A Record of Meetings held by P.D. Ouspensky - HolyBooks.com

own quite personal scale and limited to your friends, it might betrue, but people exaggerate this idea, and think that if they weredifferent circumstances would be different on a bigger scale, soif you take circumstances depending on you it would be right, but ifyou take circumstances quite independent from you then certainly itis wrong. There are many imaginary theories on this problem, butof that we will speak some time later.MR. E. Can octaves be completed by accident?MR. O. Which octave, and which accident, and what means completed,and why? You see how many questions there are in that.MRS. D. Should one try to live according to one's emotions or shouldone always try to find a good reason for what one is doing?MR. O. It is very difficult to say. Emotions may be different and one'scapacity to control one's life may be different. Very often it is imaginary.Very often all questions, should I do this, or should I do that, arequite artificial because one can do only in one way; you see what Imean? Very often one thinks one can do this way or that way, butreally one can only do in one way, one has no control, but coming tothe question itself, I think it is useful to start from this point of view,to see what kind of emotions you mean, emotions belonging to essenceor emotions belonging to personality, and very often (again I don't sayalways, but very often) you can trust emotions belonging to essenceand mistrust emotions belonging to personality, but this is not ageneral rule; it only shows lines of study in connection with yourquestion. Question itself shows by which line your thinking must go;you must think about essence and personality; you must think aboutthings which you can control in yourself and so on. It is not a questionfor answer, it is a question for investigation.***