(26.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Commentary on Effort (III) - pp.102-104
This is number (26.) 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, January 12, 1942
Part III.—The diagram of the Cross as given represents a single moment in a man's life. In this single moment the vertical line is cut across by the horizontal line of Time.
Every moment of a man's life can be represented in this way. The point of intersection of the vertical with the horizontal line is now. But this point only becomes now in its full meaning if a man is conscious. When a man is identified there is no now for him. If he is asleep in Time, being hurried on from past to future, identified with everything, there is no now in his life. There is not even a present moment. On the contrary, everything is running, everything is changing, everything is turning into something else; and even the moment so looked-forward to, so eagerly anticipated, when it comes is already in the past.
It is only this feeling of the existence and meaning of the direction represented by the vertical line that gives a man a sense of now. This feeling is sometimes called the feeling of Eternity. It is the beginning of the feeling of real 'I', for real 'I' stands above us, not ahead of us in Time. Eternity and Time are incommensurable. That means that no quantity of Time will make Eternity, just as no quantity of length will make breadth. They belong to different dimensions. But Eternity and Time meet in Man, at the point called now.
In this vertical line there is no past or future. What takes the place of Time, of past, present and future? What takes the place of Time is state or level or quality. The vertical line represents position, not in Time, as, say, the year 1942, or age, such as being aged 20 or 50, but position in the scale of states of being, in the level of understanding and the quality of knowledge. Everything in the Universe, visible and invisible, known and unknown, is at some point in this vertical line. Everything is inevitably at some point in this vertical scale, for everything finds its own level in it, according, as it were, to its density, like objects floating in the sea. All evolution, in a real sense, is to pass from one point to a higher
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point in this scale. Scale means ladder. In all the diagrams we are going to study, this idea of the Universe as a ladder or scale is found, and that is why it is so necessary to gain some preliminary conception of the significance of this vertical direction, that does not lie ahead of us, in the future of Time, in next year or the next century, that does not lie either in Space or in Time, but lies in another dimension—namely, above us. In a limited way, we all know of the existence of this vertical line, for we all know better and worse states of ourselves. This is particularly the case once a man has begun to work on himself and to know what it means to separate from bad states and what it means to be asleep.
Now there are two kinds of influences that can reach us at any particular moment. One comes from the horizontal line, the line representing Time. These are the influences of the past that enter at every moment into our lives and also the influences coming from the future—that is, the future represented in the line of Time we are moving along. But there are also other influences. When a man remembers himself he lifts himself in the vertical line upwards and tastes for a moment a new state. This happens when a man no longer merely thinks about self-remembering, but actually does it—when he no longer tries to escape from negative states by thinking himself out of them, but stops all his thoughts and lifts himself up into self-remembering. And it is only by this inner movement that new influences can reach him. As you know it has been repeatedly said that "help" can only reach a man if he remembers himself—i.e. it can only reach the third state of consciousness.
In most of the ancient, mediaeval and later books, such as those of the 17th century, which contain traces of esoteric ideas—that is, that contain "B" influences—you will find this vertical direction represented. In the Old Testament—in the first few books or the Pentateuch, as it is called, where all the stories are allegorical and contain a hidden meaning—we find the example of Jacob's Ladder. This represents the Universe seen in its vertical height and depth—as above and below. Jacob represents Man asleep at the bottom of the possible scale of development existing in him.
It is related in Genesis that Jacob lay down in a certain place to sleep:
"And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it."
Let us take a similar example from this system. You know that Man in this system is taken in scale. There are different kinds of men—different in scale or level.
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Man is born as a self-evolving organism. He can rise from one level to another in this vertical scale. And that is why there is such a thing as esoteric teaching. All the knowledge belonging to this system is about the possibility of man's undergoing an inner transformation and rising in the scale of being. In the Christian and Mahometan religions, for example, this is called union with God. To pass from one point in the vertical line to a higher point, a thing must be transformed—become different from what it was at a lower level. From the standpoint of this teaching, man is not a fixed point in the Universe seen in this vertical manner, as is an animal, which cannot change and is born what it is and what it must remain. Man is capable of inner change. He is an experiment; but he is of no importance in the total Universe unless he begins to fulfil the experiment that he represents. Perhaps you will see what is meant when I say that unless the Universe were invisibly a vertical scale of ascending and descending values, there would be no meaning in it. The Universe is a series of stages, of levels, of degrees, extending vertically from the highest to the lowest, and everything is at a certain point in the Universe. The chair you are sitting on is at a different point in the Universe from yourself. Yet if you take the Universe as space, existing only in the three dimensions of space, you might think that you and the chair were at the same point in the Universe. Man as a child of the Universe, as a product of it, bears in himself the stamp of the Universe—that is to say, Man has scale in him.