Tables In The Garden

Tables In The Garden

From our friend, Charles R.

There are two states diametrically opposite to each other which schools use that describes our relationship to others. They are external consideration and inner considering.

External consideration is the effort to put oneself in another person’s place in order to understand how they experience, or would experience, a situation. It encompasses the effort to separate from both one’s opinion of another as well as oneself to see the whole situation more objectively. In a school this means thinking about others from the standpoint of what is good for their evolution and then acting on those perceptions.

Inner considering on the other hand is identification with ours or someone else’s lower self. It manifests as concern about how others think about us. Inner considering leads to excessive concern over the way we appear or might appear, sometimes to the point of producing an incapacitating state of baseless fear, worry, needless concern and even confusion.

I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my wrath did end. – William Blake

One time while I was sharing an apartment, I had put a table cloth and placemats on our dining room table. My flatmates changed them for their own preferred impressions without asking or mentioning to me before the swap while I was away. I came back to our apartment and noticed the change. As I stood there taking in the impression, my flatmate happened to come into the dining room and said “Oh by the way, I thought we could swap each other’s table impressions each month. They’re rather nice don’t you think?” The impressions were indeed rather nice, so I nodded in agreement and that was that. Or so it seemed. The i’s that occurred to me later though, were since we shared the apartment, it would have been more equitable had I been asked before changes were made. As my resentment increased, so too did negative i’s towards my flatmate increase. There were also i’s about not being able to have said anything about it to my flatmate, since, at least in my mind, the moment had passed, and I had already sat at the table and enjoyed a couple meals there. But each time I saw my flatmate, the i’s that felt ignored or felt that my flatmate had taken advantage, kept surfacing. Eventually the understanding arrived that the weakness of not voicing an appropriate opinion at the appropriate time, without expressing a negative emotion was mine.

Had I been more present to my own needs at the time, external consideration in this situation could have helped neutralize any negative feelings about the situation between myself and my flatmate and include the probability of offering an observation from the steward, rather than a criticism from a negative parts of the lower self. We would both have gained. Even so, these small failures instruct and allow us to prepare for better successes at introducing and prolonging the third state.

In schools, emphasis is placed on externally considering one’s fellow students. George Gurdjieff even went as far as saying that in a school, students need to externally consider one another at least ten times more than others outside a school due to the substantial labor that conscious evolution requires. Through developing a sensitivity and understanding of how to assist each other’s efforts to awaken, it becomes possible for us to sit at beautiful tables of our own making; that is, assisting each other to BE, wherever circumstances find us, in the sunny garden of wordless presence.

Anybody can become angry-that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way-that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy. ~ Aristotle

Join the discussion

Image: Henri Le Sidaner, The Table in the Sun in the Garden, c.1911