How a person is trapped in mechanical reactions at a low level of consciousness.

A person’s personality may be “compared in the Work with a secretary who sits in the front room, dealing with everything according to her own ideas. She has a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias and reference books, etc. round about her and rings up the three centers—that is, the mental, the emotional and the physical centers—according to her limited ideas. The result is that the wrong centers are nearly always being rung up. This means that incoming impressions are sent to the wrong places and produce the wrong results. A man’s life depends on this secretary, who mechanically looks up things in her reference books without any understanding of what they really mean and transmits them accordingly without caring what happens, but feeling only that she is doing her duty. This is our inner situation.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p53

“Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us. All of what we think of as life is mechanical reactions to impressions. Life is our impressions of it, and these can be transformed.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p54

“It is good to begin to see that your way of taking life is your life. Your mechanical reactions are you. To work on oneself is to be in the Work, not in life. Try to think that it is not life you can  change, but yourself in reaction to life.” Commentaries, p138-39

“A person can be mechanically good or mechanically bad, and yet, strangely enough, the Work teaches that both are the same. But for the mechanically good person the problem will be how to make him or her consciously good, instead of automatically good. For such people can be in this Work year after year and never realize that their goodness is mechanical, and this is a very difficult problem to deal with, for their very goodness prevents them from understanding the Work. ” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1431-32

“The emancipation of ourselves from mechanicalness begins with self-observation, with slow insight into the fact that whatever you do, however you react, is mechanical.” Commentaries, p1433

Mechanically good people “will never understand that goodness means acting in the right way, which may be in one way at one moment and in another way at the next moment. They think it means acting always in the same way, instead of realizing that goodness is infinitely flexible, and is different at different times. A rigid associative path laid down in the associative center gives a rigid sense of what is good and bad, and it is from this that we judge others inflexibly without understanding or mercy. However, the Work makes it possible for us no longer to live such a rigid and sterile life, because, seeing in ourselves the things that we judge others for gives infinite flexibility in our associations, and this gives rise to mercy, forgiveness and all that really belongs to Good and Truth.” Commentaries, p1434

Maurice stresses that we believe that our senses give us reality. Our sensory perspective is that life is outside of us, and we perceive it and react to it. The Wisdom perspective is that life is inner. As Yeshua might say, we can begin to change our relationship with the cosmos.

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Logion 17
Yeshua says...
What your own eyes cannot see,
your human ears do not hear,
your physical hands cannot touch,
and what is inconceivable to the human mind--
that I will give to you!

From Logion 27:
If you do not fast from the cosmos,
you will never grasp Reality.

Logion 56
Yeshua says...
Those who make knowledge of the cosmos their specialty
have made friends with a corpse.
The cosmos is not worthy
of those who know it to be so.


Logion 111
Yeshua says...
Heaven and earth will completely disappear
in your presence,
and the one who lives by means of the Living One
will not see death,
because, as Yeshua says,
'The cosmos is not worthy
of the one who discovers the true Self.'

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See more Impressions on Self-Observation.

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)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.