(38.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Note on Prayer - p.154-159

This is number (38.) 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, June 19, 1942

RESPONSE AND REQUEST

In the paper that was read last time about the idea of Prayer as given in the Gospels (which is not included in this volume) it was said that the Universe can be taken as response to request. Man requests, and the Universe in all its full and total reality, outer and inner, responds according to the request. In regard to what was said last time, I wish to draw your attention to this fact: many people are getting responses to requests which they do not understand they are making. If the Universe, visible and invisible, material and psychological, gross and fine, as apprehended externally by the senses and internally by the mind and heart, is response to request, then you will see how important it is to realize what kind of requests you are making in order to understand why you get the response, from any side of life, that you are actually getting. The Work says: "Your being attracts your life". Do you see the connection? Without knowing it, a man or a woman may be making request and so getting a response from the total Universe that he or she does not like. They see the response but do not see what excites the response, what it is in themselves that attracts it. People, in other words, may be asking for trouble without being aware that they are. They only see the result—that is, the response. They see only effects, not causes. To think only from effects is one thing. It is how mechanical people think. To think from causes is another thing. It belongs to more conscious thinking. Now the level of your being enters into request as much or more than your knowledge. You may ask intellectually for happiness but not see how factors that govern your being, as love of your negative states, your grievances, your secret jealousies, your laziness, your dislikes, and so on, are asking for something quite different, and that the Universe is responding to these factors in your being that you are secretly willing and affirming without seeing that you are. Understand that full request must contain both thought and will-formulation and emotional desire. The side of knowledge is the side of thought and a man can only think from his knowledge. The side of being wills, and a man only wills what he desires. If you love negative states, then your will is of this quality. Your love is your will; it will attract the response belonging to it. Only self-knowledge will make you aware of your state of being and this begins with self-observation. Enough has been said here on this subject—namely, that a person may be getting responses he does not expect or desire, without seeing that he is attracting them because he is making requests for them that he is not aware of.

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We will now speak of some things said in the Work, directly and indirectly, about Prayer.

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THE TEACHING ABOUT PRAYER IN THE WORK

SELF-REMEMBERING

Part I.—In the teaching of the Work the idea of Prayer and the idea of Self-Remembering are so closely connected that the one cannot be separated from the other. Without Self-Remembering, Prayer is impossible. Let us look at what this means.A man as he is cannot pray. That is, a man in his ordinary daily state cannot pray. In order to pray a man must be in a state of Self-Remembering. To pray as one is, in one's ordinary state, is to pray in a state of sleep, and to pray in a state of sleep is useless. Nothing can happen. Such Prayer cannot be answered, because it does not get anywhere. Let us recall what is said about states of consciousness in the Work. Four states of consciousness are possible, but ordinarily Man knows and lives in only two, and both are called in the Work states of sleep. The first state of consciousness or the lowest is that of bodily sleep, which is a passive state in which a person lies in bed almost without movement. In this state a man spends a third or even more of his life. The second state of consciousness is the state in which people spend the remaining part of their lives, in which they move their limbs and walk about and talk and also write books and take part in politics and kill one another, and this state they regard as active and call it "clear consciousness or the waking state of consciousness". It is not too much to say that the terms clear consciousness or waking state of consciousness seem to have been given in jest especially when, through your own self-observation, you begin to realize what clear consciousness ought in reality to be, and what the state in which a man lives and acts really is. For in this so-called waking state a man is neither conscious of himself nor conscious of another. He lives and dies in darkness. And it would be better for him in one way if he remained passive in the first state of consciousness for then he could not move about and kill his neighbour.

The third state of consciousness is Self-Remembering or Self-Consciousness or the state of Self-Awareness. It is usual to consider that we have this state already and are always aware of ourselves and that we act, think and feel with full consciousness of what we are doing. But Western science has overlooked the fact that we do not possess this state of consciousness. And we cannot create it in ourselves by immediate desire alone, or decide that we will henceforth always live in a state of Self-Consciousness. But this third state constitutes the natural right of Man as he is and if Man does not possess it, it is because of the wrong conditions of his life. To-day this state of consciousness occurs only in the form of rare flashes and it is only by long practice, by trial and error, that a man can begin to re-establish a state of Self-Remembering in himself.

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Now help only reaches to the third state of consciousness. It cannot reach down to the darkness that people live their daily lives in and in which they are so often content to exist. Therefore to pray from the state of sleep—to pray from the so-called waking state—is like dreaming that one is praying, for in this second state of consciousness we are also dreaming and everything is unreal, only we do not notice that we are doing everything in a dream unless we experience a moment of consciousness belonging to the 3rd and 4th states of consciousness and see the contrast. So when a man prays he must remember himself. He must be conscious of himself and of what he is praying for. He must feel the meaning of everything he says and feel himself saying it. He must feel it is really 'I' in him that prays and not a set of frightened little 'I's or a set of mechanical 'I's formed by habit. And finally a man can neither pray nor remember himself unless he feels there is both a higher state of himself and something higher than he is.

We must now consider the 4th state of consciousness in connection with all that class of praying which can be called praying for enlightenment. When a man prays for enlightenment he prays that he may see things as they really are, apart from his imagination and his subjective ideas. In the religions of all nations there are indications of the possibility of such a state of consciousness, which is called "Enlightenment" and other names, but which cannot be described in words for it transcends all words. When a man prays for enlightenment he prays for Objective Consciousness. But he must first be in the 3rd state of consciousness for it is only this 3rd state that can be touched and can retain the meaning of any experience or help coming from those who are at the level of the 4th state of consciousness. But you must realize that if a man prays for enlightenment, say about himself, he is praying to awaken and if a man fully awoke to himself and saw himself as he really is, that is,

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objectively, he would go mad. It is better to think of praying for more understanding. But of course this is useless if you make no effort to understand better for yourself. If a man in the Work works neither on the Line of Knowledge nor the Line of Being and merely prays for more understanding, his view of the Universe is very naive. He must realize the harshness of things and the price that must be paid and get rid of childish and sentimental views. I must repeat that to pray for something you should work for and can, if you try, is quite idle. But people take idle views and cannot wake up to their own danger. You must fight for the Work and fight to keep it, and you will not keep it unless you jump and catch hold of its rope and insist on holding on to it.

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THE THREE BROTHERS IN A MAN

Part II.—The next thing that the Work says of Prayer is that all three centres in a man must pray. To begin with, if only the mind prays and the heart does not, there can be no response. The whole man must pray and the whole man is first of all three men—three brothers who do not agree. If these three centres, in the three-storey house that Man is, worked in harmony, Man would already be in the 3rd state of consciousness. He would be sufficiently awake to receive help, to obtain a response to his requests. But these three brothers in a man do not co-operate and especially to-day is this the case. For this reason, let us glance briefly at some of the teaching given in the Work about the state of our centres nowadays.

You know that the study of the multiplicity of our being which characterizes our level of being begins with the observation of centres. The three centres work independently owing to the abnormal conditions of modern life, which produce one-sided developments. Every conscious perception and every manifestation of a man, everything taken in and given out, should be the result of the co-ordinated working of the three centres, each of which should furnish its own share of associations and knowledge and experiences. In place of this, the working of these different centres is almost entirely disconnected nowadays. In consequence of this the intellectual, emotional and instinct-moving centres do not co-operate with one another and so correct and complement one another, but, as it were, travel along different roads which rarely meet. For this reason Man is very rarely conscious, and again, for the same reason, Man is, to begin with, not one individual, but three distinct people that are not in harmony. The first thinks in total isolation from the rest; the second feels in the same way; and the third acts mechanically, according to long-established habits. If development were normal these three men in a man, the intellectual man, the emotional man and the instinct-moving man, would form one single man, in harmony with all the different sides of himself. As it is, Man is, in himself, in a condition of disharmony. He is first of all three men, three brothers,

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who rarely agree, and who indeed spend their time in frustrating one another, quarrelling with one another and each dominating the other in turn. Any general result of their combined action, in which each of them is in agreement and each signs his name, so to speak, to the agreement, is thus very rare, but when this does happen, the man is at that moment in another state of consciousness. He is, in fact, conscious, in the sense of the Work teaching, for he is in simultaneous possession of all his faculties and conscious of each. His consciousness embraces all the centres at the same time, instead of being confined to one or another centre, or a small part of it, at a time. This extension or expansion of consciousness to include at the same time all the centres is not supernormal but is actually what a normal man should possess. This is the 3rd state of consciousness—the state of Self-Remembering or Self-Awareness—which is a man's right and into which he is born, but which he loses very soon owing to the effect of the sleeping people by whom he is surrounded. It is through wrong influences, wrong education, and the wrong conditions of modern life that Man has fallen away from this state of consciousness, which is his natural right, and which, if he possessed it, would make it impossible for him to act as he does to-day.

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Part III.—I will now speak of one or two things that the Work says which indirectly bear on the subject of Prayer. The Work says that in the Lord's Prayer, as in the parables and sayings in the Gospels, there is meaning within meaning. This is why it is said in the Work that the Gospels are a test for a man's level of understanding, and also that as a man changes, so do the Gospels for him. In the Lord's Prayer there are innumerable ideas. Each phrase has inner octaves. There are so many things in it to a man who has formed the ideas of the Work in his mind that to speak at all fully about the Lord's Prayer is to speak about every side and every single thing in the Work itself. To read the Prayer at times and think of all its connections, beginning with the octave from the Divine Intelligence of the Sun in which Man is created and of all the Work says of Man and his inner state and what he must do to awaken, is to use the Prayer in its real sense. To repeat the words is useless.

Now I will refer to one of the sayings of Christ quoted in the past paper on Prayer, where it is said that a man must pray for a thing and have faith that he has it, and he will get it. "All things whatsoever ye pray for and ask for, have faith that ye have received them, and ye shall have them." (Mark XI xxiv). Now it is said in the Work that a man must not wait until he has the force to do something but must act, if it is his aim, as if he had it already, and then he will attract it. To wait until you have the strength and understanding to do something—I am speaking of the Work—makes it impossible to do it. But you must each think of this for yourselves.

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Now I will add a few things. All prayer from self-pity is, of course useless. Prayer for others is only possible through understanding their difficulties and so through understanding yourself, for you understand others only so far as you understand yourself. All work is the preparation of lower centres for the reception of the influences coming from higher centres. Man has two centres fully developed in him and belonging to higher levels of intelligence. But though they are working all the time in him, he cannot hear them. Their influences touch the state of Self-Remembering, but go no further. So all work is prayer: for all real prayer is to connect Man with Heaven, and all work on oneself is to purify lower centres and make right order in the mind through being taught right knowledge, so that the influences of higher centres can be heard.

We can speak of different sorts of prayer:

(1) Prayer for Enlightenment or Understanding.
(2) Prayer about Temptation.
(3) Prayer about oneself and about others.

As regards (2), Prayer about Temptation, this refers to temptation about the Work. It is not necessarily answered, because the Work will answer it if you fight to hold to its teaching and apply it and use it. Remember that temptation in the Work and about it is necessary in order to change a man, and it follows that if you pray in this connection your prayer will not be answered, but if you work instead you will get a response. As I said, to pray when you should work, to expect help when you should make effort, is idle.

As regards prayer about oneself, it must be about others first and oneself last. Remember there are three levels of Work—Work for the Work, Work with others, Work on oneself. To pray only for oneself, to work only with regard to oneself and those connected by self-interests with one cannot give any result. Three forces must enter prayer, and this is too difficult to speak of at present, but you will find them in the Lord's Prayer if you think long enough about it.

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