Today is 30 August 2026. Nicoll died on 30 August 1953. I attach here some notes from Living Time. My interest in these is how they prefigure Gurdjieff’s “Expanded Present Moment Exercise.” At least, I take it to be Gurdjieff’s. I know that the estimable John G. Bennett taught that exercise, in several forms; and Mr Adie had a certain version of it. I may well be wrong, but I think the similarities between the two exercises are so close that one should look for a common source.

“… life, rightly conceived, is not merely a local phenomenon in passing time, confined to the point we call the present, and isolated in the visible three dimensional world. As direct experience, it is so – but it is more. It is more because we are not regarding three dimensional space as the sole container of things. It is the sole container so far as empirical experience – that is, the experience of our senses revealeds the ‘world’ to us. We are trying to force our thoughts beyond the limits of sense, beyond that aspect of the total WORLD rendered by sense, towards the realm of idea.” (p.101)

For Nicoll, as for Plato, ideas are cosmic entities. My understanding is that the ideas brought by Gurdjieff need to be put into action to have an effect in our lives, and perhaps the three main ways of doing so are using his contemplative exercises, Movements and taking tasks in life. All these taken together can be called “conscious labours and intentional suffering.” To continue.

“We actually find such an exercise recommended in a passage from the ancient Hermetic literature … To reach another state, another level of understanding, we are told to ‘expand ourselves to the magnitude of all existence’. Only in this way, the writer says, can the life become permanently unified (‘changed into eternal substance’).

“What is ‘the magnitude of all existence’?”

“The sense of existence throughout all one’s Time is meant – the sense of this living ‘organism’ in higher space which contains the little living organism of the temporal body. Think that you are not yet begotten,  that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places’ (Hermetica, OUP 1924, vol. I, 221)” (101-102)

This passage is from the chapter “Living Time.” Different editions have various numbering. It is worth reading the book as a whole, but he speaks for two pages further about this exercise. I have no reason to believe that Nicoll was ever taught the “Expanded Present Moment Exercise” by Gurdjieff, or anyone else. It seems to be an idea which he found in literature, and which resonated with him. He tried to place some of what he came to in “Pelican Hotel,” which I hope to publish this year, or in 2027.

I believe it is worthwhile remembering pioneers such as Nicoll, especially perhaps on the day of their deaths – their birth day into eternity.