Gary Lachman | Maurice Nicoll: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way

00:00 The masses almost surely have a plan, to claim maybe something there beyond the realm of man. Until we thoroughly test it every last majestic view... And we'd be without THC! Cause we know that life too is just another one degree Well would we be without THC? A higher side of Chacho, like our wooden company We'd be without THC cause we know that life too is just another one degree Well would we be without THC? A higher side of Chacho like our wooden company

00:43 Here we go, higher side chatters doing the thing from the Sunshine State. I'm Greg Carlwood and our carefully crafted culture has no shortage of fabricated heroes role models and experts whose success has more to do with their smooth and convincing delivery of mainstream messaging in conventional state sponsored and or industry funded talking points than it does anything else Household names paraded out and stuffed through the propaganda pipeline of legacy programming designed to construct your worldview, sense of self and complacency within our sick predatory system while pretending it's all fine & good. But if you look past the cookie cutter characters in primetime polish at the main stage there are fascinating individuals pushing back against such programming and pushing up against the bounds of reality itself

01:28 exploring everything from extreme states of consciousness and astral travel in exotic realms to experimentation with magical systems and encouraging individuals to explore their own inner worlds accordingly. History is full of these alternative thinkers, esoteric scholars and insightful mystics though it's safe to say we'd know a lot less about them and their work if it weren't for the passion and dedication of people like todays returning guest Gary Lockman. He has been here twice before once in 2020 talking about Holy Russia Rudolf Steiner and cultural spirits then again in 2022 for a show about precognitive dreams the hypnagogic state and synchronicity

02:06 All subjects he's written about at length in his vast library of work covering consciousness, counterculture the Western esoteric tradition and the biographies of important figures across these spaces. Today he returns hot on the heels of a new book titled Maurice Nickel Forgotten Teacher Of The Fourth Way A biography about an important but underreported on figure of Esoteric history so let's get into it The bona fide best biographer of bright minds, counterculture figures, mad men and mystics. Gary Lachman welcome back! Well Greg after an introduction like that I have to say i have to come on this show more often thank you so much thank you so much yeah it's a pleasure to be back yes yes i enjoy talking with you and i'm always impressed by your work this book was a bit of a challenge for me because i'm really

02:53 far behind in my knowledge of a lot of the figures you cover in it. I can't even say, I knew much about Gurchev or Ospensky except for a few quotes and hearing the term The Fourth Way here and there so of course Maurice Nickel even more obscure. And I understand that the big catalyst for this was you being introduced to over 1,000 pages of Nickel's private diaries which is a type of insight into a person's inner world that we don't often get right? Absolutely, that's true. Yes. Nicol was a very interesting character because I don't think anyone else had as teachers both Gorjev and Uspensky whom you mentioned and I'll try to explain briefly who those are in a moment but also Carl Jung perhaps you're more familiar with Jung we did the program at Synchronicity. And in the early 1920s in London here where I live this is where Nicol lived

03:54 He was Jung's kind of British lieutenant. He was championing Jung's particular style, a branch of depth psychology rather than Freud's and Jung looked to him as carrying on his work here in the English-speaking world and all that but then Nicol attended a lecture by the Russian philosopher Peter Uspensky and there is a whole story behind how Uspensky wound up in London anyway giving the lecture But Nicol was quite taken with the ideas that Uspensky was delivering in the lecture. And these are ideas about this particular kind of esoteric teaching and tradition known as the fourth way, and Uspensky was sort of the emissary of the master who is Gurdjieff who's this very enigmatic sort of mysterious you know character no one knew quite

04:48 exactly where he came from at the time then. I mean, we since know his Armenian sort of Greek-Armenian background but he emerged in Russia mysteriously in the years just before First World War and Gavril Spensky is sort of on his team and they were funneled across a collapsing Russia during the First World War then the Bolshevik Revolution than the Civil War and they wound up on the outskirts of Europe in Constantinople. And that's from there, the Wispinski Roundup getting to London and giving these lectures. So Niccol sort of changed his allegiance and he was one of the only people that had personal contact with three of these main figures in this sort of Western esoteric tradition

05:32 Yeah, the more I learned about these figures the more significant that seemed to be. I don't know a lot about The Fourth Way it's usually referenced along with Theosophy or grouped in with various schools of thought of that day but i was curious to ask you more about The Fourth Way what the big takeaways are from that system that are most unique or maybe even most useful to people listening? Well, the reason it's called The Fourth Way is Gurdjieff who I said appeared in just before the outbreak of World War One. And Ouspensky was a well-known writer on mystical ideas and philosophy and things like the fourth dimension and higher dimensions which were sort

06:21 fads at the time, much like say bits of quantum physics are today or chaos theory was in the 80s and 90s or something like that. And then he lectured on this stuff and he actually went on what he called a search for the miraculous. So this became the title of his most famous book. That book is about his time with Gurdjieff but his real initial search for miraculous was when he went to India, he went to Ceylon, he went to Egypt, he went to different places in search ancient esoteric hidden knowledge. You know, the kind of thing that we you know Madame Blavatsky tells us that she went on a journey for and Gurdjieff himself did too. But he came back empty handed. He came back disappointed. He didn't find what he was looking for and then these people basically got him to meet Gurdjieff and then he was completely bowled over and he believed that Gurdjieff had the knowledge that he was looking for and how ironic that he would meet what he's looking for in his own backyard in a cafe in Moscow or something like that

07:21 And so he spent the next five years learning this system. But the thing that is most, let's say first hits people it's a shock, it's Gurdjieffs fundamental ideas though we believe we are conscious although believe we have free will although we believe we have a single sustained I who decides to do this that or something else that's all an illusion But what we consider waking state is just a different kind of sleep and we're basically mechanical, you know. We're pushed and pulled by forces outside of us and we shift constantly from, you know, yes I have to lose weight so I won't have a big breakfast the next morning and then you get up and you have pancakes and bacon and eggs and maple syrup and everything else. And oh yeah, I'll change later on, you know? So we all know that this is sort of thing. It sounds sort of cliched and banal now but at the time it struck Uspensky as actually this was actually rather repugnant he was arguing for free will against the scientific reductionists

08:21 So it's like Gergiev was kind of serving up a kind of esoteric behaviorism in the early 20th century, the psychological school of behaviorisms. It says like let's just forget about consciousness no one has ever seen consciousness we can't weigh it you can't measure it but we can watch what people do We can watch their behavior and then that became a whole school That basically said that more or less we are mechanical, those stimulus response machines. It's like put the penny in the machine and a candy bar comes out. Begrudgev said yes that's right but there is a way to not be that. There is a way to actually have real will and real consciousness and real continuity and real eye and all this sort of thing. And that's fundamental psychological kind of message

09:02 And then that was wrapped up in a cosmology of things like the ray of creation and various different levels of being, and so on. But I'm giving the shortest picture of it. The reason it's called The Fourth Way is that traditionally in spiritual development there are three ways. The first way is the physical way—that's the way of the Fakir. This is the fellow who lies on beds of nails or stands with his arms stretched out for hours on end. People who spend a lot of time at the gym, or in yoga class might be considered following that path today Then there's the emotional path you know development of emotions specifically sort of devotion like bhakti yoga so Hare Krishna is in the street chanting this you know they're going through this bhakti yoga this kind of emotional development then there's the mental which is the yogi

09:52 who develops concentration, dhyana and meditation. So each of those ways works but there's a price and the price that you pay is that well the fakir develops his body physical control he doesn't have a handle on his emotions any can think very well And then the monk might have enormous powerful emotions Sri Ramakrishna He was known just hearing the name of Kali The Divine Mother he would go into a swoon of ecstasy of love and be carried away in cosmic consciousness, but no particularly great control over the body and not a particularly great thinker. Then there's the thinker—and we all know the philosopher can have very acute intellect but doesn't know what to do with his emotions and you know can't dance. So that thing with The Fourth Way is Gurdjieff had a way of combining all three of those. And this was what Nicol experienced because after he attended this lecture by Ouspensky

10:52 Not long after that, hot on the heels of that lecture, Gurdjieff himself came to town. And he was really a very kind of powerful charismatic figure. I mean, he had mana. You know, you had this kind of gravitas in his own power and kind of radiance of energy coming out of him. The story is at the very first appearance here in London people were afraid to ask a question they just had no idea what to say to him Nicol was at this lecture, and this is when Gurdjieff announced that he was opening what he called the Institute of the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau outside Paris. And this was his old chateau that was in complete disrepair but this was perfect for what Gurdjieff wanted to do

11:41 That is a pretty good summary. This is a paragraph that I took, I believe from your book—I have some notes from Wikipedia just trying to summarize this but I think this is from your book—you say the fourth way teaches that the soul a human individual is born with gets trapped and encapsulated by personality and stays dormant leaving one not really conscious despite believing one is. A person must free the soul by following a teaching which can lead to this aim or go nowhere upon death of his body. Should a person be able to receive the teachings and find a school, upon the death of their physical body they will go elsewhere." Humans are born asleep live in sleep and die in sleep only imagining that they're awake with few exceptions. The ordinary waking consciousness of human beings is not consciousness at all but merely a form of sleep

12:33 That sounds like he was a bit of an agnostic. I find it to be kind of weird to say, if you don't find these teachings then your soul will go nowhere. It's very Christian-y, but i'm just curious where does he get his ideas? Yeah well i'm not quite sure where that came from that's not something from one of my books but it has fourth wave Gurdjieffian work ideas in it and think about a soul, like Gurdjieff said the traditional, like say Theosophy we have souls or monads and we're a different personality in each incarnation, but it's the same spiritual monad that goes through these different incarnations. So whatever happens your soul is going to go somewhere you might karma might you know you might reincarnate and get born in New Jersey just as happened to me sorry uh

13:27 Or, you know, you might have perked up good karma and something better happens to you. But Gurdjieff said well that's all rubbish, we have to make a soul, we don't have one. There is no guarantee that anything is going to survive your death but you can work towards creating something and that's the Taoist idea as well with The Secret of the Golden Flower this whole kind of Taoist alchemy where you create this kind of indestructible diamond body called the Kezgen Body I mean, that's my understanding. But when you started out there and you said personality one of the central themes and this is one of the ones that Nicol focused on in his own because in the end he wound up being a teacher of this system and all that so he had to take your focus on it but one of the themes that he came back to a lot was what Birgit called the difference between essence and personality. And essence is what we're born with. You know? It's there inherent when we come into the world. Personality something where you acquire

14:25 as we start to grow up and see other people and imitate what they do. Oh, this is what you have to do to get that or whatever. And you start to get defensive and self-conscious. So personality becomes a kind of accretion of different sorts of habits and things of that sort that over time... Again, this is all metaphoric. Coats, we can say essence which is there all the time. In a way it's not that different than the distinction Jung makes between what he calls the self in personality The self is the deep inner self and then personality is this persona, mask face we put on to deal with the world. So it's similar in the whole idea one main theme of the work is that somehow muting personality or making what they say passive in order to have essence come out and its not always a very easy or pleasant sort of process because personality puts up really

15:20 heavy-duty fight. But with the Gnostic sense, I would say there is an element of that in Gergiev's notion because he basically says a good analogy is that we're in a prison and that's a Gnostic idea you know we're born into the false material world so Gergiev said we find ourselves in a prison and what do you want to do if you're in a prison? Well you want to escape! And it's easier to escape a group of people escaping than it is just one person and so that's why he emphasized the need to be in groups Because in a certain way, if it works out each of you can help the other to try to stay awake or to remember. Another notion he has is what is called self-remembering having a vivid sense of your own self which is something that we might think we have but there's a peculiar flavor to it and the way Uspensky describes it as if when you travel and find yourself in a place where haven't been before And suddenly realize that you're there You say oh me? Oh how? Me here in Egypt

16:22 And it just suddenly, the fact that you are there somehow becomes 3D or HD or whatever techno metaphor we want to use. Even though you know the fact that you were there but then suddenly it strikes you and again this is often a tangent but this what imagination does. It realizes our experience. It makes our experience real. Doesn't fake doesn't create dreams and fantasies but I didn't realize I was in Egypt until it suddenly struck me now, walking out the door. It all came to me at once and said wherever it is you know? When I was first reading about this stuff ages ago that description was what got it for me because I knew what that was like when I remember when I was a musician and I was on tour and you'd pull into the bus somewhere and walk out the door and wherever you are Cincinnati or whoever it is someplace you've never been before and you think oh wow! You know it's kind of just vivid and strange

17:18 fresh and new, and that's what that kind of feeling is like. So there are all these sort of... They're quite practical and they're quite I want to say existential in the sense that it's something that once you get a taste of what we're talking about, oh yeah, I understand what that is. And that's why he's called The Work because it is a kind of practical sort of work. And as I was saying about The Chateau, this complete disrepair So what did is all the people that attended his lectures in london cross the channel and went down there, they were putting this place together and mowing lawns and fixing building well you know building up with a study house and variety of arts and crafts and DIY stuff going on.

18:02 That's the physical. At the same time, they were practicing these different psychological exercises—self-remembering or whatever it might be—and then the emotional was Kherjof was a master at creating friction and intentional inconvenience and so he would put people together whom he knew they wouldn't get along with. They were bound to argue. Or say your group is going to build a well and there was somebody who actually did that for a living But he had to listen to somebody who had no idea what he was talking about. So, you create these kind of situations where it didn't really matter whether the well was built that day well or not. What mattered is the friction that was created by people trying to do it. Yeah, shaking people up getting them outside of their

18:51 comfort zone, their routines that sort of thing. So that's a good overview of Nichols influences. Of course he became a teacher of this system eventually but let's get deeper into his diaries what are some of the most interesting things that you discovered from them? A thousand pages is quite a lot well I tell you this is the thing that was complete shock to me and it's a complete surprise too some people know who he is most people don't these days The fourth way in Gurdjieff and Dostoyevsky, they had a vogue popularly sort of like the 70s and into the early 80s. And then they haven't been quite as out there popular as much but back then people knew who he was. So reason I say that is some people that know about him and have read the book and maybe just completely surprised. Well to put it bluntly after reading these thousand page diary one of the things that comes across is that Nicol had an obsession with sex

19:52 And as I say in the book and in other interviews, an obsession he pursued with one hand if you know what I mean. And that's a famous definition of pornography or French definition of pornography is literature one reads with one hand. The diaries themselves they're written in this fragmentary way and they were unearthed by a researcher in Enver, a university up there who's writing a thesis on nickel. Because the thing that he is known for along with teaching the system his own peculiar variant of it we can say is what we can call esoteric Christianity

20:32 And he's known for these slim volumes, a book called The New Man and another one called The Mark in which he interprets the parables in the Gospels of the New Testament from an esoteric point-of-view of the fourth way sort of teaching. And Edinburgh is interested in Niccol from that perspective. He discovered they were in possession of the daughter of one of Niccoll's students because towards the end of his life he had quite a big following I saw in London, had close to a thousand people coming to like these weekend gatherings. One of his students had these diaries in a box along with other stuff and this vague kind of allusions to A diary here and there in some of the writing about him but what they unearthed were stacks and stacks of these notebooks and this fellow who transcribed them in the sense he put them in a Word document. They're all written fragmentary it's

21:31 He's interpreting his dreams, daily events. And there are two batches of them. One of them is the early years when he was working with Jung and they chart the time up until he decides to leave and start following Uspensky. Then later on, there is a longer period during the 40s into the early 50s as he died in 1953. But I said this was this obsession that he pursued with one hand but it was in the context of kind of sacred sexuality because he engages in these sorts of inner dialogues with a kind of eternal feminine figure, who in one sense is the mother goddess or the Gurtis Avigavebische, you know, eternal feminine who leads us upward. But on the other sense there's this salacious sexual creature that engages in what we would call sort of transgressive sexual fantasies

22:29 But it's aimed at trying to get into these exalted states, I guess you'd say like in sort of Tantra. But the thing with Niccol is that he was brought up Scottish or he was brought up as a Scots Presbyterian which is very, very dour pessimistic sin-ridden Christian and he also had this alpha male father who's not that well known today but back in the day in the early 20th century his father William Robertson Niccoll was a very important sort of literary, religious political kind of figure writing in all the major magazines and newspapers and things of that sort. And they live not far from where I live here in London area called Hampstead which is very nice and green and leafy back then would have been considered almost a countryside. He's sort of fellow who was like smoking all the time and there was a telephone as the stack of papers there and he has no time for the kids and all this kind of thing. Morris was very sensitive aesthetic arty

23:30 He played guitar, he painted. He wrote stories The interesting thing about him is that he had this pseudonym, Martin Swain. He wrote a bestselling book that was made into hit stage production and actually was made into a film. It's one of the British Film Institutes on their Great Lost Film list and it's called Lord Richard in the Pantry. The only way I can describe it, I don't know if you probably remember this but 1930s there was a screwball comedy called My Man Godfrey. It's William Powell and I think it's Carol Lombard. an aristocrat, though the upper class pretends to be a butler. Trading places? Yeah I guess yeah yes but this is say 1918 or something they're doing it so he was actually quite successful but he always thought it was in the shadow of this hyper dominant sort of father so Nicol grew up quite repressed

24:23 And he never got over a kind of sense of shame and guilt about this self-sex eroto mystical practice sort of thing. So, a lot of the diary is him battling with himself and having these conversations. The people who worked on it – there's another fellow who got me involved in the book in the first place, he was the one that asked if I'd be interested in writing a book about him – they see these diaries as sort his kind of red book, you know Jung's Red Book. This collection of paintings and all this stream-of-consciousness sort of stuff that he produced during the years following the breakup with Freud who was going through this turbulent psychic upheaval and so on but I mean Jung's Red Book... You can read it as a straight narrative but Nichols isn't like that It is all very fragmentary He writes in code and we are not quite sure

25:18 exactly who and what, you know. So it's for scholars I would say yes by all means get it published but I'm not trying to think down the idea of putting it out for public consumption but just to say it's not that kind of straightforward thing But I have to say I mean slogging through a thousand pages on it...but you do get an insight into someone It's the sort of thing you don't get with well hardly get with anybody but you don't get mostly with figures teaching these sort of esoteric philosophies. And, you know he just sees the human being like the rest of us so all of his failings and all that come out and all this sort of thing it's one of the things when I first saw this i said oh my god what am I going to do with this because in one sense even saying the book people teaching an esoteric system have a hard enough time to begin with being taken seriously to find out that oh you're teaching this sort of system about higher consciousness and all this sort of thing

26:16 Meanwhile, you're pursuing this kind of shadow side of yourself. And that's the other thing too there is no indication in any his books. There is no indication that anyone around him knew I can't help but think somebody suspected something. That's why it was a revelation and Timmy Nicole too he comes across as very friendly congenial kind of fellow if you know Gorgie sort like crazy guru or zen master just whacks you over your head sometimes whatever And Uspensky was this kind of stern logician, you know taskmaster and through sheer mental effort in trying to understand the ideas in the system. But Nikolaus somebody you could sit with at the pub and have a pint and he was like the country doctor or the local vicar Or... You could see him turning up as a character one of these Hercule Poirot stories or Agatha Christie or you know the kind of 1930's

27:13 murder mysteries in England when, you know one of the characters is the local doctor and he was just a very much more approachable kind of character. And then to read in this diary that he was caught up in this kind of inner turmoil and struggle between his sexual desires, his spiritual desire which we saw as being sort of together. He kinda saw it transcendence of everyday reality involved in sort of religion and spirituality with this kind of transgressive sexuality kind of thing. They're both sort of breaking the boundaries, but again it wasn't like a philosophy was... It wasn't like Alistair Crowley who at the same time is pursuing a lot of sexual magic kinds of things with anything he could get his hands on as it were and he's out in front about it. Nicole was always in the closet you can't help but ask why was that?

28:05 Yeah, it's actually kind of sad to see somebody's shame and hangups about what they do in private with their own body be such a thing that gets in the way of someone for so many years. Obviously I think that's a bit of a relic of the past but this masturbatory mysticism thing that he was doing... It is interesting because I've always thought it was weird You get into secret societies and they seem so mysterious and epic. And then you kind of hear that the pot of gold at the end, end of the rainbow is really just like some sex magic in the OTO or whatever it seems to be the thing is like really I thought would be a little more epic than that but then I guess you learn to

28:54 Look at that deeper and you do see a significance of as you send the book the orgasm being the closest thing a lot of us get to altered states or two the divine are something so. him going through this process alone, I guess you could say it's interesting. It seems unique! I don't know if a lot of other people developing such a system but...I fail to understand like really what he is doing there? Is he just meditating? Is he dedicating his sessions to certain deities because if I can get more oomph out of getting the poison out. If I can kill two birds with one stone, I just need to know what to do." Just concentrate on something? Like... What do you do? Well that's why I say it's the diaries it's not- You have to kind of figure that out It's not like here is step 1, step 2, step 3. It's all in this kind of code so I've done the best I could These researchers I mentioned they're going to have to do a real annotated edition of the diaries

29:59 as accurate an idea of what, I mean you know, I spell it out in the book as best i can and the odd thing is that if he had more self-esteem this probably wouldn't have developed. So here I am being a backseat psychologist but he seemed to prefer self pleasuring to having sex with a real woman and then before he gets married he, in the diary at least, relates encounters with other women and it's never quite clear has he slept with them or not? You don't really know but the inner feminine goddess figure that he's having these conversations with. And I say in the book, I wonder if Jung had taught him how to practice active imagination because he was around Jung at the time when Jung himself was learning how to do this and this is this technique of where you can allow fantasies to emerge from the unconscious and engage in a dialogue with them so it's kind of sort version talking to yourself but you personify one of the fantasies

31:02 It's Jung's idea that the unconscious wants to become conscious. There is something in the unconscious that wants to come out rather than Freud is like, oh we have to keep it all down and no this is some future part of ourselves. This is a future potential somewhere any case so that's what he's doing but He even, as I said this is one woman before the women he meets and marries who sounds like why not? What's wrong you know. And even the voice is saying to him you know you should go with Laura or go with Laura she will free you it would become all this kind of thing and it doesn't happen so I don't know. I think he had this kind of reticence because they said that his upbringing where he was always kinda like this. And I think he had this jovial kinda here again being a psychologist so I'm just doing my best but I'm biographer so this what you do

31:51 I think he had this jovial side to him that was his persona, this outward kind of thing. But inside he found it very difficult to actualize his real desires and I mentioned the woman he married she originally came to him as a client. He had a very prestigious psychiatric practice on the street in London known as Harley Street and if you know Harley Street it's top shelf. You made it there. She came to him and her complaint was that she had a horror, a revulsion of physical sex. She's talking to someone who apparently prefers imaginative sex too so in a way they're made for each other In the book I say this is the kind of thing like biographers love and hate it at the same time It's like well there you go! What does that mean? You know it was a marriage of convenience and they did have one child

32:48 But it was more a marriage of they shared the same vision. She shared his spiritual goals and aims and aspirations as well, and she too became a teacher of the system. It was more personality that led him to do this rather than if he was a bit more And I say in the book, nothing makes you more confident than a sexual conquest. But in order to have that confidence you have to have some of the sexual conquests in the first place it's like alchemical gold. In order to make alchemical gold you have to have some gold in the first place and this was the time 1920s when free love and the suffragettes here and women were being more open about sexuality and all that and he was prestigious upper class,

33:36 Back then, oftentimes men of his character would have affairs with shop girls or waitresses. And the fantasies that he indulges in that are just straight outward sexual fancies are always about women of the lower class somehow the women of his own class I think you felt he couldn't approach them and I don't know what it was there were some reticence in him about that so...I mean you can't help but do that That's him as a human being and it is his soul, as it were, is laid bare in this diary. And I've tried my best trying to understand it but you can't help but raise certain questions Sure, sure. And I like this where you write the notorious magician Alistair Crowley a contemporary whom Nicol may have known through the sensational press of the day or through his interest in mystical literature claimed to have received the text of The Book Of The Law, the sacred scripture of his self-styled religion from an extraterrestrial source and other dimensional entity named Awos. I think everyone's heard that story

34:35 And then you say, oddly enough the book of the law is written in something like the same overblown language that we find in Nichols' diaries and Young's Red Book. Well that's interesting are you suggesting The Red Book and Nichols use of the same sort of language might indicate the involvement of a similar being to Ewas or Ewas maybe was just Crowley's inner voice? What I come to is Jung said the archetypes speak in this kind of bombastic, stentorian kind of language. And if you read Go thou ye and it's sort of biblical kind of King James let's say when I say in the book that that is the case we should be thankful they more often communicate symbols but in Niccols' diary he goes off on these long kinds

35:27 stream of consciousness, sort of narratives or declarations. And he's invoking different deities. He is invoking hermetic gods and Hecata and even invents a kind of group of different sorts of... I can't remember exactly the name like the mighty shining ones or things of this sort. So it's more I think that all three of them grew up in very religious families. The Bible was something that was you know very much part of their upbringing Jung's father was a pastor and his mother's father was as well, and everyone around him. Crowley grew up in this Plymouth... I mean talk about nickel growing up in this repressive religious background where Crowley brought up even worse one with the Plymouth Brethren you know they were it was very fundamentalist you know Christmas was a pagan evil holiday for them

36:22 And Nicol too, he grew up his father read the Bible. He wrote about the Bible and he had like I forget what it was but there were some different translations of it. I just wondered if their unconscious had absorbed that kind of language and then when it let go would come out but Nicol himself is unsure who what is he communicating? It's not as clear cut, but Crowley said yes this is you know and then he goes out of his way to contact other ones at different times. There are different figures that he contacts with the women who were the scryer for him but it's him on his own and its sort of like he goes through these incantatory evocations I can only assume while he was observing his devotions that's how I sort of refer to his practice in the book

37:17 But I mean, there's things like he gets into weird kind of just gobbledygook. But then the Gnostics talk about barbarous words of evocation or the Gnostics they would say, oh, zel wazza wazza wazza whatever it was, or Braxis or something like that and you can just repeat that and then that would send you out into some strange place so... He's doing stuff like that! And I think at least one or two a few times in the diaries it seems that he did enter mystical, exalted sort of state. I'll have to keep working at it then! Well i guess the thing is he never knew whether they would wake up out of that with a kind of moral hangover because you sort of again... You know? I'm reading this slogging through this stuff and I sort of think come on Morris just get over it already. Just do or don't but we're all like that

38:14 And for people who only know him, and most people will have only known him through his writing. I mentioned these two books of his and then he also produced these five volumes or what's known as the Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Uspensky which are wonderful documents! They're basically these sort of sermons or lectures that he gave to his groups once a week and they started in the 40s early 40s and they'd gone just before he died in 53 So if anyone is interested in this system and wanted a kind of very congenial, easy kind of introduction to it those things would be helpful because he's basically trying to persuade you to understand and it's more gentle approach. He did very solid important work in the school people who met him they said he was unlike anyone they ever met. He had his own kind of charisma again he was a doctor so he must have had a very good bedside manner

39:17 I've had some people already say, oh my God what have you done to him writing about all this kind of stuff? Well i wouldn't be being honest as a writer if I just ignored it. Right you can't just stumble across a masturbation diary and not include in a person's biography! Well yeah because the next person who wrote one would say well why didn't Lachman Another whitewash, you know why didn't he? That's true. So on and so on so I mean I think i'm very generous in trying to understand it at the same time You can't help but ask certain questions and I do along the way Yes And you also tell a story about a paranormal experience young has staying at nickels cabin that was interesting to quote the book

39:57 One morning, Young came down to breakfast and asked Nickel if there was anything wrong with the house. Nickel reminded him that they had got it cheap because there were things said about it. Young replied, There is a woman with half-a face in my room and she put it on my pillow and I felt horrible." The half faced woman had rattled Young. She was accompanied by strange noises and unpleasant odors and he spent the rest of the night in an armchair. Wow! And then you go on to say that Nicol says that he stayed in an upper room, not the one that Jung had slept in, and that he was at the time trying to serve Hecate, the goddess of magic and witchcraft

40:39 I don't know, might these things be related? Jung's experience and this potential summoning. Now I'm not good at the cause and effect of magic. And I don't know if anyone is it seems quite bizarre sometimes but that seems to be a pretty decent correlation wouldn't you say? Yeah yeah could very well be The thing about the Jung story is that...and I write about this as well in my book about Jung, Jung the Mystic. Thing was that Jung sort of waffled back-and-forth about ghosts, whether they were real in the sense of some kind of supernatural phenomena or that they were projections of the unconscious. That was his deus ex machina, it's like the unconscious projecting something out into the outer world and synchronicity does that so... But the funny thing about this particular incident is that in his autobiography, Memories Dreams Reflections when he's relating all the strange phenomena that were taking place

41:41 around him when he was going through that period, when he was painting the images in the Red Book and writing it down in the calligraphy and going you know his descent into the unconscious. There's an episode where he talks about The Seven Sermons to the Dead. And the twelve dead appear in Zurich and they knock on his door and they've come all the way to Jerusalem You know we have found not what we sought and suddenly you've come to my house! He has this long thing about how all this psychic phenomena was happening around. They heard noises and children's, their bedclothes are being pulled off them and these different synchronicities in this cottage outside of London he bumps into a real live English ghost and he is like oh! He spooked you know so it is kind of funny but yeah I know could very well be I said before that Nicole she was... You see the diary where he is doing these evocations to different deities and gods and something there is famous one

42:37 Not long before he goes to this lecture of Uspensky, there's an invocation to Hermes. And I don't remember it exactly but it is sort of send me a sign you know, I have asked send me an answer this kind of thing and he was a lost soul. One of the things that he loved Jung, he was very close to Jung. Jung used to come to London instead with Nicole then Jung was the godfather of his daughter They famously got on very well, but he even says in the diaries that I'm not really getting what I want to get from Jung's ideas. But Jung himself said you're trying too hard and you can see where he is over-interpreting the dreams. Again it is easy for me to say this here I am 100 years later and all of that. He was too desperate, he was too anxious to arrive at some kind of answer

43:33 And the reason he says to Jung why he's changing his allegiance to Ispensky's teaching is that basically you left too much up to me to deal with. What he wanted and what he heard from Ispensky, when Ispensky spoke basically there was a very strict discipline and system to follow if you want to wake up. So in that sense it was more like okay, he wanted somebody to force him to sort of do it. And he even says that in his diaries, and he needed somebody just kind of apply this pressure on him. And Uspensky was like very matter-of-fact and dry but when you got to Berdyuk, Berdyuk was this Mephistophelian sort of once you go up within the gates of the Prairie, you no longer knew exactly what was happening anymore

44:27 Right i've heard you express it as nickel wanted a guru which he got in the fourth way guys and young was more of a mentor and so just wasn't. Enough but when he did pray to her me is i didn't think this was interesting because he praise to her me she's like hey i'm stuck i need something and then it seems like u, would qualify his finding the fourth way as a response to his call. And I don't know how many people out there actually call out to Hecate or Hermes, or whatever when they feel stuck but sometimes it is hard to recognize the answer to the question if it comes in an odd way or if it isn't like handed you and envelope marked Hermes and then its like oh well then Hermes clearly heard me so it's sometimes weird to attribute

45:18 a later event to being a response to the previous call. I'd like to get better at that, but you've seen this 1,000 times in all the people you've biographied. They do this kind of stuff all the time—people who are involved in the Western esoteric tradition, of course—but how would you suggest people get better? If they start doing step one which is actually make the call, how do we get better at recognizing the answer when it's sometimes unconventional? Well, I think one of the things is not to have expectations what the answer would be like. Except if you're chanting for a refrigerator or something like that and it was some specific thing you want then yeah but if it's sort of like I need a sign or message... Nicole was someone who was desperately troubled and existentially challenged by meaning of life, meaning his own life

46:16 What should he do? How to deal with these sexual desires he have and the spiritual aspirations, and how to deal with life with his father. And so he was going too young actually got treated by Jung had some sessions for Jung about you know his relationship with this fog and all that So he was a spiritual teacher Yes But he's also a troubled human being and I think one of the things is if you call out something don't have two limited or finicky a sense of what the answer might be. Because the answer might be something that, oh gee I no longer want what i thought i wanted in the first place which i thought was so all important and now i see that it's not and so that was the answer you know? So it's all stuff like that so... And that's the virtue having an open mind being alert but also being attentive! You know being attentive to things

47:07 Jesus says, the spirit cometh when it willeth. We don't know like a thief in the night you don't know so it's here and it's gone It's like the wind or the Zen sort of thing is well You have to catch it on the fly It's not like here Or even in the classic Western humanist tradition in Goethe's drama Faust Faust asks Mephistopheles his kind of guru In German it says where is the way? Der Weg And Epitaph he says, kind Veg there is no way. There isn't a way if there was a way it wouldn't be any problem we'd all be on it and there would be no problem. There is no way you have to find the way yourself. You have to make yourself but he was deeply troubled and what Uspensky gave him with this kind of iron and kinda certain although he went through a lot of soul searching about that I don't know do I really believe this or not? That kinda thing finally

48:07 It was seeing Gurdjieff that made him take the plunge. And he said, okay we can go there this is some action I can take and what that meant was that he sold this practice he had on Harley Street He had to borrow a large sum of money gave up the house he was living in and then went with his wife their young daughter sister-in-law and a nanny and two goats because the baby needed goat milk So it's a weird kind of like Marx Brothers sort of thing where he's like, he's got two goats and there is this funny story that struck me as funny. Like before they go to Fontainebleau which is 40 miles outside Paris

48:44 Somebody said, well we might not be able to get goat milk once we get inside the gates. So he's negotiating with some zookeeper in Paris to get two goats so... Combien? You can imagine him talking! Anyway it was like this Alice in Wonderland kind of thing but that's precisely one side of what he got into once he passed through the It's there because then it was like nobody knew when you're attending these lectures as a system. You can do this, you can do this to get this comeback later we'll talk about it once you've gotten there nobody knew what was going on and wasn't even clear whether actually was a real institute or not. Well when Gertrude has these really specific conceptions and details of things that

49:26 Are kind of bizarre that other people don't even sense you just wonder where a person gets. That information like in the case of rudolph steiner he seem to have, i baked an intuition as six cents the second side is people say and then just through studying that developed a lot of his philosophy and stuff but I don't know, Gertrude even as you say his background is a little mysterious. Seems like people have dug up more now but when the background is mysterious it's even more hard to parse out exactly where he arrived at these conclusions that are in the system that he has. These just aren't improvised

50:08 thoughts on a whim. I mean, it seems pretty specific and something he sensed would you say he sensed it or is it something he discovered traveling through the East? Well, he tells the story in the most readable of his books called Meetings with Remarkable Men was actually made into a film in the late 70s by Peter Brook that's worth hunting down on YouTube if for nothing else there's remarkable scene where There's people practicing what is known as the movements in the Virajip school, these kind of sacred dances and they're quite remarkable. He claimed that he was part of a group called the Seekers Of Truth and he traveled throughout Central Asia and Egypt and other places in search of lost ancient knowledge and so on and so on...and he came upon

50:57 something that he called the Sarumung Monastery, the Sarumung Brotherhood. They're an ancient brotherhood going back 2500 years or something like that and it was there that he learned much of what he presented in The System but this was something written after he met Uspensky and all those kind of things so It's a great read. It's an adventurous story, you read it sort of like tongue in your cheek a bit and couple helpings of salt because it is allegory ridden so what really happened? What's an allegory or these real people that he met are these archetypal kind of encounters but the story of basically his early years in this travels and all these extraordinary people that he met from whom we learn things but there was also incredibly acute

51:42 psychologist. And I think he also developed things as he went along, the movements themselves are one example because he doesn't initially start out with them. He doesn't teach them to Uspensky and all that, that's only later on. Uspensky turns it into a system and formalizes it and organizes it but all the ideas in this book In Search of Miraculous is what Grigic taught him so from about 1915-1920 something like But it's only after that, when he sets up this institute that he starts teaching these movements. He said well if you had that all along why didn't you pull that out earlier? I mean myself years ago...I was involved in this many many many years ago in New York and Los Angeles and I can say the few times I did practice these movements they're very very difficult And I had one encounter and I've written about it in another place where

52:34 It's like your head is doing one thing, your hands are doing something else. Your foot is doing something else to a kind of time that music banging away the piano and this kinda thing." And I couldn't do it! And I was just feeling exhausted and said, I just can't do this. And I tried one more time and then bang...I was doing it and suddenly felt this influx of energy and vitality. I just wanted to hop in my car and drive back from San Francisco for fun with it. So the way I understand In terms of say something like psychologically or physiologically it's a way of inducing second wind, but athletes experience. Running the marathon you can't make it anymore my god I'm completely empty try one more step and bang the second tank of gas kicks in and your ninety miles per hour so

53:22 William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher in the early 20th century. He was aware of this he wrote an essay called The Energies of Men And he says we live subject to degrees of fatigue which become only by habit to obey and that's exactly in a nutshell what Gurdjieff's insight was We are much more than we think we are if you've just come to accept this kind of lukewarm middle-of-the-road sort of way being and we could have much more intense It's not ecstatic, but it's a much more intense sense of yourself. He says you can get to the point when you say I, and feel it rattle in your chest as if your I, your real being was some kind of strong thing there. Yeah! I find all that really interesting because I have trouble getting a first wind when it comes to a lot of physical activity

54:12 But let's fold in Swedenborg a little bit, who Nicol started to gravitate towards later in life. I really only know of Swedenborg as instrumental in homeopathy and that many consider him to be one of the earliest contactees on the record because of his claims of being taken by an angel to talk to beings that lived on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon. It's amazing that he was willing to publish all that in a book on top of his other work. I don't know if academics would be so bold today in a lot of cases, but it's good data! We need to know these things. If you're going traveling around astrally to Mars and Venus, I think we should know. But really strange stuff...I mean i don't know how much of that is folded into Nichols' attraction to Swedenborg's general ideas but talk just little bit about how he came to Swedenborg and folded him in

55:08 Well, he sort of read him throughout his career but towards the last few years of his life. He got deeply into Swedenborg. Swedenborg is a very interesting character I've actually written a short book about an introduction to his life and ideas And he was 18th century Swedish scientist or what we would call it a networker and intelligencer. He traveled around Europe and met with leading scientists of the day like Edmund Halley who you know the comet is named after. He was an inventor He designed, like Leonardo da Vinci. There's all these designs and different kinds of inventions and things of that sort. And he was also a statesman. He was an inspector of mine so he was very practical down-to-earth solid individual but then in his 50s he started having a series of these sort of mystical experiences. Angels came to him and told him that he had to give up science at the time he was working on trying to find the seat of the soul

56:06 Where was it in human beings where the spiritual and material world came together? And he was following Descartes' lead, who Descartes thought of as in pineal gland. Which incidentally is where the third eye supposed to be so... Probably circling around it! Yeah yeah and the angel said you know forget about science what your real mission is is to declare the true meaning of scripture And this was Swedenborg's esoteric interpretation of scripture in the same way, but on a much grander scale than Niccol did years later. But yes he went on these journeys to heaven and hell and this intermediary world called the spirit world and also other planets. Apparently he was able to induce these kind of... I don't think they're quite trance states but they're hypnagogic states in between sleeping and waking

56:57 so to state, and he too had a dream diary where he recounted his dreams and all this sort of stuff. But also recounted these different levels of consciousnesses kind of waking consciousnesses intermediary state between sleeping and waking in the dream states and so on but I mean for him it was divine wasn't aliens in the sense of extraterrestrials from another planet although he goes through the plan but what Swedenborg is saying He believed there had to be other habitated planets in the universe. And incidentally, he predated... He wrote reams and reams about astronomy, he wrote reams and reams about neuroscience in the brain and anatomy but he predated the nebular theory of planetary formation which is like it kind of gas and then gradually it swoops around and gets blah blah blah blah. This was Kant-Laplace and he predated that so he knew what he was talking about but he believed that

57:54 The reason why other planets had to be inhabited was that heaven, all angels are human beings and when we die you can't go to heaven. You can't go to hell in a certain way. You occupy those spaces already in your life for him their psychological inner sort of spaces and in the way you prepare for your eternal life either one in this one by developing your heavenly sensibilities or your hellish ones. But all the angels in heaven were human beings who have gone to heaven and become angels, so heaven needs to be populated and there's not enough people on the earth so there must be people on other planets

58:39 that can help populate heaven. So it's almost like an anthropic cosmological principle, the idea that all these curious cosmic accidents, these just rights sorts of things... The Earth is just at the right distance from the Sun in order for life to take place and we have just the right moon to absorb meteors and we have just the right kind of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn to blah blah blah this kind of thing so oh wow! It just happened you know? We wouldn't be here if it didn't happen by chance It was just right, so just too much to rack up to coincidence. There must be somebody at the controls and Swedenborg is more or less saying like not only is it the obvious truth that the universe is such that it produces intelligent life and not only step two, the universe is such that it must produce intelligent life he would say the universe itself is intelligent life and it's in the form of a kind of human being but Nicol didn't get into that kind of aspect of Swedenborg as

59:39 What Swedenborg talks about is what he calls correspondences. And this is where everything in the physical natural world corresponds with something in the higher spiritual world. So a simple example would be here, the sun illuminates us and warms us with its light and this is... The divine's wisdom is the illumination and the divine's love is the warmth so we can find all the natural things that we encounter. And heaven for Swedenborg is much like here, the angels live in houses they have jobs apparently a better sex than we have here so it's worth it to be good and get a good seat in heaven

1:00:21 I believe it. So, I really had a great time talking to you again. Maurice Nickel is an interesting guy with a lot of even more interesting influences and I learned a lot about them all. It's a book that helped me fill in some fuzzy spots in my knowledge base for sure but let people know about your other irons in the fire social media stuff links all the things we like to leave people with Well, I have a website. It's just GaryLachman.com and I have lots of articles there up on my blog and iIhave some Zoom things coming up later this week. I'm giving a zoom talk for the Philosophical Research Society who are located in LA that should be the first sort of talk I'm doing about the new book about nickel

1:01:09 But also I've been doing a sort of side thing, we're doing this series of maps. And I'm not drawing the map but I'm providing the locations and the copy and I did one about Alistair Crowley, The Beast in Britain so it's all different places that have something important in Crowleys life and all that kind of thing. Another one just came out was about H.P Lovecraft a horror writer. And he famously lived in Providence most of his life, Rhode Island but he also lived in New York but he went on these incredibly enormous travels up and down the eastern seaboard talk about budget traveling this was in the 1930s on greyhound buses in search of pre-revolutionary colonial architecture so that's coming out and I'm always active one of my mottos is necessity is the mother for production

1:01:59 So I try to keep going, just keep myself alive and keep myself sane. Yeah good advice! Well thanks again you do provide a valuable service for those who want to understand these interesting characters in esoteric history better and your output and discipline is very impressive and admirable until next time take care absolutely my pleasure thank you Oh baby, oh baby. Alright there we have it a little something new to add to your obscure knowledge base It's funny because I'm fresh off my return from the astrognosis event and i'm not only refreshed anew having cured my bout of occupational burnout but also had some really crazy syncs

1:02:46 One which was a bit on the weirder side because I have a book club going with some buddies from the West Coast and when it was my turn to pick the book, i went with Philip K. Dick's Ubik And that featured heavily in Chris Noll's presentation and now the book that I just finished last night The next one in our Book Club lineup Was a book called Peronisi by Susanna Clark Not only is it great but it featured heavily in Steven Snyders' presentation So of all the books to read, this presentation was bookended by my crazy clearly magical book club. And both are really good by the way. Ubik is a little bit more difficult but I thought Paranesi was something special and immediately went and tried to find a T-shirt. It's difficult but I did find one! I don't know why it clicked for me so hard but it really did and its actually infected my dreams lately.

1:03:45 But then let's add to the stack because Mitch Horowitz gave his presentation on Gertschiff and the principles of the fourth way process. And I think i took the most out of that one mainly because it was the only presentation I saw in full But Mitch highlighted a lot of great insights that come from the fourth way. A lot about being grateful for everyday life because we come into this world with a lot of things provided for our comfort, food water air etc and it was framed kind of as if we come into this world indebted to it almost parallel to original sin but more in the sense that from day one the environment life our parents whatever

1:04:26 is providing for us as individuals to have a human experience and you have the duty to quote unquote work off that debt now. You could have a reactionary take and say fuck that i don't know shit anybody but as i was listening to mitch i took it as a positive message of appreciation and the idea that we should do with the work or engage with difficult tasks with a smile, end with a sense of duty A sense that we will never fully give back to this world what it gives to us, so the efforts we do make should be done in a positive spirit of reciprocation. Ask not what the material layer of the infinite cosmos can do for you but ask what you can do for the material layer of the infinite cosmos." For me it was really useful because work was becoming a slog I'm tired all the time two kids are a lot

1:05:25 I generally wasn't feeling appreciated and so often we get the right messages at the right time and it's funny to be putting out an episode about this material. Write out that same time because honestly i said this to gary when we're planning it, i appreciate what he does in a lot of his books are in our wheelhouse but i felt this one was a bit too obscure for most of the audience to find value n And now here I am feeling like some material that comes from the fourth way has been the most helpful stuff. I've heard in a while Weird how that works out. And I think you can probably still hear my burnout in this interview, I think you can hear my concern that maybe it's not exciting enough for some people etc., etc... But I wish I had heard Mitch's presentation first because it really would have shifted my energy but we are where we are! I'm just glad this event was so refreshing and that I have a deeper appreciation for this kind of material even if it comes right after an interview about it rather than before

1:06:28 So I simultaneously thank and apologize to Gary if i didn't give him my best. I re-listened to it, and found a lot to like so... If you're this far in, we kept your attention and its all good! Of course we got into some other details & fun anecdotes in the Plus show. I can't remember if Jung's half faced woman experience was in the first or second half because this trip really scrambled my memory of the interview overall but that was a fun highlight for me let me just say And you know the deal, become a Plus member to get twice as much out of me and my guests for the low low cost of eight bucks a month. Now for the last episode! The current events extravaganza with Ryan Christian You already know 4.7 Very well liked just what I would expect He's one of the greats and he is extremely non-partisan and open minded in multiple angles. I think we have good rapport We got a good thing going

1:07:27 Alright, and I have another show to record tomorrow that's gonna be very dense so i have to keep it moving. And that means looking at the meetup calendar! Tuesday August 20th The Freethinker Social at White Labs Brewing in Asheville North Carolina August 21st Corner Bakery Cafe in Pasadena August 28th we got that sweet, sweet Burning Man meetup at the Vomiting Sparrows. And we'll throw in the first two of September. We got September 7th a meetup at The Poor House Barbecue in Kanaan New Hampshire this looks like a repeat and then we also got Geodome THC at The Red Root Farm sounds elaborate Milford Connecticut

1:08:09 So not too bad, love it. Find the others you will be surprised how refreshing it can be to meet some new people who already vibe on your fringiest of interests and that said big thanks again to Gary he really knows how to do a person justice He is the king of obscure biographies and his recall for the material is also clearly impressive And you might have noticed at the beginning I finally got my ska cover of the intro song, or ska adjacent. Good enough for right now and i have to thank the artist Or What? For basically opening up a lot of new tools for me! You're going to see some crazy stuff with the music of THC in fact

1:08:49 In the future, every little thing will get its own theme song. And the future is... Now people! I've done my part! Your move fourth-way walkers self pleasure ritual workers and kunderbuffer clad sleeping masses your fucking move. When others might have thrown in the towel With a tight line of clocking He's breaking the rules Digging through the papers Spinning out the clues on a mission, cracking open doors. Maurice Nickelstory's gonna shake the floors from the shadows of the past. Gary says things right. Lost teacher of the fourth way coming to light.

1:09:56 He finds the truth, tracing through the echoes of a mystic youth. Ink stained hands and late night plans. He's shaking up the pages making more lock nets on a mission cracking open doors. Murray's nickel story is gonna shake the floors from the shadows of the past. Gary said things right. Lost teacher of eight coming to light. Pen and a passion in the dust of the past. He's breaking through the silence and he's doing it fast From the mystic secret teachings to the lessons that Gary's writing down The tale single-handedly Here's to Lashman's journey from the darkness to the dawn Shaking off the cobwebs where the truths are drawn Baristico's wisdom buried deep Blasting through the speakers let the story be told Oh, Lockman's on a mission cracking open doors Baristico's story is gonna shake the floors From the shadows of the past Garry sets things right Lost teacher

1:10:58 Come here, come in the light