maurice nicoll on the work...
...
I remind you
that this Work was always said to be esoteric Christianity—namely,
the inner meaning and fragrance of the Gospels that has survived.
The Gospels speak a great deal about the Kingdom of Heaven and what
it is necessary to do to enter it. The Gospels say that you have to
become a quite different person to have any chance of entering the
Kingdom of Heaven. They also say that unless a man becomes as a
little child he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, but what does
it mean practically? The Work talks not about the Kingdom of Heaven
but about the Conscious Circle of Humanity, and by that it means
people at a much higher level of Being than we are at as we are now.
Christ lays down certain rules, certain indications, certain teachings,
about how to get to the Kingdom of Heaven. These are given in the
Sermon on the Mount, and we are given a perfectly clear indication
as to how we may reach the Conscious Circle of Humanity, by work
on our Being, by work on our level of Being as we are now. I fancy that
the Sermon on the Mount cannot be understood as it is translated save
through what we have been given through this Work. By means of
what we have been given by this Work on its practical side we can
understand more or less what the opening verses of the Sermon on the
Mount, which have been so badly translated by ignorant people,
really mean. As I said, we can understand what it means to be poor
in spirit in the right way.
Now let me speak about the next level of Being awaiting you.
What for you is the Kingdom of Heaven? What for you is the Conscious
Circle of Humanity? It is no good thinking about matters very
remote from you. The whole thing is very close to you—in fact,
"closer than your neck-vein". Your Kingdom of Heaven, your
Conscious Circle of Humanity, is your next level of Being, which lies very
close to but very distinct from your present level of Being. That is
why it is such a good thing to work on yourself. That is why once
you begin to see this you feel that you have something that no one
will ever take away from you. You begin to understand what the
Work is about, what the Kingdom of Heaven is about, what the
Conscious Circle of Humanity is about, on your own scale. Each one
of you can become a little more conscious than you are. Each one of
you, whether man or woman, can live a little more consciously than
you do. Each one of you can feel the force of the Work entering you
in the ordinary affairs of the day. You can do this Work, remember.
You cannot do in life, but you can do this Work. I remember it was
once said a long time ago by G. that we must remember that we can do
this Work. What would be the good of teaching a system of Work that
no one could do? He said: "All call out in loud voices and say: I can
work." We did this and I think we all got force from it. So every
one of you say to yourselves sometimes just this phrase: "I can work,"
because this is what we can do. I can remember myself according to
my own level; I can separate from negative emotions according to
my own state and my own level; I can stop making internal accounts;
I can practise non-identifying; I can stop fantasies; I can stop self-
justifying; and so on. And even if it is only for a short time yet you
are working if you can do this and you will change your level of Being,
not downwards, but upwards, not outwards, but inwards, and through
this you will come under different influences, better influences, influences
in other words that belong to your next level of Being, your next
telegraph wire, this next level of Being close to you and above you. But
you will never get up to this telegraph wire, this next level of Being,
unless you practise this Work and you cannot practise it unless you
begin to feel its good and so begin to value it as one of the most important
things you have ever met in your life, because if you do not value this
Work and if you do not see that it is about something other than what
you have ever done before in your life, it will simply pass into your
ordinary level of Being, your mechanical Being, and will become twisted
and distorted and useless.
Some of you know that there is discontinuity in the Universe.
This has been discovered and verified by experiment. In other words,
there are different levels discontinuous with one another. The level
of Being awaiting you just above your present line which is your evolu-
tion, your inner development, your inner growth, is discontinuous with
your present level, just as one rung of a ladder is not continuous with
the next. You have to jump. You cannot apply the methods of thinking
that you have at your present level of Being to the Work because the
Work comes down from above to you and you have to go from below
upwards to it. You may argue that it is a very good thing to be identified
but the Work says it is not and you have to see for yourself by inner
experience through long self-observation that it is not good to identify.
The Work comes down very close but it is not on the same level.
Now suppose you have been in this Work for some time and you
have heard many things said in the Work and you have always taken
all the things you have heard just on the level of your Being as it is
now, then I will tell you at once that you have never tried to apply
the Work but simply listened to it. You have never observed yourself
from what this Work teaches. You have no Work-Observing 'I' formed
in you. You have never seen where and how you are identified with
yourself, you have never observed your pictures, your imagination of
yourself, you have never observed your forms of internal considering,
making accounts. You have never observed when you lie. You have
never observed your forms of self-justifying. You have never observed
different 'I's in yourself or even different centres in yourself. You are
simply asleep at your level of Being and however earnestly you may
tell me that you want the Work I will not believe you in my heart.
I notice that such people say to me: "I would like to hear more about
the Work." But if I am a teacher of Greek and have taught you
over and over again how to pronounce some simple word and make
a few simple sentences and I notice that not one of you can speak even
a single word of Greek, then I will come to the conclusion that it is
useless teaching you Greek. One person, however, may suddenly begin to
speak some quite good Greek to me and I realize that this person has been
taking in what has been said practically and has really begun to work.
So once more, at the end of this paper, I ask you again as so often:
What work have you done on yourself to-day? Have you observed,
each one of you, anything of what the Work teaches you about yourself?
Have you noticed yourself being very identified? Have you noticed
yourself being negative? Have you noticed yourself laying up a lot of
accounts against others as by criticizing them, seeming superior to
them, thinking they are fools? Have you noticed your forms of imagination
and given them free play? Have you been full of self-pity? Have
you been gloomy and depressed and useless to others? Have you spoken
only mechanically and said things mechanically when you might have
said things more consciously? Has the day defeated you or have you
defeated the day? Have you lost force all the time or have you gained
force? Have you got the feeling that you are doing something else
than merely living the day and objecting to it? Have you gone to
the day or has the day made you go to it? In all this you will see a
great difference between living mechanically and living your life more
consciously. We all suffer from our level of Being. We have to see that
we ourselves have to do something, each one of us. The mechanical
way in which we take everything characterizes our level of Being. We
have to take things differently and the Work shews us in what way we
must begin to take things differently. And even if you have behaved
badly, if you have given way to negative emotion and even worse
experiences, if you have reacted mechanically, you can go back and
see where you went to sleep and in some way correct it, and remember
next time that you have to live more consciously, for all this Work is
about how to live more consciously in mechanical life.
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