“Whenever we remember ourselves in the mechanical sense by remembering our miseries and suffering, we are like Lot’s wife.” Maurice Nicoll
”No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.” (Luke IX, 62.)
“The tendency in the traditionalist movement is to look backward for truth. Look toward the past for truth and reorientation. The tendency in Gurdjieff, he has a whole thing that’s different, is that these higher sources of wisdom and teaching do exist, but they don’t exist in the past. They exist at a higher level of being, that’s his word.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 17:00 03 – TUES AM Teaching.
“I think that when you step into the Gurdjieff Work, what you get drenched in when you really give yourself to it, and when you get in a group where they’re doing music and not just pondering the ideas, is you discover the heart. And you discover the profundity and you discover that while you may not have, you know, what looks like as good a deal as an individual, you participate at the personal level, at a reality which is so far beyond what you could ever have as an individual, that you don’t ever look back.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 45:17 11 – FRI PM Teaching.
“On our journey, some of the two of the biggest saboteurs are nostalgia and envy. We tend to do our journey looking back. We have a spiritual breakthrough. We have this moment of intense awakening, enlightenment. And then we spend the next 20 years of our life trying to recreate it. And it never recreates. Because you have to look forward. It wasn’t there to get you glued to looking backward. And that regret and backward looking is one of the big drains of our energy. Thomas Kelly, the Quaker mystic, has a wonderful line about that: ‘continuously renewed immediacy, not fading, not visions or nostalgia for a fading touch, is the basis of mature religious living.’ And it takes a lot of courage to turn and walk in the direction of what’s to be without lingering like Lot’s wife looking over the back of your head at what’s past. But every spiritual teacher in every tradition I’ve ever been with hits you on exactly the same point. Don’t look back.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 44:00 19 Wed eve QA
“Understand that the self-love is different from the love of neighbor or the love of God. These are the three stages of development. A man, to develop, has to leave the first stage, because all that is formed and laid down by the genius of self-love is wrongly connected. It is simply a bad bit of machinery. This is Sodom. Consider what arises from the undisciplined and unrecognized self-love. From it come all the delights of power and possession, whether on a big or on a small scale. From it arises every kind of appearance, every sort of deceit, falseness, lying and external pretense. And from it more deeply come hatred, revenge, the unpleasant pleasure in harming others, all sorts of cruelties and making mischief, which can give a secret feeling of power to the self-love and inflate it. All this is Sodom, whether viewed in the realm of a man’s thought or in the realm of his feelings or in the realm of his actions. For the change of a man into another state of being he must leave this former state. So Lot must leave Sodom and the angels warn him that he cannot linger and that once set out on his journey he must not look back.
“The journey is a psychological journey, for, when a man passes from his previous inner state to a new one, he has gone on a journey from one state of himself to another. These journeys on a small scale are always taking place in us. Things are always moving in us. But here it is a journey from a lower to a higher level. Lot must leave the plain and go to the mountains and this means that nearly everything in him that is related to his previous level must die or be abandoned. A man is related or connected to different sides of himself in different ways. Just as he has outside relations in the external world, such as mother, father, wife, daughter, son, and so on, so has he relations in his internal world of thoughts, feelings and desires, of ideas, aspirations, of different glimpses of truth and of knowledge, of different states of himself, of different wishes, different insights, different perceptions, different aims and so on. Lot’s wife is a relationship or connection in Lot that had to become sterile. It was a fruitful connection with Sodom. The death of this intimate relation is represented by Lot’s wife looking back and being turned to a pillar of salt.” Maurice Nicoll, The Mark, p38-39
“A man gives up spiritual striving in the real sense of ‘he himself ‘ and begins to look back or goes back. He is disturbed by outer trouble. So he becomes sterile – and probably more successful in life. But spiritually he becomes a pillar of salt, because he gives up something indefinable and yet known to everyone internally, if they wish to know it. Is not this one of the most difficult things to see and understand – in one’s own case? How many little pillars of salt lie in one’s time-body – in one’s living past? And how many pillars of salt exist in life, walking the streets daily?” Maurice Nicoll, The Mark, p32
“Whenever we remember ourselves in the mechanical sense by remembering our miseries and suffering, we are like Lot’s wife. Our heads are turned round the wrong way and we look back into the past and then we are nourished by all sorts of unhappy memories which are engraved on rolls in negative parts of centers. We have to remember that we are now in this Work. This at once is a real form of Self-Remembering. A negative person must learn through personal self-observation not to remember his accounts and not to go with typical small negative ‘I’s that lie around like sharp points in the ground which only open old wounds.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p898.
“A man, a woman, can look backwards, psychologically speaking, or look forwards. Here in the Work a great struggle is delineated, about which I will only say that if you believe in all this Work teaches you will be able to look forwards. And I am not speaking of new success in business or women or appointments or honor. No—I mean that something internal reverses its direction and you then realize that one must never look back. Christ said: “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.” (Luke IX, 62.)
Now if you habitually receive impressions negatively you will inevitably look back and so become ill. Not only that, if you are in the Work you will not be able to get on in it because whatever force you may make by Work-efforts will always be eaten by these habitual negative emotions which will cause you to lose all sense of direction.” Commentaries, p1177.
Logion 113
His students asked him,
"On what day will the kingdom arrive? "
"Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside," he said.
"You cannot say, 'Look, it's over there,'
or, 'No, here it is.'
The Father's realm is spreading out
across the face of the earth,
and humanity is not able to perceive it."
“Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you,
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you,
Look out! The Saints are coming through!
The sky too is folding over you!
Take what you have gathered from coincidence,
Strike another match, go start anew.”
Bob Dylan
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The Mark refer to Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1954
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
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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