In the transformation of the self, what we experience in Time is the result of our level of Being.

It’s not quite a mantra, but the phrase “your Being attracts your life” appears six or seven times in Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries. Like the condensed wisdom of Yeshua’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, this phrase contains levels of meaning.

Maurice also has said that a cooked potato has a higher level of Being than a raw potato. (See this impression). The simplest explanation for this is that the cooked potato has been acted upon by intelligence from a higher level. Similarly, the fence posts in the image above have been acted on by a higher being, and their level of Being attracts the life pictured: one does not typically see fence posts standing alone in the forest. 

In the 1970s, I read a small book by E.F. Schumacher called Guide for the Perplexed. I wrote down many quotes from his book, as they struck me as true and valuable. Apparently, this is what I am drawn to do, as nearly 50 years later, I am still gathering quotes.

I recently decided to look for that book and found a digital copy online. Within a few pages, Schumacher discussed Maurice Nicoll, and on page 45, he quoted Gurdjieff’s statement that “your Being attracts your life.” 

Hmm. Cynthia Bourgeault talks about Imaginal causality coming from a center rather than being linear. Schumacher is the German word for shoemaker, as in Jacob Boehme, the German shoemaker and philosopher who lived around 1600 and envisioned much of Cynthia’s cosmology of the origin of manifestation.

Maurice says, “Levels of Being can be represented as points in the vertical line and form life by the horizontal line. If your level of Being changes, the horizontal line will pass through another point in the vertical line.” Commentaries, p101. Continuing on p106, “where the horizontal line cuts the vertical line marks the point of our level of Being, and what we experience in Time is the result of our level of Being.”

“As long as there is no change in your level of being, your personal history remains the same. Everything repeats itself in your own life: you say the same things, you do the same things, you regret the same things, you commit the same things. And all this belongs to this immensely deep idea that the level of being attracts your life. A higher level of being lies immediately above all of us at this very moment. It does not lie in the future of time but in ourselves at this very moment, now. All work on oneself, all personal work which deals with stopping negative emotions, with self-remembering, with not being identified with one’s woes and troubles, with not making accounts, is concerned with a certain action that can take place in oneself at this moment—now—if one tries to be more conscious and remembers what it is we are trying to do in this work.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries p2.

This begins to illuminate quotes from Cynthia and Maurice:

Maurice: “Your Being attracts your life”
Cynthia: “We perceive wisdom from a higher level as the future”
“The timeless wisdom that comes to us from another realm when we wake up is what we know as the future”
“The future is not what lies ahead, but the larger dimensions of the whole. The outer layers of meaning. The past doesn’t cause the future, wholeness does”

A few Logia from the Gospel of Thomas seem to resonate with the idea that “your Being attracts your life.”

Logion 70
Yeshua says...
When you give birth
to that which is within yourself,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you possess nothing within,
that absence will destroy you.

Logion 18
His student said to him,
"So, tell us, then, what our end and destiny will be?"
Yeshua answered,
"Have you already discovered your origin,
so that you are now free to seek after your end?
It is only at your source that you will find your destiny.
Blessed are those who come to stand
in their place of origination,
for it is there that they will know their end--
never tasting death."

Logion 3
Yeshua says...
If your spiritual guides say to you,
"Look, the Divine Realm is in the sky,"
well then the birds will get there ahead of you.
If they say, "It is in the sea,"
then the fish will precede you.
No, divine Reality exists
inside and all around you.
Only when you have come to know your true Self
will you be fully known—realizing at last that you are
a child of the Living One.
If, however, you never come to know who you truly are,
you are a poverty-stricken being,
and it is your "self" which lies impoverished.

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Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

All quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault are from The Vocabulary of Wisdom.

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.