(36.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Psychological Commentary II: On Being (1) - p.144-149
This is number (36.) 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, May 28, 1942
Part I.—To-night we will speak again about Knowledge and Being. Can you remember anything that was said before about Knowledge and Being? Let me remind you that this teaching that we are studying says that there are two sides in a man that must develop in the gradual course of his transformation: the side of his Knowledge and the side of his Being. You have heard many times that you must first of all know this system and this takes time and effort. But it leads to a definite development of knowledge and at the same time should lead to a development of self-knowledge if a man works. Now it is not difficult to understand that there are different levels of knowledge. But it is not so easy to understand that there are different levels of being. Let us try to understand once more what being is. Usually people confuse existence
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with being. A stone exists, a plant exists, a man exists; but they exist quite differently. It is here that the idea of being comes in. For example, the being of a stone, the being of a plant, the being of an animal, the being of a man, and the Divine Being, are all on different levels. The being of a thing is from its origin, but its existence is from its birth, and conception takes place before birth. Let us take the being of animals. All animals have existence from birth. A horse exists, a dog exists, a cow exists. They have a common existence. But the being of a horse, the being of a dog, and the being of a cow are quite different and are not from birth but from conception.
Now let us turn to Man. Man is different from the animals. His being is capable of a definite development. He is born as a self-developing organism and so is incomplete, at a lower level of being than he is destined for by his creation. Animals are complete. Also, as distinct from animals, Man's upbringing extends over a very long period, during which he acquires many things in his being—by education, by imitation, by custom. This is one reason why the being of one man is not similar to the being of another man. We can understand that the knowledge of one man may not be on the same level as the knowledge of another man. But we do not so clearly see that the level of being can be different. Now from the standpoint of this teaching mankind is not taken as one and the same. Men are not the same in regard to their being. The concept of Man in this teaching is divided into seven categories to begin with: No. 1 Man, whose centre of gravity is in his instincts and movements, in his physical life, then No. 2 Man, whose centre of gravity is in his emotional life, then No. 3 Man whose centre of gravity is in his intellectual life. These three categories form mechanical humanity, the outer circle of mankind, who do not understand one another. As you know, this is called the circle of the confusion of tongues, the circle of Babel. Then there is No. 4 Man whose centre of gravity is not in the Instinctive-Moving Centre nor in the Emotional Centre nor in the Intellectual Centre but as it were distributed among them. This is the balanced man, in whom development is no longer one-sided and in whom awakening has begun. Then there is the circle of conscious humanity: No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7 Man, and these are men who have undergone different degrees of transformation or re-birth or development—in short, who have had a new conception. Now these seven divisions of the general idea of Man mean seven degrees or categories of being. Let us take No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 Man. They belong to the circle of mechanical humanity, to "mankind asleep", but they shew many differences in regard to their being. All three may live only under life-influences— that is, A influences, namely, influences created in life from history, from the past, from custom, from the trend of things. But some may be affected both by influences A and influences B. I will remind you that B influences are not created by life but come from outside mechanical life, from the circle of conscious humanity, and I will remind you again that the Gospels are an example of B influences. Again, some men may
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be more under A than B influences, or more under B than A influences. Some may even have come in contact with C influences—namely, with some one belonging to the conscious circle of humanity, with someone who has been re-born, re-conceived, as the disciples came in contact with Christ. Some may even be already on the way to becoming No. 4 Man. All these different states mean different levels of being. Perhaps you have noticed that the idea of a man's level of being always entered into religious thought and it was regarded as more important than anything else. The level of being of a saint was different from that of a sinner. Good men, bad men, evil men, truthful men, liars, sincere men, patient men, hypocrites, self-righteous men, vain-glorious men, and so on, are all terms referring to the side of being, not to the side of knowledge in a man. Now-a-days people seem to be coming to think that what a man is does not matter in view of what he knows. They even think that a man with criminal being can be a great thinker or a great scientist or a great artist or a great writer.
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Part II.—Let us now come to the knowledge of this Work and its relation to our being. This Work is given as knowledge and so must be learned, just as any other kind of knowledge must be learned. But this Work comes from Greater Mind. It is not ordinary knowledge. It is knowledge about transformation, just as the Gospels are knowledge about re-birth or being born anew, and whether we call it transformation or re-birth makes no difference. It is knowledge coming from those who attained full inner development and have reached, by a growth and transformation of their being, the state of consciousness called Objective Consciousness. Now the knowledge taught in this Work must gradually become your knowledge—i.e. you must know the knowledge the Work teaches, first of all, and this takes time and effort. But since this knowledge comes from a level of humanity far above our level of being, the full understanding of this knowledge will not be possible until our level of being corresponds with the level of knowledge that the Work teaches. As you know, a union between knowledge and being is necessary before understanding results. For this reason this knowledge that you are studying must be applied to your being—and you will certainly not apply it if you do not value the ideas of the Work. A parallel development of knowledge and being is necessary. That is, you must work on your being in accordance with the knowledge you are taught to raise your level of being. With the level of being you possess at present you will be able to understand the knowledge of the Work up to a point. If you have something good in your being, you will be able to understand something of this Work and not merely know it. There is a saying in the Work that you must have gold to get gold. This refers to the quality of being a person has. If there is good in him, he already has a little gold. No one can understand beyond the level of this being.
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You will now see why a man with bad being, a degenerate man, a confirmed liar, a moral imbecile, a criminal, and so on, cannot understand this Work, and also you will see why it is said in regard to new people entering this Work that they must be at the level of Good Householders. But even so, they must be people who are looking for something, people who do not quite believe in life and who feel that there must be something else, some other meaning in their existence on this planet.
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Part III.—So many things are said in this teaching about being that it is impossible to speak of them at one time. Let me mention one thing said about being which interested me very much when I first heard it. The saying was :Your being attracts your life. This saying made me see at once that there is a connection between what is outer and what is inner. For example, on a general scale, the level of being of mankind attracts war. If the being of mankind were on even a slightly higher level, war as it is now would be impossible. On an individual scale, a person's being attracts his life. It will always attract the same kind of things, the same situations, the same kind of friends, the same sort of people, the same difficulties, and so on, no matter where the person is or where he goes. To change being is to change one's life, but to change one's form of life is not to change one's being. By altering your outside condition you will not change your life, because your being will continue to attract a certain kind of life. A horse attracts to itself a certain kind of life different from that of a cow or a dog, and you can understand that this is due to their difference in being. By changing its form of life, a cow will not change. You would not like a cow to sit with you by the fireside or be on your bed, not merely because it would be inconvenient, but because its being is so different from that of a dog. In general you can see that the being of animals connects them with a certain kind of life. A weasel is attracted to the life of a weasel, a snake to the life of a snake, and so on. But we do not see in a similar way that the law that "the being attracts the life" holds for the small difference of being in people. Of course you have to study your being, to see that you have a certain kind of being, and study your life, to see that you have a certain kind of life. People do not easily see that they have very distinct and limited outlines. They think they are boundless and free. They think they can be anything they please and do anything they wish and live how they choose. But if one begins to study one's being—and at the same time one's life—one discovers that one has a certain kind of being. This is a very long task. This Work says that the study of our being is absolutely necessary.
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You know this Work says that we are machines driven by external impressions. Now as long as a man has no knowledge of his being, he is
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certainly a machine. For a machine cannot know itself. If it did it would not be a machine. But a man-machine can know itself. When a man begins to know himself he is no longer a machine. He may, indeed, even become a man. But this takes a long time and great effort. It takes a different kind of effort, of course, from that required to learn the knowledge of the Work. That is, work on the line of knowledge, and work on the line of being, require different efforts. A man cannot get to know himself unless he observes himself with his internal attention, and he cannot observe himself intelligently unless he has been taught definite knowledge of what to observe and sees a reason for it. There are certain special factors in our being that prevent its development. One, for example, is negative emotion, such as self-pity, and so on. These special factors must be known first of all as a matter of knowledge. So you learn first the knowledge of the Work. But then you must apply it so as to gain actual knowledge of your being in the light of the teaching. Knowledge of your being is self-knowledge. But in this teaching it is a particular kind of self-knowledge because this teaching points to certain things in one's being that must be observed and ultimately changed, through an increasing willingness to change them. Merely to know that negative emotions are bad and keep us at our level of being is not enough. But it often happens that people do not observe themselves along the lines taught them; or do not connect what they observe with what they are taught; or they take everything they think and feel and imagine and do and say for granted and cannot see there is anything to observe. But how, then, can one expect to change oneself if one takes everything in oneself for granted? One is then a machine, not a man. It is strange not to be able to observe anything in oneself. A shock is necessary. But this often makes a person negative. Yet then he notices something.
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Part IV.—Everyone acts from the sense of good, from what he thinks good. No one acts from evil. But a man acts from good according to his level of being—that is, from what appears to him as good. A thief steals because he feels it is good to steal. A revolutionist shoots people because he thinks it is good to shoot them. So good struggles with good. Just as knowledge is relative, so is good relative. Now good is relative to the level of being. What people regard as good is different in different cases. Perhaps you have noticed that what you thought good formerly you do not think good now. This means a change in the level of being. If the level of being changes only a little, you have at once a new perception of good. For example, perhaps you do not like to be as negative as you once were. This is due to a slight change in the level of being.
The knowledge of this Work is about reaching a higher level and so is about another life, here. But it must be learned and verified by application to one's being through self-observation and through personal thought about it. When its truth begins to be seen by you, for yourself,
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the driver or mind in you is beginning to wake up from its life-sleep. When you begin to see the good of doing and living the Work, your being begins to change. When you see it is good to remember yourself, good to stop internal considering, good to step aside from ridiculous illusions and pictures of yourself and from the vanity and self-conceit of false personality, good to dislike your negative states, good to realize your own nothingness at times, good to struggle with identifying always, good to think of all the teachings of the Work, good to value it—all these and a thousand and one other things—then you are getting a new perception of good, and that means the level of your being is changing, and good of a higher or inner level is replacing the former level of good.