Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: Volume 5

The fifth and final volume of Maurice Nicoll's Psychological Commentaries, comprising weekly talks given at Great Amwell House from October 1951 through August 1953 — the last year of Nicoll's life. The commentaries address the full range of Fourth Way practice: self-observation and self-remembering, the transformation of meaning, essence and personality, metanoia, negative emotions, internal accounts, self-love, consciousness and love, and the development of the feeling of 'I'. An appendix gathers earlier papers from Birdlip, including a commentary on the Ark and a meditation on Unknowing. The opening commentary sets the tone of the volume: Nicoll likens the mind to a bird-cage filled with parrots and dead birds, arguing that receiving genuinely new ideas is the beginning of inner cleansing. Written with the urgency of a teacher in his final years, these talks are among the most intimate and practically direct of the entire series, moving between cosmological ideas and the minute texture of daily inner life with characteristic ease and warmth.