Since I wrote my review of Lachman’s unfortunate biography of Maurice Nicoll, I have completed re-reading Informal Work Talks. The depth of insight there is even greater than I had remembered. Before I take up some of its themes, I might note that, as Ouspensky said, when he was asked to publish his lectures, there is more life in the questions and answers from group meetings. It is striking how strong Gurdjieff’s and Bennett’s answers to the questions asked were. I think that it will generally be so: the dynamic of the group can be a factor which produces a sort of “reservoir of attention,” if I can call it that. People often speak vaguely of “an energy,” but that is hardly specific enough. There is, in a real group, evidence of an attention that makes new insights possible: a level of thought maintained with higher parts of the intellectual centre. Of course, real groups are rare. They require not only someone with understanding, but also students who was making efforts to be three-centred. And then, if the group leader and the students can hold a line of study, the results are exponentially greater. The group is not even 50% for the material which emerges, I would say, it is probably 80% for the being-efforts made in the actual moment.
Nicoll’s groups must sometimes at least have been of such an exalted nature, because the material which emerged in the groups in this book is so high. I think the book is misnamed: these were not chiefly talks given spontaneously, they are notes of group meetings – although there is no indication of how they were taken down.
Perhaps the chief matter which struck me is Nicoll’s grasp of the reality of higher levels. Mr Adie often used to say that the Work can bring two lives simultaneously: life on earth under the sun and life under the stars.
On 22 February 1942, Nicoll presented his group with a plan of “The Sun Octave” (16). I present it as follows:
Sun Do 12 Real I
All Planets Si 24 Essence
La
Organic Life Sol Personality
Fa
Earth Mi 48 Body
Moon Re 96 False Personality
Now, although their subject matter is not the same, there is a significant difference between this and a diagram which Gurdjieff drew in Russia (Miraculous 94):
All Suns Fourth Body, 6 Laws
Sun Mental Body, 12 Laws
All Planets Astral Body, 24 Laws
Earth Physical Body, 48 Laws
I understand the Fourth Body to be “Real I.” Other than that, the two schemes deal with different matters, but there is significant overlap if my interpretation of the Fourth Body is correct. I see no need to try and reconcile them in theory because the important thing is the overlap: that only our physical body comes from this Earth. Both diagrams agree in that and its being under 48 Laws.
It is worth noting that Nicoll’s understanding of False Personality is different from Ouspensky’s. The latter insisted that it was a confusion to relate it to “Personality,” and belonged to an entirely different category, something like mistaking the country China for the ceramic. Several times in Informal Talks, Nicoll relates the two categories, e.g. “All Personality is acquired. It can be real as forming the potential and eventual food for Essence, or it can be unreal, or False Personality” (53) If this material is taken with his other indications, especially in Selections from Meetings in 1953, we have an approach to the concept of False Personality which can vividly show the value of this teaching.
What is significant about the Sun Octave diagram is that it shows how we are made up of various parts, some of which come from a level which, for us, is divine. It is wrong to say “divine,” but we can say “relatively divine.” But we should not for that reason talk down our possibilities, our potential. It is hard to maintain a balance between keeping one’s feet on the ground and aspiring to the stars, but it is equally a mistake to over-emphasise one or the other. I may be wrong, but from what I can see, many people with an interest in Gurdjieff’s system devote attention to little but life on the earth, and understate the possibility of the experience of the life of a level above. The right balance does not mean giving equal time: the right amount of salt in a stew may be minute, but if there is no salt at all …
Nicoll did, I think, have a good balance, and this is part of the significance of his interest in what he called the Puer aeternus, the “eternal boy.” In this volume, there is extracted a passage where Nicoll speaks of the Puer as an intermediary between the higher and lower centres (xxiii-xxiv). If I want to mount from the earth to an elevated level, I need to take a step. Depending on their relative levels, it may be one or more steps. But the point is that the Puer represents a dynamic movement – the taking of a step: an internal action related to something higher which I sense. As Nicoll notes in his commentaries, this is what Our Lord was referring to when He said: “Except you become as children …” There is no actual Puer, nor do I make something. Rather, the Puer aeternus is a symbol of an active, curious, yet innocent aspect of ourselves which dwells in our essential being. That aspect can enter into our being-state and our being-attitude. Perhaps because he is a symbol, or even better, a sacred image, Nicoll made much of a statuette of the Puer.
This brings us to what Nicoll had to say about “directed imagination.” The ability to form a conscious image of my life as an “miraculous adventure,” so that I sense myself as someone “being in life, not of life or caused by life …” (116) This of course brings us back to where we commenced, wondering at the teaching that real I comes from a solar level, and that other elements of ourselves such as the mental and astral bodies (of which we have the substances and the possibility of crystallising them) from levels not quite so exalted as that, yet above this level of the earth so that truly we can consciously participate in the miracle of that cosmic life of which the organic world here is an element.
P.S. 2 November 2024
It has struck me that another advantage of noting the answers of people like Nicoll in groups is this: when we write we tend to go over the same ground our minds always return to. But someone else roams in a different field. When they ask Nicoll about what they see from their field, this may reveal to him the importance of something he had available to him but which he would not, by himself, have come to, whether because he assumed it to be known, thought he had said it, or it had just not occurred, or whatever. Questions from other perspectives can lead us to new perspectives on what we have understood from our experience and knowledge. The group can bring a force of attention and sympathy (these two are not unrelated) which facilitates some of the inspired answers Nicoll gave,
