Life, coming in as impressions, must be transformed. This state of consciousness leads to thinking and understanding in a new way.
“In this system of teaching, man is regarded as a three-story factory, taking in three foods—ordinary food on the lower floor of the factory, air on the second floor, and impressions on the third floor. When we eat food it is transformed successively, stage by stage, into all the substances necessary for our existence. However, in regard to the third food, the food of impressions, they enter and remain undigested. There is no adequate transformation of impressions. It is not necessary for the purpose of nature that man should transform impressions. But a man can transform his impressions himself, if he has sufficient knowledge and understands why it is necessary.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p50
“The first realization of the meaning of this work is to understand that life, coming in as impressions, must be transformed. There is no such thing as “external life”. What all the time you are receiving is impressions. You see a person you dislike—that is, you get impressions of this nature. You see a person you like—that is, you get impressions once more. Life is impressions, not a solid material thing such as you suppose and believe is reality. Your reality is your impressions.” Commentaries, p51
“If you can, through the understanding of the Work, take life as work, then you are in a state of self-remembering. This state of consciousness leads to the transformation of impressions—and so of life as regards yourself. That is, life no longer acts on you in the old way. You begin to think, and to understand, in a new way. And this is the beginning of your own transformation. For as long as we think in the same way we take in life in the same way and nothing changes in us. To transform the impressions of life is to transform oneself, and only an entirely new way of thinking can effect this. All this work is to give you an entirely new way of thinking. Let me give you one example. You are told in the work that if you are negative it is always your own fault. The whole situation as recorded by the senses must be transformed. But to understand this, it is necessary to begin to think in an entirely new way. You all can understand that life is continually causing us to react to it. All these reactions form our life—our own personal life. To change one’s life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one’s reactions. But unless we can see that outer life comes in as impressions which cause us to react in stereotyped ways, we cannot see where the point of possible change comes in, where it is possible to work.” Commentaries, p52
“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.” Commentaries, p53-54
“Impressions coming in through the senses fall, as it were, on a thick net which catches everything. This net is the Personality, with its strong Buffers, its fixed Attitudes, its mechanical Associations, its Rolls automatically set in motion, and its ideas that it knows and can do, with all its contradictory ‘I’s, with all the different forms of negative emotion, which it has acquired by imitation, with all its habits of identifying, considering, self-justifying, imagining and lying, centred in the False Personality. All these prevent impressions from passing on in their normal transformations. In other words, something opaque, as it were, has formed itself at the place where impressions enter, and closed up the way for their passage onwards.” Commentaries, p57
“How can a person bring the Work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the Work emotionally. The more a man through right self-observation feels his own helplessness, the more he realizes his ignorance, the more he sees his mechanicalness and that he is a machine, the more he preceives his own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the Work become to him. In that case, False Personality will begin to collapse and a man will become ‘as a little child’. This is one meaning of the saying : ‘Except ye become as little children’. If a man’s love no longer runs always into himself, into his habitual ideas of himself, his strange vanity and esteem of himself—that is, into False Personality—then the direction of his will alters—that is, the resultant of his desires alters. When the valuation of the truth of esoteric teaching becomes stronger than self-valuation, it begins to act on a man. He begins to take everything differently. The whole way in which he reacts to outer life changes. (Why cannot you all understand that life is impressions?) He no longer reacts to impressions from his mechanical personality by always saying the same things, feeling the same things, and so on. He begins to act from the work—that is, in quite a new way. The work comes up to the place where life is entering him as impressions and stands beside him. He begins to see life through the work and instead of wasting his time in hundreds of forms of useless internal considering or negative reactions, or of identifying, he seeks for the power of the work to help him to change these mechanical reactions which he is now aware of by observation and to transform his habitual ways of taking things. He begins to live more consciously at this point where life is entering as impressions.” Commentaries, p58
“If you are driven by the external, phenomenal world you are mechanical, but when you begin to select your impressions and only respond to a few of them your internal world begins to grow and you begin to become an individual distinct from life and its events. This is what is meant by psycho-transformism. But if you are driven by life, by everything that happens in life, depressed by reading the papers, depressed or angry with everything that happens externally in the phenomenal world, you are a machine. The Work says that you can take external impressions coming from the external phenomenal world mechanically or consciously. It also says that unless you begin to take them consciously, you remain a machine driven by life. Every time a typical event comes along to you from the external world you are identified with it and become subject to it, a slave to it. Once you begin to separate from an external impression, if it is unpleasant, you begin to grow in your internal world. This is the first idea of psycho-transformism.” Commentaries, p1308
“You must start from the realization that you do not know other people, however familiar to you they are. And so also with everything. We do not really know. But we are sure we know. Start from the idea that you do not know and have never known. Start, that is, from ignorance. This is the ‘poor’ side. And this gives new life because you begin to get new impressions, new viewpoints, new understanding. If impressions fall on essence, you see in a new way.” Commentaries, p295
Logion 4
Yeshua says...
A person of advanced age must go immediately
and ask an infant born just seven days
about life's source.
Such asking leads to life
when what is first becomes last.
United they become a single whole.
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.
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