- “G. once said that “symbolism should act as a shock to our knowledge,” and spoke of four kinds – Hebrew, Egyptian, Persian, and Hindu.” (475, 15 July 1944, 116th commentary)
- “I remember G. saying once to us all in France: ‘Why are you here?’ This made us all think. Why were we there? Could I say to myself deeply I was there in order not to lose touch with the Work, or was all vanity … or what? … This is an example of a shock, given at a certain moment rightly.” (477, 15 July 1944, 116th commentary)
- “G. once said that “patience is the Mother of Will.” (482, 22 July 1944, 118th commentary)
- “On one occasion G. was speaking of aim. He asked people round him what was their aim. People said different things – such as that they wished always to be happy or to do good to others and so on. Someone said: “I wish for self-mastery.” G. said at once that this was a real aim. “This,” he said in so many words, “is something the Work is about. This I can teach you if you are willing to go through all the difficulties that must be overcome to attain it. Real Will is possible because it exists in Man. It is Master. But Man is cut off from it.” (485, 29 July 1944, 119th commentary) This is probably indebted to an account given to Nicoll by Ouspensky, for it is similar to what Ouspensky wrote in In Search of the Miraculous. But it is not identical, and it adds some very significant material.
- Speaking of insincerity with oneself, Nicoll wrote: “… if you touch this Work up to a point and are really insincere to it in yourself, it can become very dangerous. Identity may kill you, as G. once said.” (487, 29 July 1944, 119th commentary)
- “On one occasion years ago I was sitting with O. in a small oldfashioned inn in which were many old coloured prints of former bucks and generals and grand ladies, all dressed in the most extraordinary costumes, wigs, hair-fashions and so on, belonging to the period. I pointed them out to him. He said: “Yes, you can see how everyone represented there has a mental disease—namely, vanity.” And then he turned to me with a smile and said: “You are a psychological doctor, whatever it is called. Why do you not write a book about real mental diseases?” I said, as carefully as I could: “Whom should I begin with?” His eyes twinkled—and I knew of course that he meant with myself— and then he said: “Well, with Hasnamous men. Start with Lentromuss.” This term G. invented and formed out of Lenin, Trotsky and Mussolini. Hasnamous men are people like Napoleon who derive their wellbeing from the ill-being of others. He went on to say: “Actually, no one is sane. To the Circle of Conscious Humanity we on this Earth are all insane—much more insane than the vain monkeys appear to us. In the East it was once the custom to regard lunatics as sacred and visited by God. I have often thought of this. Are you sure that our ordinary ideas of what a lunatic is and what a sane man is are not wrong? Are not we perhaps the lunatics and the lunatics sane? To really see what we are like ourselves …” He shrugged his shoulders, and became silent. (502, 20 August 1944, 123rd commentary)
The name “Lentromuss” is not known to me from any other source. But if this is entirely correct, then it means that Ouspensky had access to an early version of Beelzebub. It also tells us what Gurdjieff thought of the three named authoritarians.
- “Nothing can grow from False Personality save increasing inventions of oneself, increasing falseness.” He said—and this reminded me of something G. had said—that 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 in a prison of their own daily manufacture. A person becomes enclosed in his or her vanity-pictures and then cannot make contact with anything real, after a time, even though he or she wishes to. Their own creations, their own posturing and pretence and self-absorption, that they have nourished with so much force, render them impotent to understand anything or be anything. (503, 20 August 1944, 123rd commentary)
- “G. once said that it was necessary to collect a large number of photographs of oneself and keep them in an album, so that one could see them together.” (509, 2 September 1944, 124th commentary). This is almost identical to material in In Search of the Miraculous.
- “A man,” said G., “is not a man unless he remembers himself. But, when he realizes he does not remember himself he soon finds that he cannot remember to remember himself. His habits of forgetting himself and being asleep in life are too strong.” (511, 16 September 1944, 125th commentary)
- I suspect that the following is from Gurdjieff: “On one occasion it was said: ‘We are not even conscious in one force, still less in two, and never in three’.” (517, 23 September 1944, 126th commentary)
- “You must,” said G., “be capable of being turned and twisted in every direction in this Work and keep your direction”. This means, of course, that your valuation of the Work, your attitude to it, your love of it, is stronger than all the manifestations of the self-love. Nothing that can happen to you can break you. The Work is then another being in you, another body. But this being, this body, cannot be formed from the self-love.” (526, 7 October 1944, 128th commentary)
to be continued