When a mood against someone or for someone arises, do not place it on the person in question, but remain centered.
- When any mood (love, hate, anger) arises toward someone, the instinct is to throw it outward onto them. Instead: YOU are the source, the other is only the screen you project on. Someone else may find that same person repulsive, or be indifferent — the moon is miraculous on your honeymoon, intolerable to the neighbor whose child just died. The other does not change; the projection does.
- Bucket-in-well image: the insulter only drops a bucket into your well; what comes up was already there. If your well holds anger, anger comes up; hit a Buddha and only compassion comes out. The source is always within; the other is merely the occasion.
- Use the heat: while the mood is hot the inner path back to its source is warm and traceable — move inward ON that energy (‘the wire is hot, you can take it in’). The aroused moment is the opportunity, not a cool, calm one.
- Q&A (Q1) — this is NEITHER expression nor suppression. In both, the OTHER stays the center and you are busy struggling with the anger aimed at him. This technique forgets the other entirely and does NOT ‘do anything’ with the anger — it uses the anger only as a path back to its own origin. Don’t touch the mood; just trace it inward and stay centered there.
- Energy is neutral — the same energy becomes anger, sex, love, or hate purely by the channel the mind gives it; at the source it is formless and innocent. Three fates: expressed = wasted (and you train the habit of leaking out); suppressed = suspended, burdensome, leaks later onto someone weaker (boss’s anger vented on wife or child); returned-to-source = retained as formless power. True brahmacharya is only this returning, never suppression. A child is innocent for the same reason — energy still at the source, not yet moved into the body.
- Marker/result: a magnetic, charismatic presence with no effort to dominate — others feel a ‘change of climate’ near you. (Buddha walking into Sarnath: five ex-disciples who had resolved to snub him fell at his feet involuntarily — ‘We are not doing it, it is happening.’ ‘All energies have fallen to the source.’) You also become master of your energy, no longer dissipating it.
- Practical pointer (Q1): no need to manufacture situations — moods arise all day; use any of them. (Gurdjieff staged group insults to force live anger, then ‘Close your eyes, go back’; even once you knew it was staged the energy could not subside instantly, staying hot enough to trace inward.)
- Closing image — Lin Chi’s empty boat: meditating eyes-closed on a lake, an empty drifting boat struck his; anger rose; he opened his eyes — no one there. He closed them and floated backward with the anger to its source, and the empty boat became his realization. Now at any insult: ‘This boat is also empty’ — close the eyes, go within.