(1.) Maurice Nicoll 1 - Letter to Mr. Bush [1.a] - p.1-4
This is the beginning of our sequential postings from Volume 1 of Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
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The Knapp,
Birdlip.
Gloucestershire.
27th March, 1941
Dear Bush,
I was very interested to have your report of the meeting on March 20th. I think it would be best if I wrote to you on the basis of the questions that you have reported to me and the personal notes that you made yourself.
In the first place what must be understood is that man on this earth is in a very strange situation. When I first heard about this idea of man it affected me very much. Ordinarily, of course, we imagine that man can grow and develop in what I might call the natural normal way, simply by education, example, and so on. Yet, if we look at history, we find that man has not really developed, and particularly if we look at the present day we cannot boast that man has reached any real further stage of development. Look for a moment at the horrors that humanity imposes on itself nowadays. Yet people are prone to imagine that time means progress and that everything is getting better and better as time passes. And as a rule people take the obvious contradictions as exceptional. That is to say, people are always inclined to think that what are really the usual and ever-present circumstances of life, in a bad sense, are exceptional. You will agree with me perhaps that people usually regard war as exceptional. Yet you must admit that if you pick up any book of history you will find that it deals with war in the main, with war, intrigue, people seeking power, and so on. Actually, unless we have the strength of mind to see what ordinary life on this planet is like, we will remain in imagination, or illusion, if you prefer, the word. As you know, in this system of work, amongst many sayings which have a great density of meaning—namely, that take a long time to understand—there is one saying that "the level of being of a man attracts his life". This saying applies to humanity in general—that is, the general level of humanity with regard to its being attracts the form of life that it experiences. It is useless to think that wars and horrors and revolutions, etc., are exceptional. What is at fault is the level of being of people. But nobody is willing to understand this and whenever war takes place, as I said, people take it as exceptional, and even speak about a future free from war, as soon as the existing war is over. We can see the same process at work now. History repeats itself because man remains at the same level of being—namely, he attracts again and again the same circumstances, feels the same things, says the same things, hopes the same things, believes the same things. And yet nothing actually changes. All the articles that were written in the last war are just the same as the articles written in this war, and will be for ever and ever. But what concerns us more is that the same idea applies to ourselves, to each individual person. As long as there is no change in the
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level of being, the personal history of a man remains the same. Everything repeats itself in his own life: he says the same things, he does the same things, he regrets the same things, he commits the same things. And all this belongs to this immensely deep idea that the level of being attracts his life.
Let us come to some of the main ideas which deal with the question of how a man can change his being. The whole of this work is about a change of being—that is, a change of the level of being at which a man naturally is—in ordinary life. What must be first realized here is that every one of us is at a certain level of being. In this connection we must visualize a vertical direction or a ladder extending as it were from below upwards and having many rungs on it. People—all of us—are on one or another of the rungs of this ladder that stands vertically below and above us. This ladder is quite different from time—namely, from past, present and future which we can imagine as a horizontal line. In order to make my meaning clearer, I would like to ask you how you imagine time—that is, the passage of time from the past into the present and into the future. Usually, the kind of mechanical hope that people hold on to is connected with the idea of time—namely, that in the future things will be better, or they themselves will be better, and so on. But this ladder of which we are speaking and which refers to different levels of being has nothing to do with time in this sense. A higher level of being lies immediately above all of us at this very moment. It does not lie in the future of time but in ourselves at this very moment, now. All work on oneself, all personal work which deals with stopping negative emotions, with self-remembering, with not being identified with one's woes and troubles, with not making accounts, etc., etc., is concerned with a certain action that can take place in oneself at this moment—now—if one tries to be more conscious and remembers what it is we are trying to do in this work. That is to say, the work is about a certain transformation of the instant, of the moment, of the present, through the action of this work. For example, a man finding himself in the depths of despair, if he observes the situation and tries to remember himself, or tries to give himself any other kind of conscious shock at that particular moment, such as remembering his aim—that is, in other words, if he tries to "transform himself", to transform his mechanical reaction to the circumstances that surround him at that moment—may find to his astonishment that quite suddenly everything is changed, his mood of depression vanishes, and he finds himself in a new atmosphere from which he wonders how he could have been in his former state. This represents a momentary change in the level of being because everything has, not an exact level of being, but a general average level of being in which there are higher and lower degrees. But here we are talking about the application of the work to change in regard to the level of being. We are talking about what I might call the third stage of a man and now I will explain what I mean by this.
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As was said, a man is born as essence and this constitutes his real part, the part from which he can really grow and develop. But this part in him can only grow in a very small way. It has not the strength to grow by itself any further after, say, the age of three or four or five. Let us call this the first stage of a man. That is, the first stage of a man is pure essence which by itself is capable of a certain amount of growth but reaches a point very soon in which it can grow no further. I notice in some of the questions asked in your letter to me that this point about man has not been understood so I am going to repeat it again. As I said, this system teaches that the essence in a man can only grow a very short way by itself. You have to try to see what I mean. People naturally think that growth and development is something continuous or that it should be, but here is this extraordinarily interesting idea taught by this system that this is not the case. Man's essence can only grow by itself unaided to a very small extent, and as such a man is nothing but a little child. Now in order for it to grow further something must happen. Something must form itself round essence and this is called personality. Essence must become surrounded by something that is really foreign to itself, acquired from life, which enters through the senses. A little child must cease to be itself and become something different from itself. As you were told, the centre of gravity of itself begins to pass from essence into personality. It learns all sorts of things, it imitates all sorts of things, and so on. This formation of personality around essence which is necessary for the development of essence can be called the second stage of man. But let us clearly understand what is meant here. The future development of essence depends on the formation of personality around it. If a very poor personality, a very weak personality, is formed round it, there is very little to help further growth of essence which we will speak of when we come to the third stage. In the second stage, the formation of personality is taking place, and, as was said, the richer the personality the better. But I notice that some of you do not understand what is meant here. The reason why you do not understand what is meant here is because you do not see this extraordinary situation that man is in—namely, that man cannot grow continuously from essence because essence is too weak to grow by itself. The further growth of essence depends first of all on the formation of personality and the richer the personality the better eventually for the growth of essence, but, ordinarily speaking, the formation of personality is quite sufficient for the purposes of life. A man finds himself in a good position, able to deal with life through the formation of a rich personality in him. And if he is satisfied, he is, for all life purposes, adequate. But this work, this teaching, is about a further stage of man, and this stage I will call the third stage.
You must understand that this work is not really about life; it is about something else that a man can begin to attempt quite apart from whether he is a successful politician, a famous scientist, or a well-respected butcher or baker or candlestick-maker. This work starts from
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man as good householder—namely, from a man who has developed personality and can deal with life in his own particular way, reasonably enough. That is to say, it starts from the level of good householder, which belongs to the second stage of a man's development. This third stage is all concerned with a possible further development of essence and that is why so many apparently paradoxical or at least strange things are said in the Gospels—such as are contained in the Sermon on the Mount—about man. They are all to do with allowing essence to grow at the expense of personality and this is the only way in which essence, which is too weak by itself to grow, can continue to develop. In this sense, personality, which is formed around essence, and must be formed round essence, becomes eventually, if this third stage is entered upon, the very source from which essence can grow further. Let us suppose that personality is in a particular person very richly developed. He is, then, a rich man, in the sense of the Gospels. He knows about everything, he is an important person, and so on. What is poor in him? What is poor in him is his essence. He is not yet a real man. What he does, he does to acquire merit, or from fear of loss of honour or reputation, and so on, but he does nothing from himself, nothing from the love of doing it, quite apart from praise, authority, position, popularity, or any other gain in the eyes of the world. Suppose that this man feels, in some way, like the Prodigal Son—namely, that he is eating nothing but husks. I mean simply that he may feel in himself very empty in spite of all his "richness". He has got the finest house or jewels, he has got a well-known name, he has in some way got the better of everybody else, and yet he feels empty. Such a man is approaching the third possible stage of development. He has now reached a position in which his essence—namely, his real part—can grow, and thus replace his feeling of emptiness by a feeling of meaning. But in order to bring about in man this further development he must begin, as it were, to sacrifice his personality and to go in a sense in the opposite direction to that in which he has gone up to now. In other words, a kind of reversal must take place in him which is well-expressed in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and unless we understand that this third stage is possible and leads to a man's real development we will never understand what the Gospels are speaking about or what this system is speaking about.