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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 thatit 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 thing

that is, it is False Personality. Hesaid 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 whatwe have been taught is right or wrong. He said that Acquired Conscience

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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 allself-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 arestudying 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 underhimself. 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 whenthey 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 withany kind of discrimination and understanding who reads the Gospels

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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

themselves

to 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 observethat 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 Work

the second line of work. And then what does loveof 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 wishto kill him. A state ofobjective 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 loveis used in the Gospels in a special way. It is conscious love, conscious

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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 takesplace 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, cannotdo 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?"