Breaking the Glass Exercise
The emotional center distorts our perception of the world by placing ourselves at its center. Misled by this bias, we take everything personally and experience feelings about situations that need not stimulate any feelings whatsoever…
When we begin studying our emotional function, we stumble upon an underlying attitude that makes observing emotions particularly difficult. Their very arising sweeps us away. They appear so justified: ‘I adore this,’ or ‘I disagree with this,’ or ‘I can’t bear this any longer,’ etc. We are blind to the possibility that we could react in any other way. This abandonment of our sense of ‘I’ in the face of our emotions is called identification and it is here that our labor of September must begin.
To help create a wedge between our emotions and our budding ability to observe, practitioners were tasked with ordering a glass of water at a local café, and then inconspicuously letting the glass slip from their grasp and fall on the floor. Such an act, that deliberately makes us look like a fool in public, is diametrically opposed to our emotional function’s need for social validation. It is not so much the act itself, but the intention to look foolish, that carries the potential of splitting us in two. On the one hand, there is our habitual emotional reaction of shame and embarrassment, and on the other, the knowledge that we have brought this upon ourselves deliberately.
“The exercise began yielding observations long before the glass itself was dropped,” reported one practitioner. “I was surprised at the childish concerns circulating in me as I considered which café to visit. Glasses break in cafés every day, yet the prospect of doing this deliberately was quite daunting. I was consumed by the coming task all the way to the local café, as if I were on my way to perform a crime. It was both difficult and ridiculous at the same time.”
Our emotional function is by nature underdeveloped. It distorts our perception of the world by placing ourselves at its center. Everything is about us, everyone is ignoring or conspiring against us, everyone should be thinking about us and taking our needs into consideration. Misled by this bias, we take everything personally and experience feelings about situations that need not stimulate any feelings whatsoever.
“I was surprised at how something so simple could be so difficult,” reported another. “A large part of me tried to minimize the potential impact of the exercise. First, I thought of choosing a café that none of my acquaintances frequent. Then I hoped I’d get a plastic glass. Next, I hoped the glass would fall on the carpet instead of the floor. And then I hoped nobody except the waiter would notice.”
“It felt odd and a little eerie,” reported a third practitioner. “I knew I was playing a role, and I found myself oddly disassociated from myself. It was as if I were observing another person without being attached to any of their emotions,”—which is precisely the aim of this exercise. If executed correctly, a gap appears between ‘I’ and ‘my emotions’, sparking, as it were, an out-of-body experience. We are ourselves and not ourselves at the same time. From this unusual vantage point, we can observe the entire spectrum of our formerly invisible emotions. But this requires that we do this exercise with the proper attitude. Throughout, we must keep in mind that we are playing the fool to sever identification with our emotions. The moment we lose sight of this, our vanity takes credit for having gone against our habitual reactions and distorts our original aim.
A fourth practitioner reported falling into this trap. He had followed all the prescribed steps, experienced much of what was shared above, then just before leaving the café, couldn’t resist revealing to those around him that he had dropped the glass on purpose. His vanity couldn’t stand them not knowing that he had played the fool deliberately. Of course, revealing the intention behind this exercise punctures its efficacy. We break free of identification only to rebuild it elsewhere. This practitioner snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Success or failure, we always learn something about ourselves, as do other practitioners exposed to our findings. Breaking a glass in a café is, admittedly, one of the more theatrical methods presented in this teaching and cannot be performed on a regular basis without losing its effectiveness. Theatrical methods have their place, but as we become accustomed to observing our emotions as separate from ourselves, extreme methods will no longer be necessary. We will gradually learn more subtle ways of harvesting the same yield.