Unnecessary and Necessary Suffering
If the Fourth Way can indeed change our lives and make space for a clearer, cleaner way of living, one critical idea is that of unnecessary suffering. Suffering exists for each of the lower centers and suffering differs according to a person’s level of being.The Fourth Way involves work to drop unnecessary suffering, to become more free to experience the real moments of our days.
Real suffering is inescapable suffering and has an objective quality. While physical suffering is real, some of our emotional suffering is less real. The tendency to inner consider, to carry around hurts received from others, is not quite necessary. At least when we are more awake.
Inner Considering
One area of unnecessary suffering is “inner considering” which can derail our emotional energy–energy we need for awakening.
Letting go of what is unnecessary, we can begin to taste what is more real.
Inner considering is a subjective and mechanical process where we worry about other people’s actions and opinions in relation to ourselves. This can include feeling that we are not “considered” highly enough by others. Inner considering requires “identification” with others, a kind of slavery in which we are not free.
I’s from inner considering are such as these:
“Why didn’t she say hello to me today?”
“Am I going to make a fool of myself by wearing this outfit?”
“That stupid driver nearly caused an accident!”
“My son cares more about his video games than being with me.”
Inner considering can fill up our inner world. If we can disengage resentment, self-pity, and other negative emotions, we can engage in what is happening in the world around us and even be of help.
Working Against Inner Considering
So, is there an antidote? The Fourth Way describes it as external considering. External considering requires a conscious effort to see another. It requires one to put oneself in the place of another, to be intentional and kind.
Maurice Nicoll, a student of P.D. Ouspensky, wrote in his lengthy Commentaries on the Fourth Way ideas:
“In order not to identify, a man must first of all learn not to identify with himself.”
“All feelings of inner considering show that you are owed by other people, but you owe nothing.”
“Put yourself in other person’s place. Try to see where the trouble lies in yourself as well as the other person. Try not to identify.”
“A man is only offended where he is identified with himself.”
“If you base your life on inner considering, your life will be one-sided, undealt with, undigested, so many unhappy things left lying around and rotting, so many violent and bitter feelings, so much heavy, dense. negative material accumulated which you will not give up. But external considering is utterly different. It cleanses you.”
External Considering
“An hour of external considering can free you from the effects of weeks of inner considering. And the more you can see yourself [and] the kind of person you have been all your life, the more you will be able to externally consider rightly.”
“It is only according to your degree of self-knowledge and self-observation that you can externally consider another.”
“External considering is work on being.”
“And you must calculate second force—that is, the difficulties.”
“Nevertheless, you must never find fault or show that you are finding fault, ,but be ready to bear false accusations. And of course you must be ready to bear the unpleasant manifestations of the other person.”
“We keep one another in the prison of our association about one another. To let people go, to let them be different, depends on our letting them go.”
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