(14.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION IN THE WORK - Part II - pp.53-55
This is number (14.) of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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Links to each commentary will be put on the following Contents page, as we progress through the book:
Birdlip, August 14, 1941
THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION IN THE WORK - Part II
Part II.—The personality that we all acquire receives the impressions of life. But it does not transform them because it is dead. If impressions fell on essence they would be transformed because they would fall on centres. Personality, which is the term applied to all that we acquire, (and we must acquire personality), translates impressions from every side of life in a limited and practically stereotyped way according to its quality and associations. The personality in this respect is sometimes compared in the work with a secretary who sits in the front room, dealing with everything according to her own ideas. She has a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias and reference books, etc. round about her and rings up the three centres—that is, the mental, the emotional and the physical centres—according to her limited ideas. The result is that the wrong centres are nearly always being rung up. This means that incoming impressions are sent to the wrong places and produce the wrong results.
A man's life depends on this secretary, who mechanically looks up things in her reference books without any understanding of what they really mean and transmits them accordingly without caring what happens, but feeling only that she is doing her duty.
This is our inner situation. What is important to understand in this allegory is that this personality which we all acquire and must acquire begins to take charge of our lives. And it is no use imagining that this only happens to certain people. It happens to everyone. Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us.
Everyone is governed by his own set of reactions to impressions—that is, to life—whether he is revolutionary or conservative, or good or bad
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in the ordinary sense. And these reactions are his life. Mankind is mechanical in this sense. A man has formed in him a number of reactions which he takes as himself and his life experiences are the result of them. If you can relax enough physically, and drop away mentally from all ideas of yourself (which is mental relaxing) you will be able to see what I mean. You will see that, as it were, there are a number of things below you—namely, external to you—that you keep on taking as yourself. In such a passive state you can see them dimly. At first sight they seem to be above you. Immediately you tense your muscles or begin to talk you become them. They become you or you become them, and off you go again. But you must not try to do this exercise too much at first.
Actually they are like little grasping machines that insist on taking charge of you and demand that you should enter them again. They are set in motion by this "secretary"—that is, by the habitual way this secretary responds to impressions. And the reactions which follow we take as life. We take our typical reactions to impressions as life. We take our reactions to a person as him or her. All life—that is, outer life, which is what we usually think "life" is—namely, what we see and hear—is for each person his or her reactions to the impressions coming in from it. And as I said in the last talk, it is a great mistake to think that what is called "life" is a solid fixed thing, the same for everyone. No one has the same impressions of life. Life is our impressions of it and these can be transformed. But as was said, this is a very difficult idea to reach, because the hypnotism of the senses is so powerful. We cannot help thinking that it is only the senses that give us reality. So our inner life—our real life of thought and feeling—remains dim to our mental conceptions. Yet at the same time we know quite well it is where we really live—that is, in our thoughts and feelings. To establish a point in the work, to make it more real than life, we must observe ourselves and make our inner life of thoughts and feelings a fact more powerful than any "fact" given by our senses. This is the beginning of transforming. One cannot transform anything in oneself if one is glued to the senses. As I said, in the last talk, the work teaches that if you are negative it is your own fault. The sensory point of view is that this or that person in the outer world, that you see and hear by means of your eyes and ears, is at fault. This person, you will say, because he or she does this or talks like that, is to blame. But actually, if you are made negative, what you have to work on, what you have to observe, is this negative emotion intruding itself into your inner life—that is, into the inner invisible "place" where you really exist. Your real being is in the inner invisible world of yourself. Do you wish to argue this point? Well, are the thoughts and feelings and emotions and hopes and despairs you have less real to you than the tables and chairs in your dining-room? Do you live, as it were, in this dining-room? You may be very much identified with your particular tables and chairs, but even so, is it not your feeling about these tables and chairs that is real to you? Suppose you are ill and feel perhaps death is near you, do you bother any more
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about them? Of course not. And why? Because you have no longer any feelings about them. It is your feelings and your ways of identifying that make you regard this or that thing as important. It is not the things that you see with your physical eyes. Let us suppose that a person notices that he is identified, say, with his furniture: do you think that he must get rid of his furniture in order to change? Of course not. That would be silly. What he can change is his being identified so much. If he works on this, if he begins to transform this reaction in himself, he can still enjoy his furniture but he will not commit suicide if it is destroyed in a fire. Do you see the difference? You cannot transform life, but you can begin to transform the way you take life. The first conscious shock means work on yourself in general. The point of this work is to try to give oneself this shock. Everything that is taught in this system, on the practical side, belongs to the first conscious shock - non-identifying, non-considering, and so on. This may lead to a real moment of self-remembering as a reward. Then one has insight into what one must do, and realization of the truth of the work.
But work must be done in the spirit of the work that is, in the sense and feeling and valuation of the work. This must enter into every effort of work, for no one can work for himself alone, otherwise the results go only into false personality and so into merit. A man must work from love of the work. This brings Hydrogen 12 up to the place of incoming impressions. Incoming impressions are Hydrogen 48. They cannot pass to Hydrogen 24 without Hydrogen 12 as active force. If this hydrogen is present at the place of reception of impressions - that is, at the place we are conscious - Hydrogen 48, which comes in as passive force, passes to Hydrogen 24, the triad being completed by the Carbon 12. Hydrogen 12 is not present naturally at this point in the human machine. It has to be brought up to this point. If a person takes life as usual, in the ordinary way - that is, always receives impressions in the same mechanical way and speaks from them in the same mechanical way and acts from them in the same mechanical way - then nothing can change in the person. Such people cannot evolve. They do not see where the point of working on themselves lies. They think work is something outside them. A person must bring a very powerful hydrogen to the point where impressions are coming in. This is Hydrogen 12.