16: Inner considering and external considering

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 still does occasionally, and I find myself saying some word out loud in connection with some memory of something which illustrates just what a socially-inept idiot I was (or imagine myself to have been) back then. This of course is an absurd way to spend any waking moments which might otherwise be employed in just observing the world go by and responding to it appropriately. Ouspensky draws attention to this waste of energy in connection with identification in general. 

One cure for it is self-remembering, plus the thought that no-one is thinking much about you because if they’re thinking about you at all they’re thinking about what you are thinking about them.

External considering is quite the opposite of inner considering, and is sometimes said to be the emotional aspect of self-remembering. It is being attentive to the needs of others. 

All kinds of subjective considerations can get in the way, such as doing or not doing what other people expect, or considerations of one’s own benefit, or assuaging guilt, or wanting acceptance. Self-remembering is a way of being aware of the needs of the present moment in a clean state of mind. Being aware of oneself as an actor makes it easier to step aside from one’s various identifications.

Again I am struck by something discordant about the Fellowship. Once I described to a visiting senior student an episode that had happened to me while queuing in a bank. I had noticed an old woman who was obviously having some difficulty standing in the queue, which was moving slowly. Inner considering held me back from offering her my place, because that meant breaking out of my shyness and attracting attention. In the end I did. I intended this as an illustration of the power of going against programming. However the senior student reacted quite forcefully that this was not the way. To the best of my understanding she objected to what she imagined was quite the opposite: me acting out of a mechanical sense of duty or obligation, feminine dominance (see later). I kept my counsel and did not defend myself, feeling that this was a misunderstanding. However the view that students should act against mechanical goodness on principle seemed to me at the time and seems to me now as illogical. If one would mechanically and automatically do the right thing, then do it, otherwise one is attempting what Gurdjieff said is impossible, conscious evil. Being conscious of your mechanical actions does not necessarily mean you should do something different. 

Let me state that more clearly. Refraining from doing the right thing because someone else might think it is mechanical, is stupid.