The fourth way to nowhere

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other fellow to die. —Anon. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. —Matthew 5:44 One of the first exercises we were given in the SES was not to criticise. This seems odd when criticism is so normal in everyday life, and indeed constructive criticism is often essential. We even sometimes ask for it, then summon up the courage to listen in silence and take it, if we are strong enough. It is one way (mercifully not the only way) to learn and grow. What I think was meant by the exercise was rather to eschew criticism in the sense of mere negative commentary. There is a big difference, for example, between saying, “That child will never be a dancer because she’s too fat,” (a comment heard in relation to a girl rehearsing for an end of term performance) and what could reasonably have been said instead: “Look at her e

We tend to get absorbed into things—ideas, beliefs, feelings of personal injustice, why that person pushed into the queue while I was waiting in the sandwich shop, that the newspaper edited out the crucial sentence in my letter to the editor and made it worse by committing an apostrophe error, and so on. I am enjoying the cake so much I practically become the cake.  In order not to be swept along by events in this way a little objectivity is required. I am not a ball in a pin-ball machine. Avoiding identification, or at least being able to jump out of the system when finding oneself in a pin-ball machine, is about being a full human being. We don’t need to get involved in the idea of trying to be higher beings in order to see the sense of this.

I remember, fairly early on in my membership of the Fellowship, freeing myself just a little from a state of psychological imprisonment. In those days some meetings were held in a rented room above some shops in Cricklewood Broadway, North London. We were sitting in a circle in a rather plain room with grey wall-to-wall carpet. I remember the carpet because I was staring at it, not feeling able to make eye contact with anyone. Something that I had learned or absorbed made me realise that there was nothing to fear. I don’t remember exactly what freed me from the fear of looking up. Perhaps I understood, as I did later, that no-one was judging me, or if they were then it was not my problem.  The idea that someone is judging us is called in Ouspensky’s terminology, inner considering. Inner considering, that is, worrying about what other people think, or even what they might have thought as a result of some incident long ago and that they have since long forgotten, used to haunt me. It sti