“You are never free until you are free of family.”
That doesn't mean that you never see them again, or you hate them or anything like that. It maintains that you must lose all the co-dependencies. Such as, ‘yes mommy I will go and do this because I know you like me doing this and I will get approval.’ When you've lost all of that, then you are free of your family. You can love them, you can be with them, you can enjoy time with them, but do not be a prisoner to them. And that's what she's talking about.
To summarize this, we all act selfishly anyway, through one mechanism or another. Some arrangements may be very, very painful. Trying to please people all the time is a very painful thing to do, but it's a survival strategy that many people have learned. ‘If I please them, they will like me, and if they like me, then I have some support around me.’ That one way of getting it, but it's a very inadequate way of getting it, it's a painful way of getting it. So, be selfish. Lose all your friends. ‘Selfish,’ is a word that these days is almost as taboo as pedophilia. If you were to go and say to someone ‘I am selfish’ or ‘I am a pedophile’ it would probably get the same kind of reaction. So, anyway, it’s for you to decide how you want to live your life. But if you want to be free, and there's nothing like freedom in my opinion, then you need to be selfish.
BE PASSIONATE ABOUT YOURSELF
We tend to be passionate about everything other than the thing that really matters – ourselves.
I was once in a meeting where the person who was leading the meetings asked us what we were all passionate about. One guy said sailing, and he had a small dingy another one said dancing, another one said cooking. When it came to my turn, I said cigars. Sounds a bit pathetic in retrospect, but that's what I said because I did like cigars. He heard the six of us say what we were passionate about with a reasonably serious face, and then looked at us and said we were all wrong, there's only one thing you need to be passionate about, and that's yourself. I remember it because it was such an unusual thing for someone to say. And it went against all my conditioning - the conditioning that we should be selfless and think of others, and to be passionate about oneself seemed like a massive act of selfishness.
Selfishness is a big thing because in our society we are conditioned to act in a manner that is seen to be unselfish. And yet, when you get to the bottom of it, as UG Krishnamurti would say, we're all ultimately very, very selfish. Even the act of appearing to be unselfish is an act of trying to get the approval of other people. How can we be anything other than selfish in truth? This is our world, our emotions, our thoughts, our body, this is the world we inhabit, and so it's the nearest thing to us, and it's the thing that we should devote most attention to. This notion of being passionate about oneself is crucial to any work. I'm talking about personal development work. We need to be passionate about what we are doing. That means that we take first place in our lives. It doesn't mean that we ignore other people or that we're negligent, it just means that when anything happens, we're primarily concerned about what is going on within us.
A good example is if we're in a social situation and someone says something we find maybe slightly offensive to our own opinions and beliefs. We need to look at that, that is the most important thing, what the person said to you is not the most important thing, how you reacted to it is the most important thing. You need to be passionate about feeling it and understanding it. Now, this active feeling and understanding isn't something that suddenly magically appears. It's something we need to develop, and it requires attention. It's a fact that our attention is spread everywhere. We have very little attention for ourselves, for how we're feeling particularly, and it's very very common for people to have almost no awareness of how they're feeling. Clearly, we're all feeling something at any particular moment in time, but to be aware of that, to give attention to it is going against the flow of nature if you like, because the natural tendency is for our attention to go outwards - to what other people are thinking, to some new fascination. Maybe we're buying a new car, or perhaps we're going on holiday or buying a new house, getting a new job. The attention goes on all these external things, and there's almost nothing left for our very neglected essence, the something that is within us that needs to grow.
A great deal of attention goes on other people, particularly seeking other people's approval. This is childhood conditioning. We need the support and love of our parents, and as children, we dedicate a significant amount of attention to detecting their moods and to what might please them and what might make them angry. That conditioning is something we take with us into later life, looking at other people and seeing whether they are pleased with what we're doing, or whether we're getting some level of disapproval. The only approval you need is your own. Again, this is not something that you can magic out of thin air. Self-approval comes from a relatively long period of training, but it is the most blessed thing on earth not to be so dependent on other people's opinions and ideas. We need to be sensing our emotions. Why do I feel angry right now? Why do I feel anxious right now? Simply acknowledge those emotions, because a lot of people can't even sense their emotions. The emotions are happening, but they don't touch them, they're not aware of them, and if you ask them to put their attention on those emotions, they'll deny they are experiencing an emotion. But of course they are, and there are body-based exercises that help us get in touch with the emotions, because the feelings, at the end of the day, are a state of the body. The emotions have nothing to do with the mind, and if we're going to feel the emotions, then we need to be in contact with the body. If we're not in touch with our body, then we don't have a cat in hell's chance of actually feeling our emotions. Emotions are our barometer; they tell us how we are reacting to the environment. You will find in a social situation that you will have a certain level of anxiety seeking approval and looking for people to be amused at your jokes, or for people to approve of what you're doing or the things that you're talking about. If you get disapproval, this will hit your self-confidence, which of course if a travesty. You really shouldn't be so dependent on external circumstances and other people's opinions. Emotions are one thing that we need to give our attention to.
The other thing we need to give our attention to is our opinions and beliefs - because many of them work against us. If you believe that everything you are going to do is going to be successful, then you are going to be disappointed, and you can't avoid that if you are an optimistic person. We need to have realistic expectations. We need to have understanding that is realistic, we need to understand the nature of the world, and for it to be in agreement with how the world really is rather than the notions and the fairy tales and the dreams that we've been told as children, or maybe that we've picked up from Hollywood movies. This is all stuff of the personality. As Gurdjieff said, the personality is what is not our own. It's something we've taken in from the environment. What is your own is your essence and you will only get in contact with your essence through your body. While we're stuck in our heads with various opinions and beliefs, we're looking to a large extent at the personality, and the person needs to be effectively reprogrammed to be in contact with reality rather than the things that we've been raised to believe. To be passionate about yourself, in a nutshell, is to give attention to yourself. This is the hardest thing in the world. Don't think about Elon Musk, the guy who's creating Tesla cars. Don't think about the first people who went to the moon, don't think about Albert Einstein, don't think about Donald Trump, or whoever you happen to believe has achieved something extraordinary. What these people have done is nothing compared with the work of directing the attention from outside of ourselves and refocusing it on what's going on within us. Attention makes something grow. In fact, in some traditions, attention is synonymous with love. You can only love something if you give attention to it. It's why children love attention so much; they thrive on it. A child that has not had attention when it's young will grow up needy, always seeking attention, trying to fill in where childhood didn't s
atisfy. There we are. Be passionate about yourself. It's number one above and beyond everything else. The first rule of life, be passionate about yourself.
CUT YOURSLEF SOME SLACK
Most so-called 'spiritual' movements and religions tend to make things worse for people. They tend to feed straight into the superego, the part of us full of should and shouldn't. The superego is already a cause of much misery without deliberately adding to its demands that we should act and feel in ways that are foreign to us. For example, consider someone who adopts a new belief system which says that anger is wrong. If a person believes this, they will begin to deny that they are angry when in reality they are full of it. This denial will cause considerable inner conflict and suffering. It is also dangerous since such a person is quite likely to explode over some quite trivial incident.
In the Gurdjieff work, for example, it is believed that most of our emotions are negative. This belief is, of course, a value judgment, and Gurdjieff groupies who think this may spend all their lives trying to push water uphill, denying the very things that cannot be denied, that our emotions are our authentic response to the environment and any value judgment is merely an invitation to denial and suffering.
This kind of programming, more often associated with religions, supercharges the superego, so it becomes our inner judge. Meanwhile, our genuine needs and desires get pushed into the background, and this monster we have created within us tries to take control. The programming is intense and is exacerbated by prescriptions for behavior we ingest from books and people who believe they know how we should behave.
As we exist today, we are divided within. The real part of us, called the id by some, reacts to the environment in an authentic manner. The superego will have none of this and believes that its programming tells us how to behave, and also what to judge. It also dishes out punishment if we transgress, making us feel inadequate, depressed, unworthy, or a thousand other destructive emotions.
There is a way out of this deadlock. The id should not just run wild. It is after all only concerned with sex, food, comfort, power and anything else that might increase the likelihood of survival. We cannot live in a society where the physically strong take what they want from the weak - not if we wish to avoid an elimination competition with just a handful of brutes left battling it out. Equally the superego should not displace the real emotions and drivers that come from the id. The solution to this is understanding. If we can understand why we feel envy, hatred, excitement, derision, love and any other emotion, it has the effect of reducing its power. This understanding is what psychiatric practice is all about.
Remember, our emotions are our authentic response. There is absolutely nothing wrong with excitement, hatred, envy, obsession, pride and the rest. All we are required to do is understand them and why they occur. This is not an attempt to deny emotions, but merely to understand them as we might understand anything else. The effect of the understanding is well demonstrated by the fear caused by thunderstorms before people came to know that they are not the wrath of angry Gods, but merely electrical discharges. And as long as you are not some fool waving a golf club around on open ground, there is nothing to fear.
We need to cut ourselves some slack. Whenever we hear the inner voice that condemns, we should root out why it is in the superego in the first place, determine whether it serves any useful purpose, and if not, work to throw it in the trash can. The result is less inner conflict, a greater understanding of our real emotions, and periods of inner peace.
EMOTIONAL LIBERATION THROUGH UNDERSTANDING
Most people choose a spiritual path in an attempt to get away from some pain. We are all affected by emotional distress of one kind or another. Maybe sadness, depression, fear, anger. Any of the relatively long list of things that can affect us as human beings. Now, what is usually peddled in various spiritual movements that erupt in an attempt to address these issues is some form of practice, and what is lacking, is understanding. What is offered is essentially some technique. These methods are, in the main, calming techniques. For instance, learning to take deep breaths when anxious. And of course, that's useful, but it’s not going to help you get to the bottom of the anxiety. You're going to be taking deep breaths for the rest of your life because it’s just like a drug. You are in effect just using a natural medicine that your body can produce of its own accord through taking deep breaths. Now, it is curious that understanding is missing in most spiritual methods because it is the key to our freedom and liberation. Gurdjieff talked about understanding. He spoke of knowledge, being and understanding. Knowledge on its own is nothing; it’s just something that you push into your memory and chew around in your impressionable mind - the apparatus that you develop during life to handle concepts and words and language and images. It’s effectively just like a machine that can process symbols and words and pictures. Understanding is something wholly different. Understanding comes from direct experience. There is no way you can get understanding if somehow you are not able to experience what needs to be understood. There's the old saying, isn't there, that if you want to learn, then you have to do something. You have to do that very thing that you want to learn. Someone who is a carpenter will not become a carpenter by reading books about carpentry. They become a carpenter by actually doing it, and as such, they gain an understanding of the nature of the material they're working with, namely wood, the tools used, and the little tricks and techniques that they use to make the thing work. Things that you would never pick up just by reading about something. Understanding comes from living in reality.
The thing that often frustrated me in the various schools I was involved with was a lack of understanding. There was a great deal of work in the sense of evoking emotions and techniques to go within oneself, but very little in the way of actually understanding how these emotions arose and seeing them, seeing the situation in which they would occur, and understanding why those emotions were as they were. Once you know that, you can gain freedom. I've found this in my own practical experience, and I've seen that there's no substitute for real-life work on oneself, in the sense of observing what's going on and understanding what is going on. Observation is not enough on its own. Self-Observation is a beautiful thing; it allows us to see what's going on. But if there's no understanding of why a particular state has arisen, then there's no moving forward. I'll give you an example.
Our primary driver, our animal driver, is our need to survive, and the emotions are a legacy from our animal origins. Emotions are essentially instant responses to situations. These immediate responses mean that an animal can respond to a situation in an instant. It doesn't have to think and evaluate; it just knows how to respond immediately. If it's in danger, it will flee. It doesn't think about it; it doesn't try and reason. If it sees a predator, then it will just escape. If it considers some food that looks like it might be suitable to eat, then it will go and eat. The sense of hunger will, or the feeling of desire for food will make it go and eat. It doesn't have to think about these things. And so, it is with human beings. Emotions like jealousy and envy and hatred and anger, there's a long list of them, are instant responses to situations. I've mentioned that the primary driver for us, the animal driver, is our need to survive and the emotions derive immediately from that. When situations occur where our survival prospects are enhanced, then we feel pleasure. When we've just eaten, if we win a prize, say some money, if we get recognition - all those kinds of things make us feel that our survival is more assured.
On the other hand, if our survival is threatened, then we experience negative emotions. Now, this thing of our survival being threatened doesn't have to be 'oh my god in the next five minutes I'm going to die.' It’s merely the feeling of a diminishing of power. Let me talk very specifically about envy.
Envy is a form of hatred. It is a form of hate directed towards someone who has been favored by fortune. Why do we feel envy? Because they have something that we would like. If someone near to you wins a large amount of mone
y or inherits a large amount of money, you may feel envy because you too would undoubtedly like quite a large amount of money. And you then get a contrast between the situation you're in, the situation they are in, and the impression is that they have more, or are more likely to survive. Their prospect of survival is enhanced, and yours is still the same, but actually, you feel diminished because there's a greater contrast taking place. And so, you experience this hatred towards them because they're a source of pain for you, they're reminding you of something you do not have, and so you hate them. It’s tough for people to look at these emotions and to be honest about them, but that's what's going on. Now once you understand that, and by the word understanding I do mean you have been in that situation where you feel envy, you've had the honesty to acknowledge that in yourself, and the ability to analyze what is going on. When you can do that kind of thing, then envy will diminish. You don't have to make it decrease; it will just decrease - because the curious thing is that by understanding emotions they somehow lose their power. It’s the same for fear. In fear you have to understand why you are feeling fear. We all feel fear because we think our survival is being threatened in some way or other, so you might have a concern that you could lose your job soon. And of course, that relates directly to a diminishing of your survival prospects. You need to look at the situation, why you are feeling fear, what that refers to. It relates to a feeling of diminishing survival prospects, and look at it and sit with it. A curious thing about these emotions is that they have a certain amount of energy. They are like storms. By sitting with them and being with them and looking at them, it's somehow like the storm loses its power. And for certain people who believe that by doing that kind of thing, we in effect absorb the energy of the storm. Instead of the storm stealing power from us, we take its energy. There are a few examples there of how understanding and specifically the understanding of the emotions cause the emotions to become less troublesome. What you are left with when you have done this work for a long time is greater peace because the emotions are not so troubling. And I will remind you that emotions are essentially an animal legacy that we have, and whether we should be in that state or not is up for debate. Some traditions consider that state to be a fallen state, a fall into the state of sharing characteristics with animals, i.e., the emotions, the passions.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 12