant but a bad master. But how to make it a servant? Only by beating it. Take the example in the New Testament about turning the other cheek. An ordinary person will say that self-pride will not let him. But if you can turn self-pride into a good servant it will make you do that. And this is important, because to be able to do that means other things as well—a quicker perception, control over the emotional and moving centres and many other things. Q. I don't quite see how to begin finding my chief difficulty. A. Everybody must try to find his own difficulty, not somebody else's, and in order to do that one must get rid of one's prejudices and of thinking that ideas are one thing, work another and life yet another. So long as you think like that you will not understand. You must realize that you work here for your own personal aims and that there is no difference between life and work. There are many things that stand in your way in a life sense now, and in order to conquer them and improve matters you must do what the work suggests. The results will be seen in ordinary life, in relation to people, to things and to the work you have to do in life. So try to ask questions only referring to your own personal difficulties. Abstract things we may admit occasionally, but remember that they are not the first aim. Q. How can I struggle with possessiveness? A. First of all mind must become free from justification of it. Mind must be separate, it must not identify. We have a certain control of mind, to a certain extent we can command here. If you decide not to justify a certain negative emotion, it is already the beginning of the struggle. Then the mind will act on emotions. What is the cause of negative emotions? They are always caused by other people, it is always other people's fault. That must be stopped. You must recognize that the cause of your negative emotions is in you. And you must not find reasons for negative emotions —it is always easy to find reasons. Q. Should we try to discover what it was in us that was demanding expression of a negative emotion? A. Very often it is imitation. Somebody else expresses negative emotion
and something in you admires him, and thinks: how beautifully he expresses this negative emotion, and wants to imitate, and you do not know it. It may be many other things, but very often it is imitation. Q. When you say we must work on fundamental ideas of the system, do you mean like work on negative emotions? Can it be called work if one tries hard to work on oneself in this way? A. In any case, whatever you call it, you have got to work on negative emotions, first by studying them, then trying not to express them, then going further and finding your own favourite negative emotion. Suppose somebody has no self-pity, then it is easy for him to work on self-pity; but he may have some other emotion, his own particular one, against which it is difficult to struggle. Generally one has only a few principal negative emotions, although some exceptional people may have more. Q. I find it possible to struggle with smaller negative emotions, but sometimes they are too strong and there is an explosion. A. I tried to explain that negative emotions are different, and you cannot use the same methods against all of them. In all cases you must be prepared. It is too late to think when you are already in the negative emotion. You must study identification and be able not to identify; you must be able to think in the right way—not at that moment but before and after. And you must be able to use negative emotions for self remembering. But before all that you must be able to control the manifestation of negative emotions. If you cannot control the manifestation, you cannot start struggling with negative emotions themselves. But you must understand that you can do nothing when you are in the negative emotion; you can do it before and after. Sometimes, when you are better prepared, you can use them for self-remembering, but that is quite a special thing. In the work everything can be used, all wrong functions can be used, so negative emotions of all kinds can be useful as a help for self-remembering. By that I mean that you can train yourself in such a way that negative emotions will remind you of the necessity of remembering yourself. Q. Did you say that the intellectual centre could control the emotional centre if we knew how. Can you tell us how? A. The whole thing is to learn how. Find emotions connected with a certain kind of thinking, with certain points of view. If you acquire new points of view, then after some time the emotion connected with the old points of view will disappear. Many emotions depend on points of view. But it is slow work. Q. Why must it be done slowly? A. Because nobody can do it quickly. It takes some time to change points of view, to have new points of view established. It means breaking down buffers, and this is a painful thing. Besides, buffers cannot be destroyed at once, because then one will have no control at all. In the ordinary way
one controls oneself with the help of buffers. So buffers must be destroyed gradually and will must be created at the same time. If a buffer is destroyed, will must be put in its place, otherwise one will not be protected by the buffer and one will have no will— so one will be in a worse state than with the buffer. That is why mechanical systems of self-development are dangerous, because by some mechanical means, without knowing what one is doing, one can destroy one or another important buffer without putting anything in its place, and become worse off than before. Means must be conscious, one must know. Q. Can one always find one's chief negative emotion, or only sometimes? A. One can if one is sincere about it. It is a question of sincerity, and of a certain effort, but we do not want to make this effort, so we never do. Even if we decide to look for our negative emotions, we concentrate on small emotions. We are never sincere enough to admit what our chief negative emotion is, because sometimes it looks ugly. When I said it is necessary to find one's chief negative emotion I meant not the most important but the most persistent. If you find them and try to work on them, it often helps to see against what other emotions you can struggle. There are usually two or three you can struggle with. But you must be more precise and not just talk about emotions in general. General talk about emotions is good for general thinking, but not for acting. You can act only in relation to definite facts. Q. Are not the most dangerous negative emotions jealousy, fear, hate, anger? A. No, this is a wrong classification. The most useful classification is by the degree of identification, for it does the most harm. You take these as negative emotions of the first degree, but it is not necessarily true. For some people maybe self-pity is the worst. For another person the worst thing may be the feeling of injustice. You never know which is worst, because it depends on identification and on features, since the capacity to feel certain emotions particularly strongly and identify with them may be the chief feature of false personality. It is different for different people. Q. Which negative emotions has one to transform? A. All of them. There is no need to make a catalogue. One must first begin with those one can tackle, and then pass to more difficult and still more difficult, if it is possible. Negative emotions are an intermediate state between sanity and insanity. A man whose centre of gravity is in negative emotions cannot be called sane and cannot develop. He must become normal first. Negative emotions must be divided into three categories; first, the more usual, more ordinary everyday emotions. You must observe them and must already have a certain control over their expression. When you have acquired a certain control of non-expression of these negative emotions, the question comes as to how to deal with the emotions them-
selves. You must start dealing with them by trying not to identify as often and as much as you can, for they are always connected with identification, and if you conquer identification, they disappear. The second category of emotions do not appear every day. They are the more difficult, more complex emotions depending on some mental process, such as suspicion, hurt feelings and many things like that. They are harder to conquer. You can deal with them by creating a right mental attitude, by thinking—not at the time, but in-between, when you are quiet. Try to find the right attitude, the right point of view, and make it permanent. If you create right thinking, that will take all power from these negative emotions. Then there is the third category, much more intense, much more difficult and rare. Against them you can do nothing. These two methods —struggle with identification and creating right attitudes—do not help. When such emotions come, you can do only one thing: you must try to remember yourself—remember yourself with the help of the emotion. If you learn to use them for self-remembering, they may diminish and disappear after some time. But for this you have to be prepared. At present, since you do not know which emotion belongs to which category, you must try to use all three methods for all of them. But later you will see that they are divided into these categories and in one case one thing helps, in another case another thing. In all cases you must be prepared. As I said in the beginning, it will be difficult to struggle with them or conquer them, but you will learn through time. Only, never mix emotions with the expression of negative emotions. That always comes first. As long as you cannot stop the expression, it means that you can do nothing about the emotions themselves. So before you can do anything else you must learn to control the manifestation of negative emotions. If you learn to control the expression, then you can start. Q. It seems that the effort to remember oneself makes one more vulnerable and more easily swayed by emotions. How can one protect oneself? A. One cannot protect oneself in the beginning. One has to risk it if it works that way. Actually it works both ways: from one point of view it makes you more sensitive; from another point of view it gives you more control. Q. With one's habitual negative emotions, is it some particular feature in oneself that always brings them? A. Quite possibly, but if you practise non-identifying you will see that. You identify with many, many things, not only with negative emotions. From morning till night you pass from one identification to another, but when you try more than usually not to identify, you may notice many negative emotions you have not seen before. Some you may see full-size, of others you may only notice their tails disappearing. If you try noticing and not identifying, it will make you stronger in dealing with emotions.
Q. What is the right way to find interest in things without identification? A. There is no right way. You must either think about right things or connect everything with self-remembering. If you can think about right things, you can be interested in them without identification, but if you become identified, all thinking disappears and it becomes just a formatory repetition of words. Q. One negative emotion which is always happening to me sets me against people whom I think I have neglected or harmed in some way. It is based on identification. I cannot see how to escape from it. A. It is difficult to say. We are so mechanical that in some cases we are not responsible. At the same time one has no right to say 'I am not responsible, so it does not matter what I do'. One must do what one can. But non-identifying will not help in this case. If you feel you have done something wrong, try not to do it again. Very often people give all their energy to thinking about the wrong things they did and next day do exactly the same. Q. Did you say that negative emotions would be useful if we could be not identified with them? A. If we could be not identified, we would have different results. That would help very definitely, since it would give orientation to life and many other things we do not know yet. Yes, I said if we could not identify they would be very useful functions. As they are, they are not useful. All negative emotions that we cannot avoid become useful functions if we use them for self-remembering. Some people manage to do that and get two things at once—elimination of the negative emotion and creation of self remembering. If you have a persistent negative emotion and by right thinking connect it with self-remembering, then, after some time, it will help self-remembering, and after some more time, if you persist, the emotion will disappear. So they can serve a useful purpose if you can use them; but if you identify with them, they are no good at all. Q. Is there anything one can do about negative emotions when one is in a bad state? A. One must not believe in this bad state. Equally one must not believe in a good state, that it will always remain. Both bad and good state will change. If one believes too much in a good state, a bad state comes and one is not prepared, and as a result one is too much affected. If one identifies too much with one's bad state, one feels that one can do nothing. Bad state or good state, one has to go on—there is only one way. Q. Does strong jealousy come under the second category? A. That is for you to decide. It may have very many different forms and manifestations. Generally it is based on justification—mentally you agree with it, approve it, prepare the ground for it. When you stop preparing the ground, it may disappear or be transformed into something different.
But this is too general a description. There are ten thousand different kinds of jealousy, but the basis of them, almost inevitably, is that you feel you have the right to be jealous. You must always remember that all causes of negative emotions are in us. Q. Are negative emotions catching? Is that what makes family life so difficult? A. Yes, it is a definite fact that negative emotions are very infectious, but particularly infectious for yourself. If you have certain negative emotions and admit them, if you do not deny them in your mind they are bound to be repeated and become stronger and stronger. Q. Self-pity, to me, is not an unpleasant emotion, though I consider it to be a negative one. Should it be stopped? A. Particularly if it is pleasant. When self-pity is pleasant it is a particularly poisonous emotion. Q. How can I think rightly about self-pity? A. In thinking about it you must create in your mind a permanent solvent, an attitude which will break up your self-pity when it appears. Find the comical side of it, the absurd side, find the insane side, do not stand on ceremony with yourself. If you succeed in forming a permanent attitude, then as soon as self-pity appears, pour the solvent over it and it will dissolve. Find what is foolish, what is mad in self-pity, not by analysis but by examples. You will find many features in it if you think and observe sincerely, and if you keep them in mind, self-pity will not dare to raise its head. Q. But if you find it does not disappear? A. That means a wrong attitude, and not only attitude. Self-pity is not quite normal, so study it, find all its strange features, try to be ashamed of it, do not think or speak about it as if it were something harmless or pleasant. Q. I find in myself a very great self-indulgence which I believe is my chief weakness and obstacle in the work. But by my own efforts I do not know how to struggle with it in any but the most feeble way. A. Very often you cannot fight, or you do not know how to begin to work against some special weakness, but it does not matter. Work against any weakness and you will work against this weakness. It is a very easy way of justifying yourself to say you do not know how to fight against a weakness. Leave it alone and fight against some other weakness—the result will be the same. In special cases we have to return to some difficulty again and again, but in general all efforts lead in the same direction, whether it is struggle against negativeness, imagination or anything else. Q. Why does giving way to anger give me a definite feeling of exhilaration? A. First because it is a habit, second because it is easy. Every giving way to a habit gives pleasure. The machine always likes to work by the line
of least resistance, but in the work we must go by the line of strongest resistance Q Fear need not be a negative emotion? It may be necessary? A It is the basis of many negative emotions. We do not speak about instinctive emotions now Negative emotions of the instinctive centre are necessary, but others are almost all useless. But even instinctive emotions can lead to imagination. For instance, one may be afraid of snakes and, living in a country where there is only a snake and half, one may pass one's life in fear of snakes This is imagination Q Isn't one often afraid of things one knows nothing about? A Fear is simply a certain state; it can be without any object. This shows how useless negative emotions are. We often invent objects for an emotion when the emotion is already there. Take envy, fear, suspicion We think the emotion is produced in us by something outside, when in reality it is in us, we only look for an object afterwards, and in this way we justify it Q I still cannot understand why all causes of negative emotions are in myself. A. If you observe yourself, you will see Causes outside remain the same, but sometimes they produce negative emotion in you, sometimes not. Why? Because real causes are in you, there are only apparent causes outside If you are in a good state, if you are remembering yourself, if you are not identifying, then nothing that happens outside (relatively speaking, for I do not mean catastrophes) can produce a negative emotion in you. If you are in a bad state, identified, immersed in imagination, then everything just a little unpleasant will produce a violent emotion. It is a question of observation. Q But I still do not see how some things, for instance, people's behaviour, could fail to produce negative emotion. A They are machines Why should the behaviour of machines produce negative emotion? If a machine hits you, it is your own fault, you must not be in the way of the machine. You may have a negative emotion, but it is not the fault of the machine, it is your own fault. Other people do not have as much power over you as you think, it is only the result of identification. You can be much more free if you do not identify, and sometimes you are more free That is why I say it must be observed. If you observe well, you will see that sometimes you identify more, sometimes less; and because of this, sometimes you are absolutely in the power of negative emotions and sometimes you have a certain resistance. It may take a long time to learn how to resist negative emotions, but it is not impossible. You must understand one thing about negative emotions, we are too much afraid of them, we consider them too powerful. We can show resistance to them if we persist and do not consider them inevitable and omnipotent.
Q. I could see myself losing my temper the other day when I was talking to somebody, but I could not stop it. How can I control temper? A This is an example of mechanicalness. You cannot control your temper when it has already begun to appear—it is then too late Struggle must begin in your mind, you must find your way to think rightly about a definite difficulty. Suppose you have to meet a certain man who irritates you. Your temper shows itself, you do not like it. How can you stop it? You must begin with the study of your thinking. What do you think about this man—not what you feel when you are irritated, but what do you think about him at quiet moments? You may find that in your mind you argue with him, you prove to him that he is wrong, you tell him all his mistakes, you find that, generally, he behaves wrongly towards you. This is where you are wrong You must learn to think rightly Then, if you do, it will happen like this although emotion is much quicker than thought, emotion is a temporary thing, but thought can be made continuous, so whenever the emotion jumps out, it hits against this continuous thought and cannot go on and manifest itself So you can struggle with the expression of negative emotions, as in this example, only by creating continuous right thinking. To explain what right thinking is in a few words is impossible, it is necessary to study it. If you remember what I said about parts of centres you will come to that, because in most cases and most conditions in ordinary life people think only with the mechanical part of the intellectual centre, which is the formatory apparatus This is not sufficient It is necessary to use the intellectual part of the intellectual centre Identifying is the chief reason why we do not use it Trying to self-remember and trying not to identify is the best means of passing into higher parts of centres. But we always forget about identification and about self remembering Q Can conquering negative emotions, like fear, create energy? A. Very much so This is one of the best means of collecting energy. All possibilities of development are contained in conquering negative emotions and transforming them A man with negative emotions will never do anything Q. Into what kind of things can negative emotions be transformed? A. It is better to say they must be conquered. But, if you like, we can say that they are transformed into some kind of emotion mixed with very much understanding—an emotion of higher parts of centres. Almost any negative emotion we have now can be transformed into an emotion of higher parts of centres But this needs understanding, conviction that it is necessary, and decision to do it. Q. Is it negative emotions that prevent us from getting into those emotional states? A. Yes. We have enough money, but we spend it all on unpleasant things.