Quaremead, Ugley, March 3, I946
COMMENTARY ON ACCEPTANCE OF ONESELF



Someone asked recently: "Is self-observation a moment of accepting oneself or does that come afterwards?" Self-observation is different from accepting oneself. The point about self-observation is that it must be uncritical. It is through the work of Observing 'I' that we begin to awaken to what we really are and see our contradictions. Owing to the fact that we are many and that our level of Being is characterized by multiplicity of 'I's and so by lack of unity-lack of Real 'I' -we live in fragments which are not joined together and never clearly see that this is the case. So we are, without seeing it, all very difficult and contradictory. To-night I wish to speak about acceptance. Acceptance comes after the work of uncritical Observing 'I'. Self-observation is not acceptance but what self-observation does is to present you with a fuller consciousness of yourself and, through the new material that it has collected in its special memory, you have to come to the question of acceptance that all these things are true of you. There is however a curious state in us all owing to which we do not accept ourselves. It is a curious state because we may know something about ourselves but will not admit it to ourselves. I t does not belong to our general estimate of ourselves, to what we accept about ourselves, and one reason for this is that the action of False Personality with its picture of what we pretend we are like prevents this clear insighted acceptance from taking place. This is part of our hypnotic sleep. Here comes in the activity of self-justifying. But at the root of the whole problem lies this question of the hypnotic sleep of Man, which is kept up by buffers. Buffers prevent us from seeing contradictions and so prevent us from awakening from sleep. Buffers replace Real Conscience. If we had Real Conscience we would see and fed all sides of ourselves together. Such a state would completely destroy False Personality and all forms of imagination that contribute to its strength. We would become simpler, nicer. We all have buffers in every part of a centre but do not see them. Buffers take the place of Conscience, of Consciousness. As long as we are well-buffered we get through life fairly easily and have a good sense of our worth, Yet if buffers were suddenly destroyed in us we would go mad. Now it is only through the new memory that forms itself around Observing 'I' that we can begin gradually to see contradictions and become simpler. I spoke 

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some time ago about the dark side of us, the side that we do not properly admit into our consciousness and both know about and do not. Mr. O. once said: "We see only one half of things." 'We have to accept this dark side. It does not seem to correspond to our estimate of ourselves. Self-observation is compared, as we all know, with a ray of light let in to our inner darkness. So we gradually find that We are not what we thought or imagined. This is the beginning of self-change. We gradually find that Imaginary 'I' does not fit us properly. We are trying to be something that we are not and this produces a psychological inner strain. We do not correspond to ourselves. Here the idea of False Personality comes in. You say, for example: "Thank God, I am not like that publican." You may remember the parable. If you say this you are lying to yourself through the action of False Personality which always lies to you and always seeks to be superior to others. You are like that publican. You are no better and no worse than that publican. How can a person gain any peace, any inner balance, if all the time he is saying in so many words: "God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get"? And imagine calling in God who is defined as "living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Heb. IV I2.) Whatever we may understand by God, we may be quite sure that we can hide nothing from this supreme force of consciousness and that all our buffers, all Our' pictures, our pretences, all our inner lies, and everything to do with False Personality, all this is nothing but so much dirt. As we are, we live on one side of a circle. We live in the front 0I' the back. So we cannot walk round the full circle of Being. We only admit part of our Being at a time. Mr. O. said we roust see both sides together. Because we live in a half circle of ourselves, and the other half is buffered off and not accepted in consciousness, we are easily upset. Do you think there is anything t hat we can be accused of that is not to some extent true? I cannot believe that a man who has become conscious of the full circle of himself would lose anything save the valueless things of False Personality. Would not this give such a man a greater inner stability? Such a man would no longer have buffers-and let me remind you here that once a buffer is destroyed it can never re-form itself. I fancy that such a man would never be rendered useless by anything that was said to him, that might in another man offend his self-Love, his vanity, his pride, and produce endless hatreds and recriminations and jealousies. When people talk to me about their private difficulties and their hidden life I do not find anything astonishing because I have learned trough this Work that all these things are also in me and that it is useless pretending they are not. Do you remember that the other person ""ho prayed said: "God be merciful to me a sinner," and it was said: "This man went down to his house justified rather than the other." 
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Notice, not self-justified, but justified of God. No one can feel his own nothingness unless he accepts this other half of the circle. Then he will feel no illusions about himself and in a quite strange way he will feel at peace. He will feel stronger, not weaker, and it is than that he will be shewn what he has really to work at and transform because he is then no longer building on the sand of false personality.


1 Maurice Nicoll
"Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky" vol 3