“The faith that moves mountains can neither be an intellectual opinion nor a personal feeling, no matter how intense.” Meditations on the Tarot

Faith as an Operative Agent

“Faith is not just an attitude of belief. It has agency. It acts. If we believe, then everything is illuminated and takes shape around us. Chance is seen to be ordered, success assumes an incorruptible plenitude, suffering becomes a visit and a caress of God. But if we hesitate, the rock remains dry, the sky dark, the water treacherous and shifting, and we may hear the voice of the Master faced with our bungled lives, ‘O ye of little faith, why have you doubted’? Wonderful. What we bring in faith is an operative agent that can transform the nature of our relationship with reality, juggle it, support, and open it up to a deeper context of meaning and a deeper relational field. And that if nothing else, faith draws us into a relationship with the events, into a trusting and permeable, spacious, flexible relationship. If we don’t, we remain outside.” Cynthia Bourgeault, reflecting on Teilhard, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 01:12:00 15 – Thursday Afternoon Teaching.

“Now I will refer to one of the sayings of Christ, where it is said that a man must pray for a thing and have faith that he has it, and he will get it. ‘All things whatsoever ye pray for and ask for, have faith that ye have received them, and ye shall have them.’ {Mark XI xxiv). Now it is said in the Work that a man must not wait until he has the force to do something, but must act, if it is his aim, as if he had it already, and then he will attract it. To wait until you have the strength and understanding to do something-—I am speaking of the Work—makes it impossible to do it.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p158

Faith and Consciousness in the Work

“The Work speaks a great deal about two things, Consciousness and Conscience. The Work does not teach Love or Faith or Hope directly, but it bases itself on the words, ‘Conscience’, ‘Consciousness’.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p756

“The emphasis in this Work is laid on this factor called consciousness. This Work is not based on faith or hope or love directly but on consciousness. Consciousness in the Work is called light.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p896

Faith as Dynamic Power

“Faith is compared with a living active seed in a man and is not merely passive belief. In order to understand something further about the meaning of faith, let us look at what is said about the result of possessing faith. Christ says: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed… nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ The result of having faith is that nothing is impossible to a man. The possession of faith renders what was impossible possible. In another place —in the corresponding account given in the ninth chapter of Mark—the phrase is ‘All things are possible to him who has faith.’ At first sight, it might be thought that this means that a man having faith has the power to do. But this is not quite what is said. The possession of faith renders things possible, and this is a different idea. To a man who has faith things become possible that otherwise are impossible. It is not the man himself but the faith in him that renders things possible. To a man of faith all things become possible and nothing is impossible.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p164-165.

“Faith is connected with a certain power— that is, faith is dynamic in a special way. But the power of faith is not gained from outside, from position, from worldly power, or from anything external. Nor is faith the evidence of things seen; it does not derive its power from that source. It is not formed in that external part of the mind that deals with life and things, or with all the duties and cares of human existence. It is not on this level. It belongs to a level of mind above ordinary visible things. It is like a point offered to a man that lies above himself. It is, as it were, as if he were to open a communication with a room of the floor above the room he usually dwells in, where people live another kind of life and of which his own strength of conviction has led him to feel the existence, and discover it for himself.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p166-167.

Faith and Higher Levels of Meaning

“The idea of faith cannot be understood unless the idea of different levels in Man is understood. Man does not live at the highest level of himself. A level awaits him. He is not complete. And he can only complete himself…. For this reason, the Gospels do not speak of life, or of how to get on in life, but about this New Man concealed in every man. Their teaching is about a higher level—that is, about the evolution of a man.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p167.

“The disciples took something said by Christ in its sensual meaning — that is, according to the literal sense of the words. Christ told them that this was a sign that they had little faith. It is not a question of belief. They may have believed greatly in the seen Christ. Yet they had little faith. What does this mean? It means that faith is something more than belief. In this case, faith means understanding on a level other than literal understanding. In other words, Christ connects the capacity of psychological understanding with the possession of faith; and sensual understanding with littleness of faith, or even elsewhere with blindness, with complete absence of faith and inner death.

“Thus, sense and faith describe two ways of thinking, not opposites, not antagonistic, but on different levels. For without the perception of scale and levels, things are made to be opposite when they are not so, and Man’s mind is split into ‘either – or’, which leads to endless confusions and mental wrangles and miseries.” Maurice Nicoll, The Mark, p12-13.

“All the sayings and parables in the Gospels are knowledge about this higher level, this higher possible degree of Man. This is their explanation. This knowledge is not like knowledge gained through visible life and the senses, which is easily verified. It must be understood by the mind. This is faith. Faith is not believing in the extraordinary because miracles are performed but a perception, an insight, and a conviction that there is an order of Truth above the truth of the senses–and one that the senses cannot give directly—that is, they cannot form the starting point. A man must start beyond himself—and faith is the starting point.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p177.

“The order of Truth belonging to the category of ‘faith’ has nothing to do with the order of truth belonging to the senses, which is provable by the senses. When Nicodemus beheld the miracles and believed simply because of the miracles, he was told in so many words that it was all useless. The visible miracles, indeed, stood in his way. They could not touch that level of mind that can only be awakened through faith, and that faith only can awake. A man does not come to the stage of inner understanding belonging to faith by means of anything outer, anything seen. To live by the seen is to live on one level of life; to live by faith is to begin to live on another. And this other level, which is eventually the rebirth of a man, once he attains it, is a definite thing, a real state, an actual possibility, to which all the ideas of faith and its Truth and knowledge can eventually lift a man. 

“A higher level of man can only be reached through a class of knowledge and ideas that must be kept alive by continual effort, and does not correspond to anything that life confirms. A man must look away from the scene of life to reach its meaning. Faith is thus a continual inner effort, a continual altering of the mind, of the habitual ways of thought, of the habitual ways of taking everything, of habitual reactions. To act from faith is to act from beyond the range of the ideas and reasons that the sense-known side of the world has built up in everyone’s mind. On the side of love, it is to will action beyond natural considerations, in the light of comparison between what one is and what lies above one, what is possible.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p 182.

Faith as Divine Experience

“FAITH is the experience of divine breath; HOPE is the experience of divine light; and LOVE is the experience of divine fire. There is no authentic and sincere religious life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope and love without mystical experience or, what is the same thing, without grace. No intellectual argument can awaken faith; what it can do, at best, is to eliminate obstacles, misunderstandings and prejudices, and thus help to establish the state of interior silence necessary for the experience of the divine breath. But faith itself is the divine breath whose origin is found neither in logical reasoning, nor in aesthetic impression, nor in human moral action.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p71.

“A force which can move a mountain must be equal to that which piled it up. Therefore, the faith that moves mountains can neither be an intellectual opinion nor a personal feeling, no matter how intense. It must be the product of the union of the thinking, feeling and desiring human being with cosmic being—with God. The faith that moves mountains is therefore complete union—even if only for an instant—of man and God. This is why illusion can in no way engender faith; and this is also why miracles due to faith are testimonies of the truth—and not only of sincerity—of belief, confidence and hope of the person through whom they are operated. Miracles are fruits of the union of the whole, concentrated human being with cosmic truth, beauty and goodness—with God.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p210.

“The cascades of hope and faith which are revealed by the great ‘yes’ that all living beings say, by the very fact that they are living and that they prefer life to death, these cascades cannot bear in themselves anything else other than certain testimony of the fundamental Presence of God, i.e. the meaning and purpose of being alive.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p270.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 48
Yeshua says…
Should two make peace in one house,
they could speak the word,
“Move!” to a mountain,
and it would obey them.

Logion 106
Yeshua says…
When you are able to transform two into one,
then you will become a “Son of Humanity,”
and it will be possible for you
to say to a mountain, “Move,” and it will move.

Logion 20
His students said to him,
“Tell us about this kingdom of yours in the heavens.
What is it like?”
Yeshua answered them,
“Let me compare it to a mustard seed,
the smallest of all seeds.
When it falls into prepared ground,
it grows into a great tree
capable of sheltering the birds of the sky.”

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Read another Impression on Faith.

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

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.