PICTURES AND IMAGINATION I

We spoke last time of imagination and pictures of oneself. It was said that as long as pictures of oneself are dominant no change of oneself is possible in that direction. The reason is simple enough and need scarcely be explained. If you have a picture of yourself as being a person who never tells a lie, then naturally you will never notice that you lie. Your picture of yourself as being the kind of person who never lies will satisfy you however much you actually lie. Now here is something that has to become a personal experience as regards the practical psychology taught in this Work. You have to experience yourself in a new way. Nevertheless this teaching about pictures is little understood, even in theory. One reason is that people do not realize that they have pictures of themselves and that they live by their means a great part of their lives. Pictures are formed out of the powerful force of imagination and govern us all and can replace the actual by the imagined. As you know, imagination can easily satisfy the centres. We should all know something of this by now. It is not merely that we have imaginary pictures of ourselves, but we have them of others as well. And this is why it seems to us often that the Work is brutal. Some older philosophers have asked whether everything is not imagination. The Work says that the human family is hypnotized and asleep through the power of imagination, but that there are things in us that are not imagination. The curious thing is that much that the world thinks is imagination is not, and vice versa, from the standpoint of the Work. For example, many think that this Work and all esoteric ideas are imagination and that the aims and affairs of life certainly are real. So people live in this century of abnormal war and wonder why it is all as it is. Can we see that all is as it is because the human family is asleep and all the horrors are done by people who are asleep? I remember Mr. Ouspensky once saying in connection with this idea of the Work that several writers have tried to express it, dimly realizing the situation, and he mentioned the early work of Wells, called "In the Days of the Comet". This phantasy, as the critics called it, speaks of a cloud that passed over the earth and made everyone awaken so that people all suddenly asked themselves what on earth they were all doing-they were at war at the time. It was regarded as an amusing idea. Pictures of ourselves are formed from imagination and keep us asleep. Everyone has a certain number of pictures that take charge of him or her, blinding people to themselves, making them believe that they are what they are not. This is the action of a picture. All of us live mostly in pictures of ourselves. Now in studying any one thing in oneself from the Work angle, we should connect it with the main teachings of this Work. Suppose that you think the idea that Mankind is asleep is all nonsense, then you will never be able to see the pictures of yourself that dominate you. You will never be able to accept the idea that you are largely imagination, largely imaginary, and that the modicum of what is real in you is very small. In order to understand better, more deeply, we must continually realize and re-realize our position on this earth, where so much that is obviously evil and certainly

unnecessary continually takes place and will continuously take place unless we awaken. A terrific fight is necessary before this power of imagination can be loosened, and a great deal of thought and trial and experiment and failure and quietness and patience. Now let us try to get some superficial idea of what 'pictures of oneself' mean. You see a person walking along looking rather important, smiling a little, nodding, suddenly bending down to smell a flower, gazing round to see if anyone is watching, and so on. This person is in the power of a picture. Or again, you see a person striding along, looking serious, frowning, ignoring others, sombre, as if supporting the Universe. This person is in the power of a picture. Or you see a person doing as it were his best not to be a gentleman, a hail-fellow well-met person, who laughs at everyone who has some gentlemanly picture. This person is equally in the power of a picture. Pictures of every kind exist. You can have a picture of yourself as a good democrat, or a Tory, or a gentleman, or a revolutionary Republican, or a tough guy, or an aristocrat, and so on. They are all pictures: they are all imagination. Behind all these pictures the real person stands, but the real person never stands in his or her pictures. A question was once asked: "Are pictures of oneself not sometimes real, true?" The answer was: "No-never." If you have a picture of yourself as a tough guy you are not one, and vice versa. I have often thought about this and I advise you to do so. What is genuine and what is imaginary can never meet. They are two different orders of experience on different planes and how long we take even to begin to see what depth of meaning lies here. The imaginary man and the real ll)an are as different as the imaginary woman and the real woman. We live, however, chiefly in imagination, and meet via imagination, and a very exhausting nuisance it is, for everyone concerned. However, it all happens in the only way it can, because we do not see these pictures that govern us and interfere with everything. Only being conscious can alter mechanicalness. The destruction of pictures is not possible unless something else has begun to form itself behind them that we can hold on to. This comes from long and conscious self-observation which on one side is debunking oneself or 'seeing through' oneself into something rather odd and strange lying behind. I fancy pictures may change a little according to one's age, but their power remains. Now people often say, and sometimes emphatically, "Well, granted I have pictures of myself, what ought I to be?" This is certainly a question that shows a wrong approach. If you can begin to see a picture, if you become conscious of it, if you begin to dislike it, if you try to get away from it, to separate from its hypnotic power, if you begin to see you are not at all like that picture but invented, then the change that results will be exactly what you need. You will fit into what has always been waiting for you, and what you went out of long ago as a child. Let me remind you that so much of the Work consists in getting rid of things, of stopping things, of not-doing. For instance, if you have some well-developed systems of negative emotion or depression in you, it is useless to say: "Well, what should I do instead?" It is necessary to see and continually separate from the hypnotic power of these welldeveloped systems of negative emotion. You may be sure that something else will

gradually take their place, if you clear away the dirt. You may feel new feelings that you could not have imagined. But the task is that the dirt must be cleared away to expose the new. That is where practical work on oneself lies. It is not a question of" What should I do?" but "What should I not do?" It is the other way round-at least, in the main. One exception, and the greatest of all, is that one must try to remember oneself-at least once a day, and deliberately. To give ourselves this shock, the First Conscious Shock, is a thing we can try to do. It is possible. But we have no time. There is always the roar of things, the torrent of thoughts and worries. There is always something to worry about. Yet Self-Remembering is not going against the flood-stream of inner and outer things. It is raising oneself-not contending. Contending is another kind of effort. Self Remembering is a non-identifying with oneself-for an instant-as if one were merely acting and had forgotten. When one remembers oneself one forgets oneself. One is no longer in a picture. However it is possible to form a picture of oneself remembering oneself. Just notice here how you work and what is the quality of your effort. To return to pictures: occasionally pictures are in abeyance and something odd and strange emerges. I remember it was said of someone "she is very nice when she forgets herself". It is often said that a person is nice when "you get her alone." Men sometimes relax. They are no longer in uniform. These uniforms, these dresses that we wear, belong to the side of pictures. "I am at least married," or, say, "I am at least respectable" : these phrases belong to the picture of oneself as being a particular sort of person, having a label. "I am an educated man," "I am an educated woman," and so on, or say, "I am of ancient family," or "I am a self-made man": all these phrases belong to this picture of oneself just as do the phrases "I am a wronged person," or "I am a genius." Owing to the multiplicity of one's being it is very difficult to know, to feel, what one is. This is because (I) we have lost touch with Essence and (2) because Essence is not developed. It is a great labour to feel or know even the beginning of oneself. It takes a long time-this discovery of oneself. But it is always different from what one imagined. People lead all sorts of invented lives owing to pictures. We dress ourselves in pictures which often to others are laughable-but not to ourselves. It is sometimes extraordinary to notice a person active in some picture. One wonders why the person cannot see the picture. This is very simple. What is not simple is to see that you yourself are a picture. Pictures are formed from what you have read at an impressionable age. Novels of a period often form the pictures of a generation, either in one way or in the opposite way by reaction. One identifies with the hero or heroine or one tries to be different. The stage also contributes to pictures. I remember behaving like Lewis Waller for a week until it was forcibly pointed out to me. Films give rise to obvious pictures often in quite nice people. They begin to look, speak, in another way. All this is hypnotism. However, it is more deeply due to the lack of any real centre of gravity in ourselves which renders us easily hypnotized. I have often been interested in the remark "I am a man who respects himself." This has given me many thoughts, even before I met this Work. However, it is a picture. Which self? I can understand a man respecting his Work "l"s but not himself. If we possessed real self-knowledge and if we began to come into the feeling of "Real I", I suppose we would never make any statement about the kind of people we are. Real

Being makes no statements about itself. It is. To be is not to imagine. It is what it is. However, having no Real I we have to make shift first and to keep up some picturessuch as that we are ideally happy and so on. Unfortunately we never see these pictures. They make us behave as we do. They act us. We do not act them. This is not a misfortune as long as we are not dissatisfied with ourselves and begin to desire some definite knowledge that can make our existence more real. People are satisfied by their pictures of themselves. A thick dark dull atmosphere is produced as a result but a very ordinary one. It is possible to dislike it and wish to come into a greater sincerity and more light. But this is not necessary for life-for cosmic' purposes. We strut about satisfied. Really we can expect nothing but what happens to us, under such circumstances, and there is nothing further to be said. There is your food, there is your money, there is your position, there is your job, there is your motor-car, and there are your pictures. It is all quite simple. But it has nothing to do with age-old esoteric psychology. It has nothing to do with the Work and the efforts it demands. You are encased in jelly. But this ''jelly" of life is hypnotism. One is transfixed in selfillusion. It is really a tragedy. Why is it a tragedy? Because all the time we are not doing anything actually belonging to us, we are not being anything we can be, we are not in the right place in our sense of ourselves-and so we are eventually discarded as useless experiments in self-evolution. Is this too harsh a statement? I think not, for first we must fulfill the function of a Good Householder. That is a definite and real possibility. Why? Because a self-satisfied person will say: "Why on earth should I alter my viewpoints, my thoughts, my outlook, my standards, once I have become a reasonably "Good Householder", a reasonably responsible and educated person?" Certainly. I often wonder why anyone should. Why leave Egypt and go out into the wilderness? If pictures of oneself are very strong, very profound, and so very much identified with, the idea is sheer nonsense. "Do you not know who I am?" This is a summation of all pictures of oneself. Yes, we all say this after a certain degree of insult. All the same, it is a tragedy. We crystallize out long before it is necessary. We keep on driving about in the carriage of our picture. We never discover ourselves. Is not this a tragedy? Instead we cling to and fasten on to our pictures of ourselves. I am quite certain that it is a tragedy. It is hypnotism. Do you think that when the Work says we are deliberately hypnotized on this Earth it means nothing? Why, if you begin to see pictures in yourself and to see how you have been identified with them all your life then you will know that you yourself have been actually hypnotized and shared in the general hypnotism. But to see how you yourself have suffered is exceptionally difficult. It is of course obvious that everyone else is suffering from hypnotism and that therefore everyone else is rather a fool or silly. But not oneself. No one thinks he is a fool. What you really think is this: "I am a lion, a genius, or an eagle, a remarkable, a fine person, an exceptional person, not in this particular and common way but in that subtle, unnoticed way, a violet not yet disclosed, a person not yet grasped and, in fact, a person who should never have been born into this soulless world". Yes, we all have such delicate false pictures without exception, but do not notice them. They furnish us with a great deal of satisfaction until there arise in us, when we begin to awaken, very powerful contrary forces that for a long time we cannot understand-that is, because we still cling to those ideas of ourselves, or that sense of ourselves, that are derived from our not realized pictures. Let the forces of growth and evolution act on you and if you have not yet seen at all what

stands in their way, you naturally suffer unnecessarily. You do not see what they are at in you, as long as you are accepting your pictures and not seeing them. But if you have begun the laborious task of removing your sense and meaning of yourself from these rather cheap pictures of yourself, these forces become infinitely full of meaning. Naturally, one cannot change if one clings to what one is. However this is what we do for many years-until at last we know that a turning-point has been reached.