(17.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - COMMENTARY ON MEANING - pp.62-67
This is number (17.) 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, September 21, 1941
COMMENTARY ON MEANING - Part I,
Part I.—We can all get so tired of one another that we have no meaning for one another. A man and a woman can get so tired of each other that they have no meaning for one another. One can get so tired of a subject that it has no longer any meaning for one. A person can do his daily work dutifully for years until it has no longer any meaning for him. A man may search for new adventures until they have no meaning for him and he does not know what he is doing, and so on.
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Let us ask ourselves about the meaning of meaning and the source of meaning. Let us consider, first of all, whether meaning is important or not. If we decide after reflection that meaning is important, then let us ask ourselves what we want. A very good formulation of what we want is this: "I want to find meaning in everything", or "I seek more meaning" or "I dread a state of meaninglessness and pray to have more meaning in my life", and so on. Some years ago I was speaking to Mr. O. about aim. The conversation was about the possibility of recurrence—that is, living one's life again. It is a possibility, and if nothing changes in our essence—that is, in our deepest and most real part—then the recurrence of one's life, if this happens, will be identical with the life one has passed through. One will live the same life, and perhaps live it over and over again, but have no memory of it. This means that at death one returns to that part of Time where one was born, and is born into the same surroundings, etc., and lives again the same life—in fact, lives again and again the same life because nothing has changed in oneself.
Mr. O. asked me what my aim was in connection with this possibility of re-living my life and I said: "Thinking of my life as far as I can remember it, I see that I took very little in. It was like a dream. It had very little meaning, and in fact whole years are blotted out in my mind. I would like to have the power of feeling meaning in all the experiences I had, if I re-lived my life." He said: "Yes, this is right. As a rule we are not there. As Mr. G. said of someone: 'He is never at home'." He continued in something like the following words: "And this really applies to us all. We are never at home, or very rarely. We are nearly always out. So our experiences have little or no meaning for us." I said: "But I am sure that you, for example, remember your life far better than I remember mine, and that your life has had more meaning." He replied: "Yes, but not quite in the way you mean. I have noticed how much you have forgotten. In my case, as a child I did not play with toys. I was less under imagination. I saw what life was like at a very early stage." I said: "Well, in my case, I must confess that I never thought of life as a thing to think of. I took it all for granted." He said: "Yes, that is why it had little meaning for you. You were simply carried along by it, as by a torrent, thinking you were going somewhere—to some clear goal. It is only when you realize life is taking you nowhere that it begins to have meaning."
At that time I thought this conversation a very strange one. I have given it as I remember it, in regard to the ideas expressed. I carried away two clear impressions: one was that to formulate your aim in regard to the possibility of having to re-live your life at death, in terms of wishing to have more meaning, was right, and the second idea was that unless you saw the nature of life you could not get more meaning in living it.
I realized that he had answered the question I had not asked— namely, " How can life have more meaning?"
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Let us take this conversation as the basis of an attempt to speak about meaning.
Although people do not realize it necessarily, they live by meaning, and when things become meaningless, they feel hopeless and useless. Life gives certain meanings, otherwise everyone would be unable to live or would feel that suicide were better. The meanings life gives are not permanent. Perhaps you have all noticed this. Imagination enhances meaning, but reality tends to exhaust it. There is no correspondence, of course, between imagination and reality. The one can never pass into the other, because they are utterly different things. It takes people a long time to see this—namely, that imagination can never be fulfilled in reality. Imagination is on one plane, reality on another. However, most people get a great deal of meaning solely from imagination. Imagination feeds meaning. It is one source of meaning. But the meaning that is formed by the action of the imagination does not correspond with reality. On the other hand, reality itself has its own meaning, quite apart from imagination. For example, a good dinner is "reality" and not imagination. It has meaning of its own. If you try to separate meaning derived from imagination and meaning derived from life—that is, from reality, speaking in the ordinary sense of the word—you will begin to see the great difference between these two sources of meaning.
Let us consider this phrase: "You have destroyed all my illusions." This phrase is used in the sense of suffering, of being wronged, of being seriously damaged by someone, of being, as it were, ruined. Illusions lie in the imagination. If all the meanings you derive from your imagination are destroyed, is that a loss? The answer is: Yes and No. It is quite possible to destroy a person's meanings too violently and do harm. Yet meaning derived from imagination eventually only complicates life and often, later on, actually prevents any real situations and relationships from developing. When I first made my private debut into life—that is, when I first advanced more or less independently (as I supposed) into the world—I had absolutely no idea that my imagination about life and people was in any way different from the possibilities offered by reality and obtainable from it. That is, of course, nothing extraordinary. I do not regard myself as exceptional in having such an attitude. At that age I was chiefly in imagination. That is to say, my meanings were chiefly derived from that source. As a result my experiences were "like a dream". By this term I mean that reality did not correspond with imagination and since I was chiefly in imagination, everything was "like a dream". In fact, I was dreamy. I was not there. I was not at home. I was always out. Because if your meanings are formed in the imagination you are living all the time in imagination, so that life is a far away unpleasant thing. Reality is unreal. In fact, you cannot come in contact with the meanings that reality offers you. You have heard me often say that everyone has his dream-woman, or her dream-man. Such dreams are intensified nowadays in many ways
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—by the cinema, by novelettes, and so on. But such dream-creatures, formed in the imagination, only feed on your own energies, for your own energies are required to keep them alive. All such forms of imagination derive their strength from yourself. But it is quite true to say that all this takes place in most people, often throughout their lives, and exhausts them in many different ways, making them unfit for any real relationships or right contact with real people. As you know, imagination is one of the things that the Work speaks of as having to be struggled with and fought with continually. And there are some drastic Work-parables about the imagination that some of you may remember. I will give them in another place.
Now let us return to this idea expressed by Mr. O. : "A person is usually out. He is rarely at home." If a person is in the imagination and its meanings, he is then always out. He is not at home. Such a person does not see you. He sees his dream of you, his imagination of you, his illusion of you. This is not a very satisfactory basis for any real relationship. A tremendous shock has to be undergone for a person to pass from the meanings derived from imagination to the meanings that reality offers. Reality in this respect is at first sight a poor small thing compared with all the wealth of meanings that the imagination supplies a person with, day and night.
You know that in the Work it is taught that you have to try to see yourselves apart from your imagination of yourselves. This is a long task and very difficult and painful. You may think you are charming but not notice you are usually rather rude and always lazy. And just in the same way, you have to try to see others without imagination. And this is also very difficult. It is imagination that blinds everyone in every direction. It blinds all mankind. You have heard one of the sayings of the Work about imagination in regard to mankind in general. It compares mankind with people in a hall of turning mirrors. These mirrors are so arranged that everyone thinks he is going forward toward some goal. But actually the mirrors are turning and people are going round and round in an ever-repeating circle. It is imagination that makes people believe in progress. Look only at this century! And this imagination has its roots in individual people's imagination of themselves and the entirely false meanings they derive from their imagination. Imaginary people meet imaginary people. Imaginary people dress up to meet other imaginary people dressed up. Imaginary people converse politely with imaginary people. Imaginary people marry imaginary people. Imaginary people kill imaginary people—and so on. And since people are based on false personality, which is entirely composed of imagination, it is not so surprising that this is the case. All their meanings, in fact, most of the meanings people live by, are derived from false personality and therefore from imagination. Real meanings exist apart from the meanings derived from imagination. But it is difficult to find them without the help of something that is not based on imagination. The action of this Work is gradually to destroy imaginary
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meaning and substitute real meaning. Work on oneself signifies, among other things, destroying imagination, for the Work is to make the real side of a person to become active and grow, and the false side of the person to weaken and become passive. This is called awakening from sleep. We have spoken about meaning derived from imagination and meaning derived from reality. We have now to speak of meaning derived from the Work.
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Part II.—The whole of the Work, all the ideas connected with the Work, all that it says about man being asleep, about the possibility of man's awakening, about life, about mechanicalness, about man's inner state, about efforts on oneself, about consciousness, about being, about new ways of thinking, new ways of understanding, new ways of taking things—all this can become the greatest source of meaning a man can possess. The meanings that the Work—that is, the meanings that esotericism and its unchanging concepts about man and his possible inner re-birth—can give a man, belong to an order of ideas that can transform all the meanings that life gives us. If a man begins to take life as work, then his whole relationship to existence begins to change, because the meaning of life changes for him. He sees life in another light, not as an end, but as a means, and this enables him not to identify with life and its happenings, as he formerly did. He does not necessarily expect that life is going to take him anywhere, but knows that if he takes life in the light of the Work, it becomes his teacher. That is, the Work gradually shews him how to take what happens in life so that he learns from life and all that happens in life and in this way life becomes his teacher. Whatever happens, he has the Work to hold on to, and he knows that the explanation it gives him of the real meaning of his own life cannot be destroyed by anything in life itself. But if he takes life as an end, the case will be different: then he will never understand the Work and never have any new meanings. From the Work viewpoint, then, life is a means, and all the Work teaches about self-evolution is the real end. This, however, is not easily understood, nor are we to suppose that it is easy to take life as work. When an unpleasant situation arises in life, one does not easily take it from a Work viewpoint, especially if it touches the meanings of ourselves through which we feel our self-satisfaction and which we derive from imagination and false personality, and abide in as easily as if they were really ourselves. No one, of course, understands the work. We know a little about it. But few have applied it to their being. That is, the Work is not third force for us. Life is. Only in a vague way and at times and by means of another's help, is the work third force for anyone—that is, a neutralising force stronger than the neutralising force of life and the forms of imagination derived from life. It is very difficult to change and no change is possible as long as life and imagination are the source of meaning for you. To think in a new
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way is the starting-point of inner development. And this, as you all know, is exactly what the Gospels say. The Gospels are also "esoteric teaching"—that is, teaching about man's possible inner evolution. The Gospels say: "Unless a man thinks in a new way, he cannot gain the Kingdom of Heaven." This is unfortunately translated: "Unless a man repent." To think in a new way is to find new meanings, and to be given new ideas is to have new thoughts. But people do not quite see what is meant. They hear this work and still think as before. So they believe that many of the ideas of this work are odd or fantastic. But it is they who are so. None of the ideas of this system is odd or fantastic. How long it takes us, and how many hard and horrible experiences we need before we catch glimpses of the fact that the Work, and the Gospels, and all Esotericism, are not saying anything odd or fantastic, but are actually saying something real and absolutely necessary to us.
Once we begin to be aware of this, in individual experience, new meaning enters us, and at once our relationship to life alters a little. Old meanings lose a little of their force. Psychologically we live in a world of different meanings and new meanings enter us only when old meanings die. Do you see that one cannot serve all one's old meanings and expect to have new meanings? But all this is very difficult to understand. You all have your meanings—the meanings that you follow. Perhaps you even believe that your meanings are the only ones, and are absolutely right: or perhaps you believe that there are fixed meanings for everything—in fact, standardised meanings? Of course, this is not the case. The meaning of every single thing can change. Think of some general changes in meaning since this war began. A thing can lose all meaning for you; then it is meaningless and then you will have no relationship to it. You are related to a person through his or her meaning for you. If this meaning changes, your relationship changes.
Meaning relates us to a thing or a person and, if all meaning fades, there is no relationship. But it will depend on the source of your meaning. Life divides people: the Work unites people.
If a man takes life as Work, everything can come to have new meaning. As a result of new meaning, new parts of centres are touched and new connections made internally, and new interpretations are possible. That is, the man becomes a little more free, not so mechanical. But since the source of these new meanings reaches him through the ideas of the Work, this change depends on how much He feels the ideas, how much he evaluates the Work. Therefore, you must think of the meaning of the Work and what evaluation of the Work means, in order to understand better this third inexhaustible source of meaning, whose origin lies beyond mechanical life, in the conscious circle of humanity.
“It is only when you realize life is taking you nowhere that it begins to have meaning."… well of course this is true. Yet there IS real meaning. It’s resident in an inner state which one isn’t connected to, and the state has its own meaning. A meaning that the intellectual mind and outer events cannot produce or fathom. The meaning is, so to speak, a question within the form of awareness itself.