The Kingdom of God is within you

From “Psychological Commentaries on the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky”, by Maurice Nicoll, M.D. (1884-1953)

"In the Gospels it is said: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! Or, lo, there! For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
It is not something outside that if you would only join you would be liberated. When it is said in the Gospels that “the Kingdom of God is within you”, by this is meant a state in which the hypnotism of life no longer acts on us and in which we are invested with the influence of ideas coming from quite a different source. (Christ Consciousness)
Now let us take one of the ideas of The Work from which we are taught to observe ourselves and from which we must think and build up within ourselves a new point of view. There is the idea that “Man Cannot Do”. (This idea is inherent in the concept of “The Kingdom of God”.)
Have you ever thought about this idea?
Remember that an idea is comparable with a very delicate and complicated machine which, if handled wrongly, may do you very great harm. If you were to handle a great dynamo-electric generator-wrongly without technical understanding of its connections, you might easily be killed.
Now this idea that “man cannot do” is like a great dynamo. It can furnish you with light or it can kill you. You can take it wrongly, as I have seen many people take it, as when they say some such thing as this: “Well, if we cannot do, then what is the good of even trying anything?”
This is a quite wrong understanding of the idea that Man Cannot Do. “Everyone”, said G. on one occasion “is doing the only possible thing that he can do. Everything that is happening at this moment is going the only way it can possibly go.”
He was talking about mechanicalness. Self observation is anti-mechanical and must come before anything else in The Work. It is in non-identifying that the main key lies to preventing loss of Force. The conception of Force is a key, essential idea in The Work. Every act of non-identifying saves or preserves Force. Here we are speaking of the force necessary for awakening. In order for man to awaken, he must have force: without Force, he cannot awaken. As long as Man is asleep, things will go the only way they can possibly go, by an infinite number of lines of cause and effect.
But The Work teaches that a man can come under new laws and ultimately that he can reach a higher state of himself in which he can do, a state in which he has Real Will. Certainly, such a state is very far from each of us at present. But in applying this idea to ourselves ( that Man Cannot Do), we have first of all to notice, to observe over a long period, what it actually means to us in a very personal application.
We have to observe ourselves by means of this idea of The Work."—Maurice Nicoll
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This is what Christ Consciousness, or Jesus’ statement, “seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven” means. It is a challenge daily to will and to adopt the value system and mindset according to awakened, self observant, conscious living as a Kingdom of Heaven man, in Christ.
To non-identify with the “hypnotism of life” in this world of external circumstance, and to have Real Will in accordance with the Mind of Christ—this is my prayer for Christmas 2008.

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