Why Do We Take Things Personally, and How Do We Stop?

George Gurdjieff was a spiritual teacher with an expansive, enigmatic mind. His basic teaching was that people live in a state of sleep but can awaken themselves through what he called “The Work,” which he introduced to his followers in an eclectic mixture of lectures, music, dance, and physical group projects. In the video I’m posting for this blog, I look at just one idea of his, the distinction he made between what he called “internal considering” and “external considering.”

Internal considering can be understood as our most reactive and immediate way of taking in information from the world. We are animals who want to protect ourselves, after all, and so when data comes in, we’re prone to take it all “personally” or to interpret it in terms of how it hurts or helps our own well-being. On the other hand, “external considering” mean considering another’s viewpoint on a level equal to our own or recognizing that even though our own perspective sinks us into a very particular place and time, we are players in a bigger system, which itself equally privileges the other. I’ll say more—but here is the main offering of this post, a short video I made exploring the dizzying task of respecting the other’s viewpoint:

In his explanation of the difference between external and internal considering, Gurdjieff had some tangential and insightful things to say. One was that when we are hurt, we usually see the hurt in terms of larger, objective systems of injustice, placing our own perspective in the center: Even minutiae that is unpleasant to us can come to seem “unjust, illegal, wrong, and illogical. And the point of departure for [this] judgment is always that these things can and should be changed. ′Injustice′ is one of the words in which very often [internal] considering hides itself,” Gurdjieff explained.

He also said that if we try too hard to comply with some moral dictate to “consider the other,” we can get in the trap of a treacly focus on that task, trying too hard to be that “sort” of person, which itself is a form of selfishness: Sometimes a person begins “to think that he is not considering another person enough,” and so he flails in trying to be more flexible and considerate. “All this is simply weakness. People are afraid of one another. [He] gets angry with himself and feels that it is stupid, and he cannot stop, whereas in such cases, the whole point is precisely ′not to consider.′” “Not to consider” means to loosen the tight hold on compliance and the mere appearance of self-improvement.

Gurdjieff said that we sometimes err on the side of “honesty,” too. Perhaps you have a frustration, complaint, or simple negative feeling inside, and you think you need to tell the other person all about it. Otherwise, you worry you are not being “sincere,” he says.

But sometimes you overshare because you are weak: “The expressing of unpleasant emotions [is a manifestation of an] inability to control himself… He calls it ′sincerity′ or ′honesty,′ and he tells himself that he does not want to struggle against sincerity, whereas, in fact, he is unable to struggle against his weaknesses.

Sincerity and honesty are, in reality, something quite different. What a man calls "sincerity" in this case is, in reality, simply being unwilling to restrain himself. And deep down inside him, the man is aware of this. But he lies to himself when he says that he does not want to lose sincerity.” Gurdjieff advises stronger self-restraint when it comes to handling a temporary flush of negative emotion.

In any case, the road to true “external considering” is a delicate one, which I hope I state in some interesting form in the video above.