Maurice Nicoll (1884 – 1953) was a Scottish psychiatrist and author. He studied science at Cambridge University before going to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and then to Vienna, Berlin and Zurich where he became a colleague of Carl Jung. After his Army Medical Service during the first World War, in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, he returned to England to become a psychiatrist. He was first a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff, and then of P. D. Ouspensky, before getting permission to start his own study groups in 1931. He is best known for his Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, a multi-volume collection of talks he gave to his study groups, but he also authored several other books and stories, including The Mark, The New Man and Living Time.
Quotes by Maurice Nicoll…
To realize that you have not got something and that you need it, this is real asking.
Nor do we think that many of our insoluble difficulties, perplexities, and unanswered questions necessarily exist because of the kind of consciousness we naturally possess, and that a new degree of consciousness would either cause our awareness of them to disappear or bring about an entirely new relation to them.
Truth is not something lying in time, in the future, but is something here, now, only above us, above our present consciousness.
In the presence of greater meaning all lesser meanings that fill our ordinary mind full to the brim, shrink to their true proportions, and cease to steal from us. For in the presence of greater meaning we are redeemed from everything small and trivial and absurd.
All insight, all revelation, all illumination, all love, all that is genuine, all that is real, lies in now — and in the attempt to find now we approach the inner precincts, the holiest part of life. For in time all things are seeking completion, but in now all things are complete.
