(11.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - CONCEPT OF CONSCIENCE IN THE WORK and SOME THOUGHTS ON THE WAR, Part I - pp.40-44
This is number (11.) of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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Birdlip, July 16, 1941
CONCEPT OF CONSCIENCE IN THE WORK
Consciousness and Conscience are similar in their respective spheres, one being in the Intellectual Centre, the other in the Emotional Centre.
Consciousness is Knowing all together;
Conscience is Feeling all together.
CONSCIENCE
As you know, in the experiment of religion as a means of conveying teaching from Conscious to sleeping humanity, one of the sources of failure is that each person sets up his own dogma as absolute truth, and so people persecute, despise, and kill each other in the name of God. They may do so very earnestly and say they act from Conscience. But this is False or Mechanical Conscience and is formed in Personality. This False or Acquired Conscience is not based on inner understanding. It is related to False Personality and so to feeling merit and therefore feeling that one is right and better than others, and that others who have different religious beliefs are inferior or wicked and contemptible and worthy to be killed.
The difference between Real Conscience and Mechanical or False Conscience is that Real Conscience is the same in all men and speaks, as it were, the same language. Mechanical or False Conscience is different in different people, according to their nationality, upbringing, customs, forms of belief, etc.
If all men could awaken, Real Conscience would speak in them all and they would agree with one another, because it would speak in the same way to everyone.
Real Conscience exists in everyone but is buried and so out of reach. Personality has grown over it and as a result our feelings, our sense of ourselves, has shifted to Personality. Therefore to "feel all together" is impossible and indeed would be unendurable as we are. To "feel all together" would mean that we were one. But Personality is divided into little bits, as it were. The fundamental thing to grasp about Personality
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is that it is multiple. For this reason you now feel in one way and now in another way, but separately and not together—and without even remembering—just as you think now in one way, then in another, or behave now in one way and then in another. And to all this shifting kaleidoscope within you, you say 'I'. That is, you imagine you are one person. As long as a man takes himself as one person he will never move from where he is. To awaken to Conscience you must begin to see the contradictions in yourself. But if you try to see contradictions in yourself taking yourself all the time as one person you will get nowhere. Indeed, you will stand in your own way and instead of stepping aside will create an impossible situation. It would be just as if you believed everything you saw in front of you was a part of your body.
What especially prevent a man from seeing contradictions in himself are buffers. In place of having Real Conscience a man has Artificial Conscience and buffers. Behind everyone there stand years and years of a wrong and stupid life, of indulgence in every kind of weakness, of sleep, of ignorance, of pretence, of lack of effort, of drifting, of shutting one's eyes, of striving to avoid unpleasant facts, of constant lying to oneself, of abuse and blaming of others, of fault-finding, of self-justifying, of emptiness, of wrong talking, and so on. As a result the human machine is dirty and works wrongly. Not only this, but artificial appliances have been created in it due to its wrong way of working. And however a person may wish to wake up and become another person and lead another life these artificial appliances interfere very much with his good intentions. They are called Buffers. Like the contrivances on railway carriages, their action is to lessen the shock of collision. But in the case of buffers in man their action is to prevent two contradictory sides of himself from coming into consciousness together.
Buffers are created gradually and involuntarily by the life around us, in which we are brought up. Their action is to prevent a man from feeling Conscience—that is, from feeling "all together". For example, very strong buffers exist between our likes and dislikes, between our pleasant feelings towards someone and our unpleasant feelings. To break a buffer it is necessary to observe oneself over a long period and remember how one felt and how one is feeling. That is, it is necessary to see on both sides of a buffer together, to see the contradictory sides of oneself that are separated by the buffer. Once a buffer is broken it cannot form again.
Buffers make a man's life more easy. They prevent him from feeling Real Conscience. But they also prevent him from developing. Inner development depends on shocks. Only shocks can lead a man out of the state he is in. When a man realizes something about himself, he suffers a shock, but the presence of buffers in him will prevent him from realizing anything. For buffers are made to lessen shocks. The more a man observes himself the more likely will it be for him to begin to see buffers in himself. The reason is that the more you observe yourselves the more you will catch glimpses of yourselves as a whole. If you observe
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different moments of your lives, after a time you catch a glimpse of yourself over a period, all together—that is, your consciousness of yourself increases. But first you must try to observe everything in yourself at a given moment—the emotional state, thoughts, sensations, intentions, posture, movements, tone of voice, facial expression and so on. All these must be photographed together. This is full observation and from this begin three things: (1) a new memory of oneself, (2) a complete change in the conception one previously had of oneself, (3) the development of inner taste in regard to the quality of what one is observing internally. For instance, by inner taste you can recognize that you are lying or in a negative state without difficulty, although you are justifying yourself and protesting you are not. Here the whole thing turns upon whether you possess inner sincerity or not. If not, then best to give up the work. Inner taste can be said to be the faint beginning of Real Conscience, because it is something that recognizes the quality of one's inner state. Self-observation and inner taste are not the same but may coincide. The more you understand the work, the more it is arranged rightly in your mind and its meaning seen, the more does it pass into Real Conscience. It is sometimes said that if we had Real Conscience the work would be unnecessary for we would know it already.
COMMENTARY—Birdlip, July 19, 1941
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE WAR FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE WORK - Part I.
Part I.—War is an event which drags millions of people into its vortex whether they wish it or no. People, however, imagine that they are free. All man's life is based on the idea that he is free to choose. If a man could see clearly that he is mechanical—that is, that he is not free—he could not endure the realization. It is necessary to understand that mankind on the earth is under 48 laws, and each person is actually under 96 orders of laws. This is at first sight difficult to see unless you remember the Ray of Creation and realize from it that the part is under more laws than the whole. The fact, however, that man on earth is under many laws can be understood in general. These laws or influences, some waxing and some waning, as it were, or intercrossing and forming different combinations, produce the events that form the drama of human existence on the surface of the earth. Before an event occurs, it is quite easy to think that one is free from it. But when the event comes the case is different. It is almost as if it tried to drag as many as possible into its range and feed on them. People forget what they thought. The event attracts them into its sphere of influence. By means of buffers and self-justifying, they enter the event and pass under its
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power. A man may decide he will never fight again in any war. He is sure he will not. But when the drums begin to beat, when the horrors and madness of war start and he sees them or reads about them, he forgets all his resolutions. And it is the same not only with events on the scale of war, but events on the scale of his ordinary daily life. For events are on many different scales. There are, for instance, collective events—that is, events implicating nations or a single nation, such as wars or revolutions. And at the other end of the scale there are the little cycles of events that form an ordinary man's private life which turn like small wheels, repeating themselves endlessly—that is, in the same way, more or less, unless the man begins to struggle with himself and change himself. And although no one is really satisfied with his life, he does not see that his own level of being attracts his particular kind of life—that is, this repeating cycle of small events. Collective events —namely, events which involve millions of people—are like big wheels. But a person's life is like a small wheel turning somewhere in a vast machinery of bigger and smaller wheels—and all these wheels, big and little, form "life", which drives everyone.
This work speaks often of the necessity of isolating ourselves from collective events. We are connected with them by attitudes, as by invisible threads. To isolate oneself from collective events, it is necessary to change attitudes in oneself. It is through beginning to have a right attitude to the work that mechanically formed attitudes can be seen and altered or even alter themselves. One can only observe a thing in oneself by means of something else. A thing cannot observe itself. To observe, one must stand away from what one observes. The whole system of work and all its ideas, which belong to the age-old teaching about man and his possible development and inner freedom, give the full possibility of self-observation—that is, one observes oneself from the teaching and the ideas and knowledge of the work. A man in life cannot do this, for he has been formed by life and so can only observe himself from the ideas belonging to life.
War, in this system, is said to be caused by extra-terrestrial influences, not by people. It is said simply that planetary influences create war on earth. But it adds that these influences create war on sleeping humanity. Because man is so deeply asleep, these influences act on him in a particular way. If he were awake, they would act on him in another way. The greatest mistake and the greatest injustice we do, in regard to one another, is to imagine that everyone is conscious. This work also says that in life everything happens. It seems that man does and can do, but this is not the case, but an appearance. Actually, everything happens, just as the last war happened and this present war has happened. But the work also says that everything happens on earth because man is asleep. Everything happens in a world of sleeping people. Everything that takes place takes place in the only way it can. Millions kill each other, suffer incredible misery and so on, because they cannot help it, and it all leads nowhere, and can lead nowhere. The
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direction that can lead somewhere is awakening from sleep. In every small part of time, some people are ready to awaken. If they do not try to do so, they block the way for others. It is like a ladder on each rung of which people are standing. If those above do not move up, those below cannot move. Awakening is the individual task of everyone. But only a few can awaken at a time or find the possibilities offered them. If these begin to awaken the effect spreads and others begin to understand what work means and what awakening means.
The hypnotism of life is at all times very powerful. The object of nature is to keep man asleep and keep him based on violence, so that he serves the purposes of nature. The work is a force coming into life from conscious sources from outside life. To-day the hypnotism of war is very strong. It is necessary to resist it. In order to resist it, the influences reaching us through this work must be kept alive. In order to keep the influences of this work alive, it is necessary constantly to think about it, to concentrate on different sides of it, to renew it daily, and put it into practice. The work must be kept alive and everything that keeps it alive is useful and everything that has the contrary effect is bad. Every one of you must think what it means to keep the work alive at this time and what effort it requires on the part of those who are teaching this system. Only those who think seriously of the work and see all its difficulties and have realized for themselves how very easy it is to forget everything and fall back into ordinary life can understand what is meant. One thing can be added—you all know that everyone must play his part in life in this way—that is, the fourth way—that we are studying. But it is one thing to identify with what one must do in life and another thing to take life as a means of working on oneself. Life and the work must not be mixed up. If a man mixes the work with life and cannot see the difference, he cannot feel the action of the work on him. It will fade and become as nothing in his mind. As you know, this point has been emphasized in many of the readings given since this present war began. The reason is obvious, but although this is so, we easily forget it and so must struggle all over again to remember the work and re-set it in our minds, see its inner meaning once more and understand again what this work is and what life is, and why this work has always, in one form or another, been taught to suffering humanity in every age. Above all, you must not adapt to war any more than you must adapt to this system. To adapt to war is to go to sleep in regard to war.