commentary by maurice nicoll..
Amwell, 19.2.49
COMMENTARY ON SCALE
WORK-IDEA
"Things are on different scales."
COMMENTARY
It is necessary to understand that things are on different scales.
For instance, our personal grievances
are on a different scale from the
national difficulties of the country we live in. When war is declared,
something happens on a different
scale from our personal troubles.
We live on the Earth, which is clearly
on a different scale in size from
our personal stature. If it blows up, we are physically blown up, as in
an earthquake, such as that of Messina, where 100,000 human beings
were killed in a moment without warning. An earthquake belongs to
the scale of the Earth. A personal quarrel belongs to the scale of oneself
—that is, the Man-Woman scale. In
great matters, as earthquakes or
famine, or war and its desolation, the
scale of personal grievances as a
rule ceases to have much power over us. In a forest-fire, or in a drought,
wild animals cease to attack one anot
her. In a hard winter, deer come
down from the snows to get food from Man. A great common danger
dissolves the scale of personal antagonism. This is interesting, for the
world of humanity is full of personal
and natural antagonisms. It
means that only something bigger, greater, on another scale, can destroy
the power that they exert. I said
just now that this is interesting.
So it follows that if you have no sense of anything higher, anything
greater, than yourself, you will not be able to change.
Now the idea of what is called religion was to bring into the consciousness
of a man or woman the constant sense of something greater
than themselves in daily life—in short, to give a continual sense of
greater scale. No doubt God is not interested
in different religions, but
only in their effect on this
feeling of I.
And, as you know, any religion
can easily produce a feeling of me
rit and superiority which is, of
course, the reverse of what it wa
s invented for—for example, "Thank
God, I am not as other men . . ." Bu
t here we have an idea of very
great consequences to our understanding of the Work. The Work says
that unless a man can comprehend the idea of
Greater Mind,
he will be
faced with endless difficulties in receiving it. It says a man, a woman,
must have
Magnetic Centre,
which, briefly, is a sense or intuition of
higher influences and of the impossibi
lity of Nature's creating itself or
of life's being explicable
in terms of itself.
Now it is this feeling that the visible world—the minute part of
total creation opened to our limi
ted senses—is not the sum total of
reality, that makes it possible to do this Work in a spirit of under-
standing. For those who say that visibl
e nature created itself, it is impossible
to do this Work. Why? Be
cause they have something upside
down in their minds. Such are like people who, having a radio, take
it to bits to find out where the
music comes from. Are not invisible
forces playing on the radio ? And is not the radio
made
to receive them ?
Then how can you attempt to explain
the radio in terms of itself?
And so it is the same with the brain.
Now you can explain the radio
in terms of its parts. Also you
can remove brains and study them
under the microscope. But will you
thereby find out why they exist?
Can you explain anything in terms of itself? You can take a picture
and analyse its paint, canvas, etc. Will this explain the picture? No.
The radio instrument can only be explained
in terms of the invisible—
the wireless waves which are inaudible, invisible, intangible, but become
intelligible to us
via
a machine that transforms for us what our
very limited senses cannot pick up. And so it is with Higher Centres
and our preparation of lower centres to hear what they say to us all
the time.
All esotericism begins with the idea that there is something
higher.
Exoteric systems, such as religions, say that this something higher is
God, which people of sensory understanding take as something outside
them, in the sky, so to speak. Esoter
ic systems say that this "something
higher" is in you—not outside you in the visible world—but within
you as a higher possible and existing level
of yourself, not yet attained,
but there already. So Christ said: "The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you." A man, a woman, following the ex
oteric path, thinks of a thunder-
storm, an earthquake, a drought, a famine, as an external god acting
unfavourably. But esotericism teaches that if you get negative and
delight in all that, you descend in your level of
understanding, and so move towards hell.
The Ray of Creation can give rise to many thoughts that belong
to the development of a new way of thinking. The Work says that it
is to make you think in a new way. It
also says that if you continue to
think as you always did, you
cannot change—that is, you cannot
undergo that possible change latent in Man by his creation as a self-
developing organism and which is his real meaning. All that I have
just said requires careful thinking—otherwise it may go in at one ear
and out at the other and leave no
trace in your mind. There is one
thing that can be said for certain—and that is that you have to make
mental effort in this system called the Fourth Way. You cannot think
in a new way unless you make an ef
fort to do so. Now, amongst many
other things, learning to think in terms of scale is to think in a new
way. To do so puts the mind in right order. To start with oneself puts
the mind in wrong order. For example,
if you put the Work first, as
something greater, and yourself after,
then you will get help. Vice
versa, you will get none. Why? Because things are the wrong way
round in your mind.
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