tea boy: the people there were not as pleasant as he
had been told.
In our own lives, the Bengali tea boys are the peo-
ple who, when you let them through the front door of
your house, go right down to the basement where you
store lots of things you’d rather not deal with, pick
out one of them, bring it up to you, and say, “Is this
yours?”
These are the people who, when your habitual
style is working just fine and everyone’s agreeing with
you, say, “No way am I going to go along with what
you just asked me to do. I think it’s stupid.” You think,
“What do I do now?” And usually what you do is to
get everybody else on your team. You sit around and
talk about what a creep this person is who confronted
you. If the disagreement happens to be in the realm
of politics or “isms” of any kind, you get a banner on
which you write how right you are and how wrong
this other person is. By this time the other person has
got a team, too, and then you have race riots and
World War III. Righteous indignation becomes a
creed for you and your whole gang. And it all started
because somebody blew your trip. It all turns into a
crusade of who’s right and who’s wrong. Wars come
from that. Nobody ever encourages you to allow
yourself to feel wounded first and then try to figure
out what is the right speech and right action that
might follow.
Gurdjieff—a teacher in the early part of the twen-
84 Be Grateful to Everyone