(15.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION IN THE WORK - Part III - pp.56-58
This is number (15.) 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 27, 1941
Part III.—In order to continue these talks about Transformation let me take a question of this kind : "What prevents impressions from transforming themselves in us? Why does this not always happen?" Let us again study this subject.
Impressions should pass on in their octave until they reach Mi 12. You will remember that they come in as 48, but do not continue to evolve. (See Fig. 1). Remember also that the First Conscious Shock is to make impressions pass on in their evolution, namely, to Hydrogen 24 and then to Hydrogen 12. That is, by means of the First Conscious Shock, Do 48 becomes Re 24 and then Mi 12 (Fig. 2).
Now two things must be borne in mind and clearly understood:
(1) The First Conscious Shock does not happen to man asleep. It is a conscious effort requiring special knowledge and self-observation and given in connection with the incoming impressions of life and a person's mechanical reactions to them. Roughly, it consists in seeing the object and seeing one's reactions to it simultaneously and without being identified. This process is sometimes put diagrammatically as follows:
(2) The First Conscious Shock to the human machine increases the energies of the machine in the form of Hydrogen 24 and Hydrogen 12. The result is actually to give every cell in the body different food—that is, higher hydrogens. In regard to this second point let me remind you here that neither the psychical nor the physical functions of man can be understood unless it is grasped that they can both work in different states of consciousness. If the First Conscious Shock is applied,
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the Third State of Consciousness is touched, with the result that the human machine works in a different way, owing to new energies, both as regards its psychical and its physical functions. The Third State of Consciousness is the state of Self-Remembering, which man should possess but which he has gradually lost because of the wrong conditions of his life. To-day it can be said only to occur in the form of very rare flashes. It is the creation of this Third State of Consciousness that forms the First Conscious Shock—that is, the first object of the work is to recover this lost state, namely, to make a man remember himself until eventually he does not merely have rare flashes of increased consciousness (over which he has no control) but can create in himself increasing degrees of self-remembering by deliberate efforts. These efforts, which belong to the First Conscious Shock, gradually cause the machine to work more rightly. Many wrong functions, both in the psychic and physical spheres, acquired by the wrong working of the machine in the two lowest states of consciousness—that is, in darkness—then begin to disappear of themselves.
Let us now return to the question as to what prevents Do 48 from passing on to Re 24 and then to Mi 12. Why does not this always happen? It does happen in childhood; and to a certain extent Mi 12 is created in the body in early youth. We may remember its action. But as Personality grows more and more thickly round Essence, it happens less and less. That is, impressions are more and more intercepted by Personality, which is represented in the diagram by the double line marked X. Impressions coming in through the senses fall, as it were, on a thick net which catches everything (save a very small part, which passes onwards and produces a very small amount of Mi 12).
This net is the Personality, with its strong Buffers, its fixed Attitudes, its mechanical Associations, its Rolls automatically set in motion, and its ideas that it knows and can do, with all its contradictory 'I's, with all the different forms of negative emotion, which it has acquired by imitation, with all its habits of identifying, considering, self-justifying, imagining and lying, centred in the False Personality. All these prevent impressions from passing on in their normal transformations. In other words, something opaque, as it were, has formed itself at the place where impressions enter, and closed up the way for their passage onwards.
Now from the standpoint of Triads, impressions entering as Hydrogen 48 cannot pass to Hydrogen 24 unless Hydrogen 12 is present. Hydrogen 12 must be brought up to the place where impressions are entering. Personality is constructed mainly out of Hydrogen 48—the Formatory Hydrogen—so you have impressions 48 falling on Personality 48, and since the necessary elements of a triad are therefore lacking, no transformation is possible. In the case of food—ordinary food—that is, Hydrogen 768—on being taken in, it meets with the gastric juices, and their active ferments, belonging to the order of Hydrogens 192, and the result is the transformation of 768 into 384. But in the case of impressions
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once Personality is formed, no corresponding active "ferment" meets them (in this case Hydrogen 12). The work itself must be brought up to the place to act as a "ferment", for the work is to make a man think in a new way and to awaken him.
What does this mean? How can a man bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more a man through right self-observation feels his own helplessness, the more he realizes his ignorance, the more he sees his mechanicalness and that he is a machine, the more he perceives his own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to him. The work can exist in us as Hydrogen 48. Then it is merely in Personality, as something formatory, in the memory. It can exist in us also in terms of Hydrogen 24. Then it is emotional. It can also become so valuable, so important to us, that it begins to have the intensity of meaning and significance that belong to Hydrogen 12. In that case, False Personality will begin to collapse and a man will become "as a little child". This is one meaning of the saying : "Except ye become as little children". If a man's love no longer runs always into himself, into his habitual ideas of himself, his strange vanity and esteem of himself—that is, into False Personality—then the direction of his will alters—that is, the resultant of his desires alters. When the valuation of the truth of esoteric teaching becomes stronger than self-valuation, it begins to act on a man. He begins to take everything differently. The whole way in which he reacts to outer life changes. (Why cannot you all understand that life is impressions?) He no longer reacts to impressions from his mechanical personality by always saying the same things, feeling the same things, and so on. He begins to act from the work—that is, in quite a new way.
The work comes up to the place where life is entering him as impressions and stands beside him. He begins to see life through the work and instead of wasting his time in hundreds of forms of useless internal considering or negative reactions, or of identifying, he seeks for the power of the work to help him to change these mechanical reactions which he is now aware of by observation and to transform his habitual ways of taking things. He begins to live more consciously at this point where life is entering as impressions.