In my last post on Nicoll I mentioned how his understanding of False Personality seemed promising. It is strange how things work out. I was not pursuing that idea, but rather, making efforts in a different direction (studying nothingness) when it occurred to me that something I was seeing in myself could be described as “vanity.” I turned to what Gurdjieff had said about “Mr Self-Love and Madame Vanity,” including the interesting observation that the greater freedom is from outside influences, and the lesser is from “self-pride (emotion) and vanity (body).” (Early Talks, 211)
Here, however, I will deal with some material in Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries, esp. in “Vanity,” 500-506, and “On Living More Consciously,” 921-924. Perhaps the most critical point is that we are all subject to these denying qualities, and that the inability to see them is due to their prevalence: after all, the more vanity there is in me, the more sensitive I am to evidence of this quality. To look at this from another angle, I would venture the opinion that simply having the question of whether I am subject to vanity (to keep it simple) is the first step to becoming aware of it; and that is the second step in becoming free of it (rendering it passive).
The more we see of this, the more we understand how poisonous vanity is. Nowhere else have I see the powerful description that because vanity gives us nothing real it leads to an obsessive search for more vanities to “produce an effect.” (503) But in fact, it can lead to nothing but more of the same, for as Gurdjieff said (and Ouspensky elaborated) “vanity by causing continual, unnatural, outward manifestations of oneself produced a certain formation or psychic substance that surrounded a person’s inner life and shut him or her in, as a prison of their own daily manufacture.” (503)
Rather than expand on this, or define “vanity” and “self-love,” projects which we should all be able to do for ourselves, I will move on to the relation between vanity and “false personality.” In this respect, the great revelation I found in Nicoll is that “false personality” can be taken as “vanity,” (921-922), or perhaps more precisely as the “certain formation or psychic substance” which always accompanies our inner life. In other words, “false personality” may be the four-dimensional expression of our vanity. That is, perhaps “false personality” stands to vanity as deafness stands to much exposure to loud noise, or blindness to the aggregation of small grains in the eye.
Nicoll points out that the activity of false personality ceases in the third state of consciousness, i.e. self-awareness. (922) This is, I suggest, an aspect of our nothingness: that what is prevalent when our state is characterised by our being non-entities, disappears in a higher state, for the lower state stands to the higher in the relation of zero to infinity (as I have elsewhere conjectured, https://www.josephazize.com/2024/08/25/de-salzmann-on-our-nothingness/).
The long-term solution is to live in a higher state, but in each of these commentaries Nicoll notes that the effort against vanity can be quite specifically described as separation (501 and 922). This is further evidence for the critical importance of the advanced means of “doubling” or “separation” which Gurdjieff taught during WWII, once a person has done enough ground work to be able to use this method.
In trying to observe vanity, and to at least mentally and emotionally separate ourselves from it, it might be useful, as Nicoll urges, to ponder how much of life is based on vanity. (922) In this respect he recalls pointing out to Ouspensky some pictures of grand ladies and proud men from olden days. Yes, said Ouspensky, it is patently obvious that they all suffered from the mental disease of vanity. (502) If we did the same with the people of our own day and age – not least ourselves – we might better see how prevalent vanity is, and how impressive we find it (when we are in a state of waking-sleep). We might then see how little things we do reflect the presence in us of this mental disease.
Incidentally, but significantly, these insights show the need for various methods: it is not enough to work to come to a good state through the exercises, because when we leave them for ordinary life, we are immediately subject to the hypnotic influence of the culture of vanity. We need to both wake up within our vanity (so to speak) and make it passive in ordinary life, and to experience states of consciousness free of it, so that eventually our ordinary life will be a waking life, a life more often in or influenced by the third states of consciousness: self-awareness, conscience, “I AM.”
For this blessed day to dawn, the work must and only can be gradual, for we are not yet strong enough to live lives stripped of all vanity and self-love. Nicoll here quotes the saying of Christ: “In your patience ye shall win your souls” Luke 21:19 (923) Nicoll also relates the idea of vanity as a mental disease to the Eucharist: how can we really celebrate the Eucharist if we are under its influence? (503-504) However, I will close with this quote:
The Work also teaches that through the terrible power of vanity, of pretending, of affectation, we ascribe to ourselves all sorts of qualities, capacities and values that we do not possess. … We believe we can help others when we cannot help ourselves. We believe we have some extraordinary merit or value which is not the case. We imagine we know ourselves and can do. … To gain an insight into vanity in oneself – that is, into this imaginary pseudo-side – is to begin to become more free. it is half-pleasant and half-painful. One part is glad. One part suffers. … When you think of the meaning of freedom you must ask: “Freedom from what?” (503)
