“Again it follows that men are naturally envious.”
Spinoza is telling us there that man's natural state is one of envy. That person's got a more beautiful car; I hate him. That person's got a better pension than me; I hate him. That woman looks more glamorous than another woman, she hates her. Envy is our daily bread - and if you've not seen that in yourself then you must be just unconscious. You need to start looking at what is going on inside yourself. More from Spinoza:
“Again it follows that men are naturally envious, rejoicing in the shortcomings of their equals and feeling pain at their virtues.”
Schadenfreude. Experiencing joy when someone suffers misfortune. Rejoicing at their shortcomings and feeling pain at their virtues. When somebody else experiences an increase in power, and we're talking about power as being able to manifest in life as you want to, we feel envy. Oh my God, he's just won the lottery look at the big house he's just bought, and whatever else. And yet more from Spinoza:
“For whenever a man conceives his own actions he is affected with pleasure in proportion as his actions display more perfection and he conceives them more distinctly, that is in proportion as he can distinguish them from others and regard them as something special.”
Well, we all want to be something special, don't we? We want to be something special in the eyes of other people. If there are no other people around, we won't give a dam about trying to be unique. Why are we trying to be special? Because we want approval from other people, all the other chimps in the chimp park, we want their approval. Ridiculous. Forget about other people's approval; it's not worth anything. And yet, the whole of society is driven by that. So, "therefore a man will take most pleasure in contemplating himself when he contemplates some quality which he denies to others." Well, of course, you do, don't you? You don't want anybody else to have your special features.
“But if that which he affirms of himself be attributable to the idea of man or animals, in general, he will not be so greatly pleased. He will on the contrary feel pain if he conceives that his own actions fall short when compared with those of others. This pain he will endeavor to remove by putting a wrong construction on the actions of his equals or by as far as he can and embellishing his own.”
There you go. I could write endlessly about that proposition, but I'm not going to do. What I've just written there is a description of the whole of society. It's a description of people trying to piss on each other with their power. And this is the way it works, and when you understand that, when you really appreciate it, when you've seen it in yourself, when you've seen yourself doing it, it loses its power and really you couldn't give a damn about what other people do or what they approve of or what they don't approve of. This understanding gives you your inner power and your sense of freedom. Because when people are depressed, they're depressed because they have no power. It's as simple as that. Somehow society, or some individual, or maybe a group of individuals has diminished their power, and when someone has reduced power they feel depressed, it's just the way it works. People have to start creating their inner strength. What is it that I want, and there is no reason why I shouldn't go and get it if it doesn't break the law and doesn't harm somebody else.
You need to understand that we are in a big chimp park and the chimps will piss all over each other as much as they are allowed to do so, and that's the way it works. Occasionally you will meet someone who doesn't operate like that, and that is like tasting the nectar of God. But you have to get used to the idea that human beings are so insecure, so inadequate, so lacking in power in themselves that they are desperately seeking your approval by bragging to you and trying to get you to approve of their fantastic new car or house or holiday. That's the first part, understanding. And that understanding will not come from this; I'm just trying to give you a taste of what that understanding might be. That is number one - understanding.
Number two, an observing I. This practice, in essence, is straightforward but it's possibly the most challenging thing that you will ever do in your life, and here's how it should work. Let's say that somebody's putting you down and you begin to feel a bit angry. Say your boss is saying this is terrible work and he can't use it, go and do it again. You're feeling a bit annoyed maybe; maybe you're feeling a bit sad - whatever emotions are coming up. Well, instead of reacting, instead of going back to your desk and cursing, well you can curse if you want, but instead of going to your workmates and spewing it all out saying your boss is a real shit, sit with that feeling. Sit with that feeling of being angry and hurt because what you need to develop is the ability to sit with any of the emotions that arise within you. You are not in control of those emotions. You are buffeted about by the environment, by other people, by things. I live in an earthquake zone. If there's an earthquake tomorrow I may be flattened, maybe somebody I care for will get crushed, and there's nothing I can do about that, and that will impact me emotionally very much. We live in a world where we are always bumping up against other things, and they will influence us. People, events, whatever, so we have to be able to sit with whatever is going on within us, and when we sit with it, we build up within us an inner strength to be able to bear things. That is the important thing, this internal muscle, the ability to endure what is happening in our life. This observing I sits with what's going on. If you're feeling envious because so-and-so has just got a job promotion and you wanted it, sit with that feeling of envy and do not judge it. Every emotion you have is legit. It's not something that's wrong. These emotions are our true immediate response to the environment; they are not to be judged. They are true; they're real. You feel that emotion, you sit with it, try and feel it in your body. You don't judge it, and you don't try and make it go away, you don't try to change it. It sounds simple. It isn't simple. It may take a person years to master that particular practice. But what happens is you start to develop an inner strength to bear any emotion, and you create a little bit of distance between this I within you that can observe these things and all the things that are going on. Even though something quite dreadful may be going on, there's also a part of you that's just sitting back and looking and feeling and not judging and not wanting to change. These emotions have energy and what you eventually want to do is suck up that energy, because that energy allows something within you to grow.
Mr. Gurdjieff used to call this kind of work the work to create a permanent I within a man. I don't give a damn about a permanent I, but I do attribute a great deal of value to the ability not to be buffeted about by life and to suffer at every least event that happens, and that is why I'm reasonably happy taking the escalator down to hell and poking around down there. Some of the ideas and the realizations that you come up with when you go down there and look around are disturbing but you know, I've been doing this work for a long time, so I have the inner fortitude to feel what I'm feeling and suck it up. Just feel it because that energy's useful. And the observing I is something you have to develop. It's an inner thing that most people don't have. They don't have it because they've never bothered to create one. As Mr. Gurdjieff says, those who don't plant seeds when they are young have nothing to harvest when they get older. And that's the kind of timescales we are talking about with developing these things.
IF YOU DON'T TRY TO CHANGE, EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE
Almost to a person, the idea that reason can somehow change the emotions creates quite a bit of resistance, and that resistance is entirely justified because it can't. I want to clarify the whole situation that we're in - it's cut into two bits - Phenomena and Being:
Phenomena, the phenomenal world, everything that you experience is the phenomenal world. The average person lives in a world of phenomena and pretty much nothing else. You know, my dogs live in a world of phenomena. It's food time, so they're happy, go outside in the rain and have a shit, and they're not happy. It's just pure reactions to the environment all the time. They're part of the physical world, and they react to it as circumstances dictate. Sometimes, they are ha
ppy and sometimes they are not, and that's how most of us live. Things are going well, and we're delighted, things not going well, and we are unhappy. This world of phenomena is a world of doing. If your roof is leaking you will go and fix it, I assume anyway. If you have an infection, then you will go to the doctors. It's just this persistent world of doing, a world of cause and effect, a world of trying to order things to our own best advantage most of the time. It's a world where there's no reflection, as Socrates said, 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' Well, I think quite a few people enjoy living an unexamined life, but it does have its problems. You can live an unexamined life reasonably well as long as things go kind of OK. When they're not going OK, then you will suffer and whether they're going OK or not will be down to luck at the end of the day. You can't determine whether some unfortunate thing is going to happen, or whether next week you're going to win the lottery. You can't predict those things.
As far as we're concerned, this world of phenomena is driven by desires and appetite. The primary desire as I've said many, many times is the desire to exist, the hope to survive, and that drives pretty much everything else. The emotions in the main are derived from this desire to live - things are going well, and you're happy, things not going well and you're unhappy. It's all mechanical, and the emotions are nothing special; they are just reactions to the environment. If we're affected in a good way, then we think things are great, and if we're not changed in a good way, then we think things are bad. It's all mechanical; it's just like a big machine churning along, this visible world, the physical world, existence. It produces mechanical suffering or automatic happiness, but nothing is going on there that is looking at what's happening.
This is one way to live. That is how the universe uses our life. Well, how else is it going to use it? It's just a person being buffeted about by living with no real awareness of what's happening. People fulfill their function, typically to create the next generation, to have kids and provide a home for them, and for them to produce the next generation so they can then, in turn, deliver the generation after that. We see that as futile and pointless, which from the human point of view it certainly seems, or we can take the belief that the universe is much bigger and operates according to its laws, and maybe there's stuff that we don't understand. Perhaps there isn't; maybe it indeed is futile? But there are lots of people who say that "well actually, maybe this big meat machine called planet earth is fulfilling some function?” And perhaps it is, I don't know. Either way, the result is the same. We live a mechanical life, we suffer, and we die.
Now, note the words 'Being' and 'Doing.' Because 'Being' is not, or does not share the same characteristics as 'Doing.' Doing is always a cause and effect thing, and it's always mechanical. Doing is from our point of view, intervening all the time in what's happening. If I'm thirsty, I go and get a drink of water; I do something, I intervene in that situation, I don't just sit with the thirst, I go and get a drink of water. To make the point, the world of phenomena is the world of emotions. Your emotions are mechanical, and they will happen in the way they happen, and your emotions will always dictate what you do at a phenomenal level. But there is a part of us that can observe, Being. I've got a list of words here that I put together to try and convey this thing of Being - Observing, Reasoning, Understanding, Sensing, Inner, No Intervention, Freedom, Joy. Your Reason and Being has no power; we're not talking about something here that is interventionist. Being is something that is yours, but it's not part of the cause and effect chain in life, it cannot intervene in life. If there's a 40-ton truck heading your way and you're in the middle of the road, Being cannot help you with that.
Similarly, if you have just lost someone that you love a great deal and you are in deep grief, Being cannot help you with that either. What the hell is the interest in Being? There is a very thin line dividing Doing and Being, and I'll get on to Being in some detail in a moment. The guy who first brought Zen to the West, DT Suzuki, was asked: "what is the result of all these years of Zen training?" He said in response, "two inches of separation."
That two inches of separation is everything; it means that something within you has a certain kind of freedom. You may still be in deep grief; you may decide to eat ice cream though you don't want all that sugar and fat because the emotions and the desires determine your life at the phenomenal level. But something within you is watching it. It's not intervening; it's just understanding. Let me go through these terms because many people that I've spoken with and had a dialogue with have said that when I say, ‘a man of reason,’ they immediately think 'oh nobody can be a man of reason.' Reason has failed us terribly as a mechanism to try and address the problems of the world.
Reason is a personal thing, it's not something out there that's going to change the world, the world will go the way it goes, and you have authors like John Grey, that wrote a book called Straw Dogs who says that reason hasn't got us anywhere. Well, of course, it hasn't got us anywhere, that isn't the role of reason. When I say reason, I'm not talking about reason as applied to the world. However external reason means that we're not all suffering from a toothache and infested with parasites and die from minor infections and we live in, (most of us anyway) warm safe houses, and so on. I'm not talking about that kind of reason. The reason I'm talking about is the ability to form ideas or to create an understanding of how the world works. That understanding does have a certain amount of power, but I'll come onto that in a moment too. When I talk about reason I'm talking about something that is personal to you, it has no power. All the power is in the phenomenal world. How strange to have something that has no power. Reason has no power to change anything.
I'll give an example of reason. I've already mentioned that all your emotions are linked to the idea that we want to survive. I don't think most people would argue with that; you do want to endure. And, as a result of that, your body and your emotions (your emotions are in the body not in your mind) in the world of phenomena are everything. That's what you are, a body. When you become ill then your mood will change, you might become depressed. Or if you lose a load of money and your security is threatened, you will become anxious. If you win an amount of money, you'll become happy. I've been over this many, many times and it's pivotal, it's central. If you understand this (and here we are talking about the understanding), then you will create a particular little bit of space between what is going on in the world and what is happening within you, that 'two inches of separation.' By the way, I should say that that two inches of separation can take a lifetime to create and even then, it will get breached. When something truly awful happens, you will be affected, and no amount of Being will stop it. The world of phenomena may swamp your Being, but even so, in many situations, your Being will give you a certain kind of inner freedom. There's a certain level of inner freedom got from understanding that when you are happy it is because your body is just saying 'I like this, I like having lots of money, or ‘I like having a good meal’, or ‘I like good sex’, or ‘I like...', you know whatever it is - anything that is to do with survival and procreation and all that stuff.
The art of this, of course, is to be able to observe all that. Literally, just when you in the heights of euphoria, to be able to step back a little bit and say, 'Oh yeah, I'm like this, because my body likes this', 'I've just been awarded the Nobel Prize' or something and 'I'm famous, and everybody likes me,' and 'my existence is more assured'. Equally when you are down, then you step back a little bit from it and say 'I'm depressed because I've lost my job' or whatever it is. You can only observe your emotional state if you sense it, that's how it goes. You have to be able to sense the emotions in your body if you want to observe them. Otherwise, you're just in your imagination. Your emotions are in your body, so you need to be able to sense your body, it's as simple as that, or as difficult as that. There are things you can do to fine-tune your sensitivity to your body so that you can observe its state. Then, you need to understand. ‘Well, why do I feel pissed off?’ And I've
given some examples of that, so I'm not going to go through it all again.
The significant thing here is (the book on self-observation by Red Hawk majors on these points) that when you're observing, you do not try and intervene. If you're pissed off, you experience the feeling of being pissed off. Don't say to yourself ‘well, being pissed off is wrong, I should be happy.’ Experience that feeling of being pissed off, get really into it. Again, it's in your body, so your attention needs to be in your body. All of this is within you; you're not modifying anything in the world at all. In a sense, you're not interested in the world; the world can go to hell, it can do whatever it wants. You are just sat there looking, trying to apply reason to what is happening for the sole purpose of creating a correct understanding of what is happening. Understanding has power; it has the power to free you. The more you understand, the freer you will be. But it's crucial that you do not try and intervene in the world, from the level of being. It's not what being is about. If you are intervening you are doing, so you are back in the world of phenomena.
I mentioned a book by Red Hawk above, who suggests not intervening and also not judging. If you are angry, then you are angry. End of story. If your mum told you that being angry was wrong or you read it in a book that being angry is wrong, then you know you need to realize that any emotion you have is your authentic response to the environment. Any ideas that you have around that emotion regarding trying to modify it, or judge it, is stuff that you just picked up from the environment. It's not what you are. Those ideas that anger is wrong, or lust is sinful, or whatever emotions you happen to be experiencing are wrong, or beautiful, (the other side of it), are just emotions, they are only part of the phenomenal world. It's just you who are manifesting in the phenomenal world. If you are wholly in the phenomenal world, then you are only a machine, good things will happen to you, and bad things will happen to you. You will get to the end of your life and, poof, you die. At the end of life, typically people tend to get a little bit bitter and more resentful. Why? Because they had all kinds of expectations and things didn't go how they wanted. If you don't want to grow old and bitter, then you need to do something like this, because it creates a particular kind of inner freedom with which comes an inner joy. It's your power; nobody can take it away from you. I think I've probably mentioned this before, but the book Fooled by Randomness by Taleb, who is inclined towards the Stoics, particularly Seneca, says ‘when the executioner comes, make sure you've had a good shave, and you are wearing your best suit.’ In other words, you are active within yourself.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 14
