Maurice Nicoll Living Time Pdf Download
Melva Simons
In the well-known analogy, Plato compares the ordinary mental state of man to that of a prisoner chained in a cave with his face to the wall, on which are thrown the shadows of real things outside the cave, of which latter he can begin to have no true idea unless he realises his situation and turns himself round. (This allegory is given in full later, page 189.) This is the state of eikasia, and it is characterised by continual uncertainty and vagueness, a living, as it were, in a dream world of shadows and fears. In this state of illusion man is simply a dim reflex of the changing world in time, a procession of images caught by the senses.
Nicoll abandoned his career as the premier Jungian psychiatrist in London to work with Gurdjieff in 19221923 at the Prieuré. In 1923, when Gurdjieff closed the Institute, Nicoll was invited to go to New York with A. R. Orage to teach the System as he referred to it but declined and never saw Gurdjieff again. In this exceptional book, he provides a glimpse beyond the two-dimensional temporal world of striving for goals in the illusory future of time by drawing heavily on Hermetic and Christian traditions, Ouspenskys formulations of higher dimensions of space/time and states of consciousness, as well as his own practice of Gurdjieffs teaching. Our true future is our own growth in now, not in the tomorrow of passing time. Something must be brought into every moment, the cumulative effect of which is to create now. Now is not given. While living our ordinary life we must always be doing something elseinternally. [ed.]
In 1930 Granville-Barker was appointed to the Clark lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1937 he was Romanes lecturer at Oxford. He received honorary degrees from Edinburgh in 1930, and from Oxford and Reading in 1937, in which year he became director of the British Institute in Paris where he had been living for some time. He resigned from the British Institute in 1939, and when Paris fell, he went to the USA, where he was a visiting professor at Yale and Harvard. He continued to take some interest in the British theatre and in 1940 returned to advise on John Gielgud's production of King Lear at the Old Vic, on condition that his name did not appear. Gielgud said:
The Army psychologists, like the court psychologist, were engaged inapplying scientific knowledge to the practical problems of life; andthere are many other applications of psychology, to education, tomedicine, to business and other occupations, as well as to the art ofright living. Scientific knowledge enables you to predict andcontrol. Having devised scientific tests for intelligence, you canpredict of a six-year-old boy who tests low, that he will not get muchgood from the regular classes in school; and thus you are in aposition to control the education of this boy for his own bestinterests. In the Army, it happened during the earlier part of the warthat some companies or regiments made much slower progress in trainingthan others; and a whole Division was delayed for months because ofthe backwardness of a single regiment. When the psychological testswere introduced, these slow-learning units were found to contain adisproportionate number of men of low intelligence. From that time on,it was possible by aid of the tests to equalize the intelligence ofdifferent units when first formed, and thus insure equal 4 progressin training. This was a good example of "control".
Biology, being the science of living creatures, includes psychology,which studies these creatures on the mental side. The science of lifeincludes the science of mental life. We may call psychology a part ofbiology, or we may call it one of the biological sciences. It has veryclose contact with several other branches of biology. Animalpsychology overlaps that part of zoology which studies the behavior ofanimals. Genetic psychology, as it is sometimes called, i.e., thestudy of mental heredity. 6 and development, dovetails with thegeneral biological science of genetics, so that we find biologistsgathering data on the heredity of feeble-mindedness or of musicalability, while psychologists discuss the general theory of heredity.
To the psychologist, conduct is a matter of cause and effect, ofnatural law. His business is to know the laws of that part of naturewhich we call human nature, and to use these laws, as fast asdiscovered, for solving the problems presented by the human individualor group. For him, even the most capricious conduct has its causes,even the most inexplicable has its explanation--if only the cause canbe unearthed, which he does not pretend he can always actuallyaccomplish, since causes in the mental realm are often very complex.No one can be a psychologist all of the time; no one can or shouldalways maintain this matter-of-fact attitude towards self andneighbor. But some experience with the psychological attitude is ofpractical value to any one, in giving clearer insight, moretoleration, better control, and even saner standards of living.
These two groups out, the rest are rather a miscellaneous collection,including the "random" or playful activity of young children,locomotion, vocalization, laughter, curiosity, rivalry and fighting.They might be named the "non-specific instincts", because the stimulusfor each is not easy to specify, being sometimes another person, sothat this group has great social importance, but sometimes beingimpersonal. This third class might also be called the "playinstincts", since they are less essential than the other classes formaintaining the individual life or for propagating the species; andare, we may say, less concerned with the struggle for existence thanwith the joy of living.
Probably there is one more fact that belongs under the herd instinct.A child is lonely even in company, unless he is allowed toparticipate in what the others are doing. Sometimes you see an adultwho is gregarious but not sociable, who insists on living in the cityand wishes to see the people, but has little desire to talk to any oneor to take part in any social activities; but he is the exception. Asa rule, people wish not only to be together but to do somethingtogether. So much as this may be ascribed to the instinct, but nomore. "Let's get together and do something"--that is as far as thegregarious instinct goes. What we shall do depends on other motives,and on learning as well as instinct.
Some of the other varieties of human locomotion, such as running andjumping, are probably native. Others, like hopping and skipping, areprobably learned. As to climbing, there is some evolutionary reasonfor suspecting that an instinctive tendency in this direction mightpersist in the human species, and certainly children show a greatpropensity for it; while the acrobatic ability displayed by thoseadults whose business leads them to continue climbing is so great asto raise the question whether the ordinary citizen is right when hethinks of man as essentially a land-living or surface-living animal.As to swimming, the theory is sometimes advanced that this too is anatural form of locomotion for man, and that, consequently, any onethrown into deep water will swim by instinct. Experiments of this sortresult badly, the victim clutching frantically at any support, andsometimes dragging down with him the theorist who is administeringthis drastic sort of education. In short, the instinctive response ofa man to being in deep water is the same as in other cases of suddenwithdrawal of solid support; it consists in clinging and is attendedby the emotion of fear.
Revery affords the best example of free association. I 377 see myneighbor's dog out of my window, and am reminded of one time when Itook charge of that dog while my neighbor was away, and then of myneighbor's coming back and taking the dog from the cellar where I hadshut him up; next of my neighbor's advice with respect to anautomobile collision in which I was concerned; next of the strangerwith whom I had collided, and of the stranger's business address onthe card which he gave me; next comes a query as to this stranger'sline of business and whether he was well-to-do; and from there mythoughts switch naturally to the high cost of living.
This is rather a drab, middle-aged type of revery, and youth mightshow more life and color; but the linkages between one thought and thenext are typical of any revery. The linkages belong in the category of"facts previously observed". I had previously observed the ownershipof this dog by my neighbor, and this observation linked the dog andthe neighbor and enabled the dog to recall the neighbor to my mind.Most of the linkages in this revery are quite concrete, but some arerather abstract, such as the connection between being well-to-do (ornot) and the high cost of living; but, concrete or abstract, they areconnections previously observed by the subject. Sometimes the linkagekeeps the thoughts within the sphere of the same original experience,and sometimes switches them from one past experience to another, oreven away from any specific past experience to general considerations;yet always the linkage has this character, that the item that now actsas stimulus has been formerly combined in observation with the otheritem that now follows as the response. One fact recalls another whenthe two have been previously observed as belonging together.
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