Stages of Awakening in the Work

(Psychological commentaries of G. & Ouspensky)
 by Maurice Nicole

We are accustomed to our own smells. Now as long as we live comfortably in the thick & nauseating atmosphere of ourselves, taking everything for granted, including ourselves, we cannot awaken. Why is this is so? It is because we have never begun to ask ourselves any questions as to what we are or what anything means. We simply eat & sleep, fight & quarrel, talk & hear, see & touch, move & feel. We take it all for granted, not having the slightest idea that it is extraordinary. We are easily satisfied in this respect. We move about on the surface of things & like or dislike or love & hate, & so on, & it is all, as far as we are concerned, taken for granted. There is no sense of the strangeness of the whole business. If this is so, then certainly we are asleep & it will take a good deal of pain & unpleasantness, a good deal of startling experience, many heavy shocks, to awaken us to the beginning of our real thinking.  

Life contains many natural shocks of which one is death. Being confronted with death can sometimes make us begin to think in a real way. But the torrent of the senses, & the screaming note of modern life, dulls & deafens this thinking-point, so that it rarely emerges & becomes felt. Certainly we are upset if we do not have our own way in what & where we are, but, on the contrary, usually puts us more to sleep than ever. We again plunge into life expecting to have our desires ultimately fulfilled & regard all temporary & continual failure in this respect as very exceptional. However, all this is necessary – until we begin to think.

Then a new situation is begun in us. We have begun to think. This Work is to make us think – not to think how we can get the better of someone who we feel has let us down or how to attract someone who ignores us or how to get more personal power, more attraction or more pleasure, more comfort, better position or how to say more unpleasant things of others – no, this work is to make us think exactly of all that side of us, through self-observation, so that we begin to see what & where we are ourselves. However, this takes a long time, & nothing is worse than to pretend we know already. A person who pretends to have or to know what he does not have or know – such a person as a ‘picture’ of himself or herself. This stops everything real in every direction of development. Of all the casting out of devils mentioned in the Gospels, the casting out of pictures of oneself must surely come first, for pictures hinder every new experience & every line of development. We all have pictures of ourselves. Wherever they lie, there they stop development in a more real sense than a ton of concrete will prevent anything from growing beneath it. We think of the imagination as a light airy nothingness. But the imagination is very powerful- very real – like concrete. Pictures are formed out of imagination, controlled by vanity. They are fixed forms of imagination, woven by vanity. Vanity is a terrific force is us & imagination is the powerful builder & bricklayer of vanity. It builds pictures of ourselves. Then we cannot move into a new stage of ourselves, into new ideas & feelings, & experiences & meaning. Of course we do not see either our vanity or our pictures of ourselves. They are too close to us. We are them. We may see the results of vanity, but not it. We see the results of it when we are insulted or taken for granted. We take ourselves for granted, but do not like others to do so – a paradox at first sight, but not really so. In short, where we are vain, there we are blind to ourselves. None of us thinks he or she is vain, none of us really thinks he of she has dominating pictures that are served all day. They are too close, too much ourselves.

The side of what we actually are, & the side of what we pretend & imagine we are, are two contradictory sides. These two contradictory sides, however, exist in everyone without exception. The action of the Work, once it is beginning to be wished for, makes us become gradually aware of this contradiction – over many years. Then we begin to have traces of real suffering – interspersed with all sorts of attempts at self-justifying & excuses & so on. This marks a stage in the Work, a definite point in self-development. Here pictures weaken. For a long time the Work is something outside. One makes notes about it & draws diagrams & asks questions about words. Then it either begins to penetrate into understanding of not. If it does, & you wish it, the Work enters oneself.

Then it begins, as it were to judge you, to point out this or that, very mildly at first, more distinctly afterwards. One tries to avoid it, of course. But, once it has penetrated oneself, by trying to avoid it one only increases one’s inner difficulties, realising that one cannot do without it & that to be deprived of its mild current of new meaning is worse than death. One realises then what it means to be dead in the sense of the Work. This stage is easily imitated & often is. Then one talks a lot of one’s difficulties, etc. Later one becomes more silent. To talk about one’s difficulties is a sign that one has not understood much. But it is a necessary stage for everyone to pass.

The Work is a series of stages in the understanding of it. If it does not penetrate it remains words – on the surface. Then you argue about everything. But its ideas are spermatic – that is, capable of penetrating & fertilizing the mind & feeling – otherwise it would not be the Work – real teaching. It corresponds to something we have forgotten, something waiting in us, something to which we have gone to sleep long ago, something covered over by continual life. That is why this ancient teaching can awaken us. All awakening is unpleasant. One can always avoid unpleasantness by means of all the apparatus of the False Personality – by ingenious or even stupid arguing, by insincerity, by buffers, by self-justifying, by negative attitudes, by lying, by not trying to think, by resorting to pictures, by resorting to all kinds of things to keep one’s sleep intact. But if the Work penetrates, this becomes more & more difficult. One begins to become aware that the Work is really saying something hard to catch & that perhaps it is quite true. This is painful. It is sometimes scarcely endurable & at the same time a very marvellous experience. It is painful to one side of us, marvellous to another side.

Of course all this will sound very strange to those who come to meetings expecting that the Work will cure their rheumatism or improve their business or help them to have a jollier time or tell them exactly what to eat & drink. I do not see how such a level of regarding the Work can lead anywhere. The whole conception is too small, too selfish, too self-centred. A deeper sense of life is necessary – one that can eventually grasp the three lines of Work - 1) Work for & on oneself, 2) Work with & for others, & 3) work in & for the Work itself. There is a saying in this Work that it is to transmute “lead” into “gold”. This is speaking in the terms of alchemical language. The subject of real Alchemy was Man & his inner transformation. But the Work adds that a person must already have gold to make more gold. A person must have some special understanding to start with. This is called the possession of magnetic centre which is the first sign of different Being. You would do well to reflect on this point & discuss it. Speaking from another side, the Work aims at the development of mechanical Man, 1, 2 & 3, into No. 4 Man – that is Balanced Man. In this respect certain kinds of effort are expected apart from working on oneself in the line of non-identifying, Self-remembering, inner-separation & so on.

I must say here once more that Self-remembering is the most important thing of all & has many degrees & stages. Everyone can, to a limited degree, begin to practice & understand Self-remembering. Full self-remembering is one thing, but many degrees exist in the approach to it. Obeying the Work at a critical moment is one form of Self-remembering. But, to continue, since the goal of No. 4 Man refers to a man whose centres all have some development, so that a person is not one-sided, merely a good golfer, or a good scientist, or merely an artist, & so on, it is necessary to educate oneself. “How,” said Mr. Ouspensky, on one occasion, “How can you expect to come into possession of Great Knowledge when you have made no effort to get to know any of the ordinary knowledge that is accessible to everyone?”

Now if we divide a man’s work into work on the line of his Knowledge & work on the line of his Being, it is possible to realise that work on the line of Knowledge may include not only the special Knowledge of this Work but also the ordinary knowledge in which he finds himself or herself too much lacking – that is knowledge of all kinds. This demands normal effort, but efforts of this kind are necessary. Sometimes people enter this Work with really hardly any ordinary knowledge. They then have no means of comparing the special knowledge of this Work with ordinary knowledge. They have no power of judgment & so take what they are taught as if it were just ordinary knowledge. They have nothing ready to receive. This is a great difficulty because having no power of contrasting, they take this Work as ordinary knowledge, which means that it falls on the ordinary parts of centres, just as the arithmetic table might or a talk on ways to cook eggs, or make hydrogen from water, or find a square root. The more you study ordinary knowledge the more you will see how all that the Work teaches is Extraordinary knowledge & how it rises over the ideas of ordinary knowledge which are all disconnected. But by filling rolls in centres through the effort of getting to know what can be known, the whole machine is made stronger & the breadth of the mind is increased. I repeat that you cannot do this Work from too narrow a basis, emotional or intellectual. Again, ordinary knowledge sometimes nourishes the Work directly, as when one can see connections & illustrations, & sometimes indirectly, by showing us how it is wrongly understood. In the Work, Everything can become useful – once the Work has begun to penetrate into one’s mind & will & being, & no longer lies in the memory. Then “all life becomes your teacher,” as G. once said.