Withdrawing Our Permission
Withdrawing Our Permission
From our friend Lindsey V. of the New York Center.
There is nothing more mechanical in our life than negative emotions. — P.D. Ouspensky
Negative emotions—anger, resentment, jealousy, irritation, self-pity, self-deprecation—are so familiar that we seldom question them. We assume they are natural responses to what happens to us. Someone cuts me off while driving, therefore, it is natural that I become angry. Someone is dismissive of me; therefore, I feel hurt. Yet the Fourth Way asserts that negative emotions are not caused by external events. Ouspensky says, “We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes.” Behind every negative emotion lies our permission.
It can be difficult to see because negativity has become so habitual. The essential ingredient is identification. Ouspensky says, “Negative emotions depend on identification.” An unpleasant event can occur without becoming a negative emotion. But with identification, instead of observing irritation, I become irritated. Instead of experiencing an emotion, the emotion becomes “I.”
Recently someone sent me an email that implied they did not like something I had written. This started an oscillation between self deprecation and irritation. Within minutes I was defending myself in an imaginary conversation while trying to decide what the other person “really meant,” and if I was “at fault.” The message took thirty seconds to read, but I kept the emotions alive for hours. The event was no longer causing my irritation and self doubt—I was. We allow negative emotions to perpetuate—and they are contagious.
If one lets go of negative emotions, one lets go of the lower self. — The Teacher
Gurdjieff therefore emphasized the tools of non-identification and non-expression of negative emotions. This does not mean suppression. If I am furious but force myself to smile while continuing an imaginary argument internally, the identification continues. The effort is to be present to the emotion without feeding, justifying, or expressing it mechanically.
The non-expression of negative emotions is not suppression, but transformation into divine presence. — The Teacher
Negative emotions are also an enormous energy leak. A few minutes of anger can leave us exhausted. We may feel we lack energy for self-remembering or inner work while continually spending that energy on complaints, worry, imagination, and inner considering. Ouspensky points out that we remain attached to negative emotions largely through “habit.” We know their taste. We have practiced them all our lives and we do not realize that they drain the energy we need for awakening.
Ouspensky recounts an interesting story in the book, In Search of the Miraculous, about being awake. While with Gurdjieff in Finland, Ouspensky temporarily entered an unusually heightened state of consciousness. His perceptions and thoughts became more vivid; he could think in ways ordinarily unavailable to him. Yet instead of simply enjoying this awakening, he found its intensity increasingly uncomfortable.
Finally, he asked Gurdjieff, “How can this be got rid of? I cannot bear it anymore.”
Gurdjieff replied, “Do you want to go to sleep?”
“Certainly not,” Ouspensky answered.
“Then what are you asking about? This is what you wanted, make use of it. You are not asleep at this moment!”
We may imagine that awakening will immediately feel great and natural. But sleep is what is natural and familiar to us because we have practiced it most of our lives. We are accustomed to the coarse energies of irritation, anxiety, self-pity, and imagination. Finer energies may initially feel unfamiliar and even difficult to bear. Years ago, after having dinner with my Teacher, some of us would gather afterward and animatedly share our observations, often laughing and talking excitedly. We did not realize that, in doing so, we were dissipating some of the higher hydrogens we had received in our Teacher’s presence. We were not yet accustomed to these finer energies and did not know how to contain them.
Our work, then, is not only to practice non-identification with negative emotions and refrain from their mechanical expression, but also to become increasingly familiar with the finer qualities of energy that become available to us as our work deepens.
As we continue to observe ourselves and the many different flavors of negative emotions the question is not, “How can I stop having negative emotions?” But “Can I observe the negativity and withdraw my permission?” Can I catch the moment of identification before resentment becomes “me?” Can I remain present long enough to experience another possibility?
Most of us have spent a lifetime becoming habituated to the energies of sleep. Awakening requires patiently becoming familiar with finer energies and the states they bring.
Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
— Walt Whitman
The Appeal, attributed to Titian, Giorgione, and Sebastiano del Piombo, 1500
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