Lesson 3
As we have been doing the work for the past two weeks we are probably, by now, beginning to notice that there are various and sundry thoughts racing through the mind that say things like this, “There isn’t anything worthwhile in this, drop the whole thing.” Some self-improving “I” comes along and says, “You’re really a mess, I’m a mess, this is terrible, I don’t want to find out these things about me” — that really one “should” do a great amount of suddenly changing the whole thing. Or another one says, “What’s the use, this doesn’t change anything, it’s just making it worse.” Now all of these are very natural occurrences and they happen to everyone who takes up the study of self and to have self-knowing. All these doubts etc. have come along because one begins to discover certain things that are not exactly pleasing and not in keeping with vanity, especially as we write them down and looked at them. But this is essential and it is necessary. The first thing is to be knowing self as to what happens. We will be working on knowing self that the self may undergo a transformation. But if one doesn’t know the self there is no hope of a transformation. One may hide the self, may keep it under cover and be blind to it, but it still destroys. So to bring it to awareness and be conscious of it and pay attention to it, while it may not be very pleasant at this moment, it definitely has a great value. So let’s continue our work.
We’ll start this week with completing the picture we started on last week, of the picture of man as we find him in his conditioned state. We had the basic idea that the whole purpose of living was to be non-disturbed and we had four ideas of improving the self in order to actualize this non-disturbed state.
1. Complain. The first one was to complain which didn’t work and hasn’t worked so far.
2. Sticking up for rights. The second one was sticking up for rights, which hasn’t worked so well.
3. Trying to please people. It sometimes works but it creates an inner havoc. Then we looked at the one that:
4. One must believe and do as one is taught by one’s authorities, whether in newspapers, books, television, what someone says, or by some authority figures that we might run into in our affairs.
We’ve been writing down how we practiced each of these. Now the next decision that the infant makes is
5. It is important to be different.
In other words, the way I’ve been getting along up to this state has been quite a conflict, so “I should be different.” So here comes the effort to put on a front. It is a thing to do so people will approve of me, give me attention and that I will look good, that I can approve of self. But it’s all on the outside. It is not due to an inner state of really discovering that “here is a way to behave, a thing to do,” but it is to put on a front to impress people. This has been referred to as the Scribe and the Pharisee, the one to put on the front. By trying to appear to be different we build barriers over these four we looked at for the past few days and we are usually unaware of how they work. We give them other names. We don’t describe them as we have, very bluntly, in this picture we are building now.
So we have on the B side, above the one that says PLEASE everybody, that IT IS IMPORTANT TO BE DIFFERENT. This is, of course, different behavior and the person is trying, but every so often one of the others reacts. One has an explosion of temper or one has an explosion of resentment or one has a fit of jealousy or whatever, but they will continue to appear. Then, of course, we only give those other names and we try to describe them differently as well as appearing to be different. But this doesn’t bring any peace to the person’s being, and the child is probably is 7 or 8 years old now and so he makes another decision. Maybe he makes it earlier or later but the time element is unimportant because we’re talking about the person with all of them now, anyway. Over on the A side he comes up with another very solid decision which we will put opposite to the one That it is important to appear to be different. In this one he has discovered that it’s really everybody else’s fault that he wasn’t always different. So he says that the whole worthwhile thing here is to establish what is to blame, so we will just simply put BLAMING here.
6. Blaming (It is important that everybody else be different) (On the A side.)
Now when a person blames somebody he tries to get them to straighten out so that they will do what they ought to do and then, of course, “everything would be fine for me.” And I can go on in the illusion that I am quite different because there would be nothing to upset the appearing to be different by putting on this particular mask or behaving differently. There would be no challenges if everybody else would just be different. So we build quite solid accounts against everybody we blame. Now this is a very fundamental School idea, that we build accounts. In other words, we’ve established blame and we say that the person owes me an apology or they owe me damages or they owe me to behave differently. This, the School idea says, “This is the burden that every human carries.” It is what ages a person. It is what gradually disintegrates the person over a period of time. One big aspect of it is the “Accounts Receivable” we have against all people. It is blaming and that they should do differently. So the infant decides that if everybody else were just different then I would be just as peaceful, pleased and happy as I can be. But they’re not different so they’re to blame and they do owe me.
So we now have six basic ideas of self-improvement and the big ideal; so we have a picture of man, each of us, as we are in everyday life until we have studied ourselves and observed what goes on for a considerable length of time. This time is not indefinite. We’ll be doing it in a reasonable number of months or weeks but it is not going to be gone tonight. We do want to be aware of it; we want to be conscious that it is going on.
We will add two more sheets of paper to observe now. Write down when “I ought to be different” every time one notices “I should have been different” or “One is putting on a particular front or fancying up the story a little bit,” write it down. Again, not for other people but for one’s personal use. On the other side we will put down all “The people I blame” and what they would have to do in order to pay the debt. Now someone no doubt has apologized to you many times. Did that end the hurt or are you still nursing it a little bit? Recall the incident and see what kind of a feeling arises within you. Someone cheated you and then they apologized or they forgot your birthday or forgot the anniversary or promised to take you to a party and they forgot all about it and didn’t arrive until hours later. They apologized and said how sorry they were. Let's recall those incidents and see if there is still a decided feeling that they “owe me,” they “mistreated me,” a hurt feeling. Now we have six sheets of paper that we are keeping up with. We won’t see all the incidents but we can certainly add a little bit to them each day, and each bit we add is knowing a lot about this conditioning that is controlling ones existence, and if we may say, is destroying that existence.
First, it is in conflict, is it not? A against B and B against A. The real person with a will is not even there. That is myth we read about up to this point. Maybe someday we will have a will. Maybe all the conditioning can be gone. But at this moment we are only interested in knowing about the conditioning and watch it work. Because without being aware of this conditioning and how it works we wouldn’t even believe it’s there.
It usually comes as quite a shock to any of us to discover what is really within. It is as though we have a lovely home and we suddenly found it was infested, almost to the point of destruction, by termites. We’d be quite shocked. If we never find out about the termites we wouldn’t do anything about it until the house fell in and then it will be too late. While we might see all these things of conditioning as termites and they are slowly but surely sapping the strength of one’s being we have every reason to observe them.
Starting with a new picture, we will talk about expectations. We will draw a picture of how expectation works. Take a sheet of paper and on the long side of it draw a straight line. Write under that line, “Expectations based on the ideal.” Remember that the ideal is to regain the non-disturbed state by gaining pleasure and escaping pain on all levels. We want pleasures of physical comforts, physical sensations. We want the pleasure of having favorable attention, approval, of feeling important and being able to control other people. We want to avoid physical pain, we want to avoid being ignored or rejected, disapproval, and avoid the sense of being inferior because things don’t happen like I want them to. People just don’t do what I want them to. So now we have expectations based on the ideal, the first decision, the one that’s dark, drawn over in the picture of man as he is in his conditioned state.
Now everything that we do is based on an expectation. You don’t start to do anything unless you felt it was true and valuable. Therefore it is an expectation that it will work out the way we see it. Of course, what is valuable to us in the conditioned state is to be non-disturbed, and what is true is that this action will bring it about whether it be any one of the six decisions or something else in our everyday affairs. We wouldn’t put a key in a lock unless we expected it to unlock. We would not go out and get in the car unless we expected the car to start and to travel. We wouldn’t put ingredients in a pan to cook unless we expected that it would cook and someone would eat it and enjoy it etc. We also expect that every thought we have of gratification will be fulfilled. We expect that if we complain that everybody will get with it and do what we want them to. We expect that if we stick up for our rights that everybody will see our rights and do them. However, it doesn’t usually happen this way and we are usually unconscious of the expectation. Let’s make the expectations conscious. Write down on a sheet of paper, “These are my expectations” and “They are based on.” We will see how many of them are based on the ideal that the whole purpose of living is to be non-disturbed. Now there will be others based on the actual events of everyday existence that are not related to our inner state such as: A door will open when I put the key in it. The car will start when I turn the key. The stove will get hot when I turn on the thing. The adding machine will add correctly etc.
But we will want to keep up with all of them, “I am expecting this.” Then we will notice that in many of the things in interpersonal relationships one is disappointed because one had the expectation based on the ideal. That was the ideal that everyone is fully conscious, that they know what is right, proper and justifiable but they go on and do wrong anyway. But we expect that they all know what I want, what is good and why I put value on it and they will behave accordingly. So we will find many disappointments. We will put on our sheet below the expectations, “My disappointments.” Write down all the times we are disappointed this week and in following weeks. We will look for our disappointments until we begin to observe them. When we’ve been disappointed, we will see what ideal we had in mind. Now maybe the ideal was that in some interpersonal relationship a person will remember my birthday but they have other things to do, and they forget it. We are disappointed and decide that they deliberately ignored me.
This is being ignored or rejected and it is a pain. Now when one is disappointed one feels hurt. So you will have hurt feelings or a feeling of being ignored or rejected or disapproved of. So we will put another little heading that says “Hurts.” We have “Disappointments and Hurts.” After hurt we always look for “Blame” when we are conditioned. We will put “What I blame for my disappointments and hurts.” Now we will find that this is where the anger, guilt, fear, insecurity or the inferiority comes about. So just make marks under those as we go down the line. Now we are going down to the end of the sheet. We started over with our long line that said, “Expectations based on ideals.” Then there is “Disappointments.” A little arrow leads down to “Hurt” and a little arrow below that is “Looking for blame” and a little below that is “Anger, Guilt, Fear, Insecurity or Inferiority.” Now this is a little diagram of the inter workings of the self, of the conditioned awareness. We want to be aware of its function and how it works. We are not trying to “change” it; we are trying to become “acquainted” with it. We will begin to notice the accumulation of the number of times of anger. There may be very few, they may be slight or there may be several, some strong, some weak and some we may only call annoyances, some make us make us mad, but we will have this series of numbers. We’ll have the ones under “Anger,” “Guilt,” that’s regret, “I wish I hadn’t done that” or “I shouldn’t have done that” etc. Fear is when something is not right to us but we don’t know what to blame it on, it’s just something. Insecurity is the inability to control the situation.
Under these four and their many marks under them draw a broad “V” and write the word “Stress.” Stress is what the body reacts to. A burn is a stress, a sudden change in temperature is a stress, a sudden weight dropped on you or a blow from a car behind is a stress. We are interested in the inner stresses, the ones that originate from the inner state of being disappointed because the expectation of the ideal was not realized. Stress is a state of chemical imbalance and neuromuscular tension. Whenever we are angry, guilty, fearful, or feel very insecure we are telling X that we are in an emergency. X sends the message down to charge the body up with tremendous energy by the use of various hormones from the ductless glands — adrenaline, thyroxin, pituitary extract and a big charge of glycogen from the liver to be used for fuel. So one is all charged up for a state of emergency, a violent physical challenge. But there is no violent physical challenge. We only have our “feelings hurt” because we were disappointed in something that we had felt was the ideal that would make me comfortable and non-disturbed in some way or other.
So now we have chemical imbalance and neuromuscular tension. It has gone from the psychological to the physiological. This, of course, requires adaptation. We cannot continue in this state of having the body all charged up to fight or run and no fighting or running takes place. So X starts an adaptation to restore the chemical balance for the actual time, place and circumstance.
I’m sitting in a warm room on a soft divan and there is no physical violence in sight, but inside is seething turmoil, sometimes an accumulation of it. So then this adaptation takes one of two forms:
1. The most usual one is unusual cellular activity. A group of cells begin to do something they ordinarily don’t do in order to use up this mobilized and unreleased energy from the chemical imbalance and the neuromuscular tension from being angry, guilty, fearful, in other words being in an emergency.
Unusual cellular activity is known as a change in function, so some aspect of the body begins to function different. When it begins to function different there is always a change in sensation. Any change in sensation from the usual is called pain, fullness, stiffness, soreness, aching etc. Then, of course, that becomes an emergency because I was disappointed, suddenly feeling rough, I feel hurt, I am hurting all over, uncomfortable physically, and I begin to look for what’s the cause of that. Cause really means blame. So what’s to blame for this sensation, this change in functioning I am experiencing? It must be the flu, it must be cancer or it may be TB, no telling what it is, it’s something bad. Today it would probably be diagnosed as hypoglycemia — that’s in these days. It’s a scary sounding word so it’s probably terrible, but it really means about the same as telling you that you had ancestors. However it is frightening, and so more energy goes in and it must be adapted to so more cells are drawn into it. There is more change in function and more sensation. And if this keeps up long enough these tissue cells that are involved in the unusual cellular activity break down or they are altered in some form or another — much like a callous on the hand is due to stress of friction. As long as that friction is there, there is going to be a change in tissue. If the friction quits the callous goes away in a little while.
So one has a physical disability, a physical adaptation, really, and it is a perfectly normal adaptation to some stress. It is X’s way of restoring the body to health. It is an unusual function, unusual sensation and tissue cell alteration and breakdown. If one understands it and doesn’t get excited about it, it’s over with very quickly. If one gets excited about it, doesn’t understand it, it goes on and on. Chronic because there is a continual cycle of being concerned about the symptom, being fearful of them, which builds up more chemical imbalance or neuromuscular tension and requires more adaptation of unusual cellular activity, unusual sensation and tissue cell alteration or breakdown. So really one could say that having expectation based on the ideal, which is an illusion, is the struggle towards the illusion, which is the disintegrating factor in man — the struggle towards an illusion, the illusion that there is an ideal where I could exist by some means without having any disturbance whatsoever.
2. The other way of adapting is unusual behavior. One goes on a binge, one gets drunk, and one throws a wild temper tantrum. In extreme cases people go on killing binges, robbing binges, drug binges etc.
Now for a very practical beautiful something to do. Write down when one has the anger, guilt, fear, insecurity and write the date. Then observe what happens within 72 hours. Usually the adaptation doesn’t follow immediately. If it did we would have all caught on to it a long time ago. We’ve already calmed down from the anger, fear, guilt, but we don’t get the symptom because it takes X a little time to notice that the body is in a state of chemical imbalance and to see if you are going to do something and use it up. If you don’t then he has to adapt to it to dissipate that unreleased energy. So the symptoms occur from 12 to 72 hours later. Somewhere between the time it occurred, the anger, guilt, fear, insecurity, and the time of the adaptation of the unusual cellular activity and the unusual sensations or possibly an increase in the severity of an old chronic cycle of adaptation, somewhere between 1 hour and 72 hours.
So keep track and we will begin to understand symptoms. Write down, “What symptom did I have between 1 hour and 72 hours” after those little marks one makes under anger, guilt, fear and insecurity. As you understand this and see the relationship you begin to realize that all symptoms are normal adaptations, X’s way of restoring the body to heath, to chemical balance, to natural tone instead of a state of stress. It relieves stress. If one sees this, understand it and is thankful for the adaptation you will find that they’re all gone very quickly. Keep records and you will understand and cease to be alarmed at symptoms. You will be thankful for them because you see they are the expression of a loving spirit to restore its body to normal, usual, creative functioning in which you are really unaware of the body, only that it’s a great, valuable and beautiful instrument.
Copyright © 1973 by Rhondell. All rights reserved. This material is for an individual student’s personal use; it is not to be duplicated or loaned to another.
