“Mechanical goodness is useless in the Work, but conscious, active goodness gives you force.” Maurice Nicoll

Goodness as Transformation

“If you come back to Jacob Boehme’s statement and his insight, his jaw-dropping insight—that goodness, fundamental goodness, that fundamental love is an alchemical product that results out of the transformation that happens in the shift in the tension between affirming and denying when that other factor, perceptivity, enters. You can see why the third force is so important. You wouldn’t have had the love. The love is the product of the entry of that third force.

“That’s what he means by it’s the spiritualizing principle. It doesn’t just mean that it holds two things together so there’s compromise. It actually creates the new substances, the new manifestations, the new possibilities that can emerge only in and through that tension and are itself the gift and the fruit of that tension, but don’t have an independent source apart from that.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil, April 2023 NC, 02 b- Monday PM, Teaching Evil.

The Relationship Between Being and Knowledge

“One of the problems of esotericism is how to raise the level of being of a man apart from his level of knowledge—that is, to raise him on the side of good, for goodness is of being and knowledge is of mind. Man can no longer see good directly or be taught directly from good. His mind must alter first, so he must be taught knowledge or truth about a higher level of being first. But the object of the knowledge is to raise the man’s level of being.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p163

“If Truth, if knowledge, does not lead to the goodness or use of it, which is its genuine partner, for what reason should we seek to study any Truth or knowledge? Knowledge is endless unless it leads to its own goal, which is its goodness. Good is the culmination of Truth. So Jesus as Good stands at the culmination of Truth, where it passes into the perception of its Good and finds its true union. All doctrine, all Truth, all knowledge, must lead to Good to have any meaning. To follow knowledge alone, for its own sake, is to misunderstand not only the meaning of life and of oneself, but of the Universe. For the Universe, understood psychologically, is both the Truth of things and the Good of things. When a man acts from the sense of the Good of whatever Truth he knows, he acts directly from his will—from what he wants—for we will Good but think Truth.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p73-74.

Mechanical vs. Conscious Goodness

“Everything you do mechanically is lost but everything you do more consciously begins to belong to you. For example, mechanical goodness is useless in the Work, but conscious, active goodness gives you force. Doing something difficult at the moment when you feel very disinclined to do it, if it is done intelligently, will always give you force.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p768.

“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. Now what is the first step for a mechanically good person to take in order to change ? The answer of course is: to observe himself or herself. As you will find by experience, the mechanically good do not observe themselves, because they take their goodness for granted, and what a person takes for granted he never observes. Ouspensky once said: When you live amongst mechanically good people, it tends to drive you mad. You see them all behaving in a good way according to mechanical goodness and you feel they are asleep and do not know what they are doing.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1433

The Flexibility and Source of True Goodness

“Goodness is infinitely flexible, and is different at different times. A rigid associative path laid down in the associative centre 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.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1434

“To act from Good in place of Truth a man must sell all his feeling of merit, all self-evaluation, all sense that he is good, all sense that he is first. For if he thinks he is good, he will act from himself, from his self-love, and that is why it is said that only God is good. In Luke it is said: ‘None is good, save one, even God. ” (xviii, 19. ) All good is from God, not from Man. If a man thinks that he is good he will inevitably seek a reward for all he does, for he will ascribe good to himself. He will not see good as a force passing into all things.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p83

“The mind is for thinking what is true and the heart for perceiving what is good.”Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p35

Perceiving and Living for Goodness

“To be able to see the value of a thing is to have good – that is, to have the power of seeing its worth. This is goodness. And this is the fundamental conception of good in the Gospels. Every form of knowledge, every form of truth, must find and unite with its proper good to become living. Every truth has its own particular good, and Man is the point where they can meet and unite. Good and truth must unite to produce fruit.” Maurice Nicoll, The Mark, p80.

“When we’re present, something in us responds to reality in a way that we come more into balance. Our centers come more into balance. Physically, we come more into balance. There’s more elegance in how we inhabit our movement and how we speak. It’s like you can feel things lining up inside you. As we come into this balance of this one essence, we perceive the goodness in the world. In the way Plato talked about the good. And then all of our heart wants to live for that goodness. That’s all we care about. What do I need to do to serve the goodness in this world?” Russ Hudson, Stonington June 2021, 1:02:28 05 – Monday Evening.

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The Goodness That Flows Through

“To be able to see the value of a thing is to have good — that is, to have the power of seeing its worth.” Maurice Nicoll

Sit with Saint Francis.
Not the statue in the garden, but the man whose being was a song of surrender.
He walks barefoot through the fields, not to shame wealth but to taste the real ground.
He speaks to birds, not out of fancy, but because he listens differently. He hears their worth.

Goodness is not something he does.
It is what flows through him when he steps aside.
He has let go of merit, of reward, of reputation.
He lives the truth.

Yet goodness shines through him.
Not as perfection — but as presence.
Not as strength — but as surrender.
Not as possession — but as fruit born of tension held in love.

This is alchemical goodness, as Jacob Boehme saw:

“The spiritualizing principle… a new substance… born of the tension of opposites.”
Cynthia Bourgeault

The animals gather near.
Not because Francis is tame,
but because he is true.
His stillness says: I will not harm.
His gaze says: You matter.
His soul says: We belong together in the Great Good.

Let the image live in you now —
Saint Francis, hand raised in blessing, surrounded by those who do not lie.

Let it stir your question:
What would it mean to become a vessel for goodness to pass through? Not to be good — but to let Good be in me, for the sake of the world.

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Logion 22
Yeshua noticed infants nursing
and said to his students,
“These little ones taking milk
are like those on their way into the kingdom.”
So they asked him,
“If we too are ‘little ones’
are we on our way into the kingdom?”
Yeshua replied,
“When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,
but male and female become a single whole;
When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another —
then you will enter in.”

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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. 

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

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man refer to Martino Fine Books, Eastford CT, 2019

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The Mark refer to Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York, 1954

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.