Thoughts on the transformation of self through living between opposites.

In The Plan Is Good, a collection of her writings, Annie Lou Staveley  writes about “pulls,” which seems to be her term for what Maurice Nicoll calls “opposites.” 

She says, “Now I’m pulled this way—now that way—and I can ask myself perhaps: Who is being pulled? The action of the pulls, one against the other, makes a kind of friction which acts as fuel for the fire needed for my work. I have the habit of being swept from one extreme to the other. I forget to remember. How to stay in the middle, the center, and permit the disturbance and discomfort that comes from simply experiencing the pulls but not going with them, experiencing the friction. If I can find the way to stand in front of these pulls, then there might be that friction, the source of the sacred fire, which makes for more intensity of work.” The Plan Is Good, p93-94

Maurice Nicoll says it is on the horizontal timeline that things are true or false, good or bad. In the higher realm, what we call the vertical, the opposites are one. M suggests that we cannot escape the opposites unless we come to see both sides of ourselves and how one side helps the other side. If we can see both sides of ourselves—what we call our good side and our bad side—then we begin to be conscious of opposites at the same time. This is where the strange secret of the Sufi saying lies: “All true life is the peace and harmony of contraries. Death is due to war between them.” Commentaries, p325

Maurice advises: Take the feeling of ‘I’ out of both opposites—that is, don’t identify with either—and ‘I’ moves to the center, in a place of nothingness. Here in the middle is the place or state where Real ‘I’ is—from a higher level. “The opposites are thieves because what you build on one is undermined by the other. But whatever is built in the center cannot be taken from you. Commentaries, p330

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.

Page numbers for Annie Lou Staveley refer to The Plan is Good, (Two Rivers Press: 2023)

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.