Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: Volume 1

The first volume of Maurice Nicoll's Psychological Commentaries, collecting weekly talks and written papers circulated among his group at Birdlip, Gloucestershire from March 1941 through December 1943. Nicoll had studied personally under Ouspensky from 1921 and spent a year at Gurdjieff's Institute at Fontainebleau in 1922; Ouspensky gave him permission to teach the system in 1931. These commentaries were begun during the war years as a way of transmitting the teaching to students he could not always meet in person. The volume covers the foundational ideas of the Fourth Way in depth: self-observation and its difference from ordinary observation, A B and C influences, the multiplicity of 'I', transformation, the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, internal and external considering, the four bodies of man, hydrogens, self-remembering, the digestion of impressions, the three lines of work, and cosmology. The commentaries on internal considering alone run to thirteen consecutive papers. Written with exceptional clarity and personal warmth, this first volume establishes the characteristic tone of the entire series — rigorous, practical, and addressed to real people struggling with real inner difficulties.