COMMENTARY ON FALSE PERSONALITY AND SELF-LOVE

Questions are asked at different times in which the term "self-love" is used. I have explained that this term "self-love" is not used in this system of teaching and when I use it myself I have usually added that it is not a technical Work expression. In the early days of the Work in London we often discussed among ourselves why this word was not used and I remember someone saying that perhaps it was because it was either a worn out word or it did not contain any clear meaning. On one occasion, at a private talk among a few of us, Mr. Ouspensky said that if we could find another term for it, it might be of some use to describe False Personality. Various words were suggested such as "self-esteem", "self-admiration", "self-importance", and others, but when the term "self-liking" was suggested, he said that perhaps it came nearest to what he had in mind. He added that the whole question lay in the emotional reactions of False Personality in a man or woman. He said man, or woman, must be shaken to their depths to get rid of False Personality. We are easily offended and upset because False Personality is our feeling of ourselves and it is an imaginary thing, an acquired artificial mask, a pretended person that we like to imagine ourselves to be and are not. This False Personality takes itself as a unity and this is how Imaginary 'I' arises; it borrows, so to speak, the idea that it is a real person and so says 'I'. The keeping up of the False Personality takes a great deal of force. It makes us internally consider: it exhausts us. Mr. Ouspensky said that the False Personality always justifies itself in order to maintain its existence. This wastes force. In regard to the False Personality, which in my case is called Nicoll, he said that one has to be able to see that it is not really 'V. He said it was composed of a certain grouping of rolls in centres and groups of 'I's which may shift from time to time in regard to their composition according to the environment in which one happens to be, and yet at the same time it always has the same quality of falseness, of something kept upsome invention. A man, for example, may amongst lower class people assume a certain pretence of himself and amongst higher class people assume another pretence of himself, and yet at the same time it is all the same thingthat is, it is False Personality. He said that we have to come to the point of being able to say to ourselves internally "this is not really I". He said that this inner separationin my case from Nicollwas the most important point in the Work, and was connected with making the Personality as a whole passive. He said that the study of False Personality was almost a life task and eventually could only be understood through the development of inner taste which led into Real Conscience. He said that Real Conscience apart from Acquired Conscience was one of our greatest internal senses, and that unless it had been given us, no one could awaken. Acquired Conscience is, of course, merely a matter of how we have been brought up and what we have been taught is right or wrong. He said that Acquired Conscience

is different in every nation. It could be anything. It was a matter of imitation. Some people are taught by imitation and education that it is right to have many wives and others are taught that it is right to have one wife, and so on, in a thousand different ways, but Real Conscience is the same in all people, but it is buried beneath the surface of the False Personality. He said further that no one of course could ever act without some admixture of selfthat is, in the sense of self-interest but that usually it was all self-interest. People did not externally consider. He said that we are told to love our neighbours as ourselves and that one meaning is that we could not do things completely without self-interest or self-liking, but that half of it should be self and half love of neighbour. I asked him to speak about the stages of emotional development that is, the development of the Emotional Centre to its highest receptive powersas it was formulated in the Gospelsnamely, "love of oneself, love of one's neighbour, and love of God". It is recorded that Christ, when he was asked by one of the Pharisees which was the great commandment replied: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself". (Matt. XXII 37.) It is only possible to attempt to give a summary of what Mr. O.'s answer was. He began by saying: "False Personality loves itself only and all that flatters it or agrees with it. Unless a man can find something to love greater than himself he can never modify this inner state. Nowadays," he said, "people have got a very strange view of the Universe and take it all for granted as if it created itself and see nothing marvellous in it. How can a thing create itself? Scientists ascribe every discovery to themselves, not understanding that they are studying a Universe already given them which existed long before they were born. They even call stars by their own names. It is absurd. But False Personality ascribes everything to itself. In more ancient times when a man had sense of the miraculous and worshipped God as the Creator, both of himself and of the Universe, he was emotionally in a far better state than exists nowadays in the average human outlook. His understanding was better. He could stand under himself. In regard to what is said in the Gospels about love, you must realize that this is said in a very big sense, on a very big scale, and has meaning within meaning in it. These meanings destroy False Personality because when they begin to be understood by a man or a woman then the sense of the smallness of themselves in comparison with the great mystery of Creation begins to affect them emotionally. All greater emotions destroy the small self-emotions which arise from the narrow contracted sphere of the False Personality and its own minute self-liking and self-importance". He said, in so many words: "You know already that all sayings and parables in the Gospels contain immense density of meaning which reveals itself as we change in level of Being. To argue about whether Christ existed or not as an historical fact has little sense. In fact He did, and carried out his role deliberately. The point is that any man with any kind of discrimination and understanding who reads the Gospels

for the first time knows at once that these brief records, these words, are completely different from anything that has ever been written since that time. But people read the Gospels mechanically; they do not understand what they read. They read about the Pharisees and Christ's continual condemnation of them, but they do not see that it applies to themselvesto their own False Personality. The Pharisee in you is your False Personality; it is always pretending to be what it is not. It is the Pharisee living in you. People even think sometimes that it is easy to understand that one must love God with all one's heart, with all one's soul, and with all one's mind, and imagine they do. They do not understand that this means first making Personality passivea long task. They must give up completely the idea that they are their own creators, realize practically, by blow after blow, that something infinitely greater than themselves exists and that they are nothing. The trouble is that they think they understand what Christ said, and even quite religious people profess that they love God and do not observe that they insist on their own opinions and are a mass of False Personality so that really in the long run they love themselves". He added: "For example, they are liable to judge and condemn everyone who behaves in a way they do not like. That is, they hate in secret. Now what does "love of neighbour" mean? Who is one's neighbour? Some people perhaps think it means the person who happens to live next door. Psychologically it has to do with those nearest you in Being, those near you in understanding, in what they seek, or who are going along the same road. That is why we must make a conscious relation to those in the Workthe second line of work. And then what does love of self mean? Which self? We have many selves. And finally, how can we understand what "love of God" means? It is something tremendous, something we may imagine we know about, but cannot know yet. Yes, people say they love God and then go and kill one another or hate each other, or talk evilly. How can that be love of God? Perhaps No. 7 man knows what "love of God" meansthat is, a man belonging to the highest development possible to Mancertainly ordinary mechanical Man cannot know what it means. He may love his own opinion of God, the God he supposes he worships, but that is subjective, and if someone disagrees with him, he will be angry and even persecute him and wish to kill him. A state of objective consciousness (i.e., the fourth state of consciousness) would have to be reached before the meaning of Christ's words became fully understandable. All we can say of ourselves is that we do not know how to love others or God. That is the first thing. We must see that it is so. What we call love can turn to dislike, suspicion, jealousy or hate in a moment. Love means positive emotion and we do not know positive emotions. Their characteristic is that they never turn into opposites because they include all opposites. We only know emotions that turn readily into their opposites, and do so often in a flash. We call it love but it is not love. It is self-love. The term love is used in the Gospels in a special way. It is conscious love, conscious

relation, not mechanical love, that is meant. That is clear enough. When a man begins to realize he cannot love as he is, then at least he is nearer truth. He is no longer a fool. He has at least got rid of some imagination, some part of False Personality, got rid of some make-up, and so is nearer the possibility of conscious love. What passes as love in mechanical life is chiefly imagination. What people call love is usually satisfied self-love. To love is to work. Love is work." Some people, of course, disagreed with these words and were sure they knew what love was even though they were unhappy or sad in appearance, I noticed. At another time Mr. O. said that we could not form any conception of a "development of love" without a development of consciousness. He said: "This Work speaks mainly of a possible development of consciousness in Man; as Man is he is not yet properly conscious. Love must become conscious, not passion. Man is asleep. Everything in him is mixed with dreams, with imagination, and with negative emotions, to which he clings most of all. Most of his life takes place in his imagination. He is subjective and especially governed by False Personalitythis false person he has to obey which is not himself. He cannot see anything as it is. But a man who reaches the highest state of consciousness is in a quite different state. While in that state he sees what everything really is. He is no longer in personal subjective meanings. He is objective and so universal. He can include all things in himself. This happens when a man becomes conscious in the highest or most real part of himthat is, in "Real I" in him. Such a man would understand what love of God is. But a man living in False Personality in which only small one-sided self-emotions occur, cannot do so. How could such a man, so prejudiced, so small-souled, so selfish, so negative, understand what love of God isa man who even looks down on others if they do not belong to the same club, and utterly rejects a man of a different religion or nation?"