The Work Life

by Beryl Pogson
Samuel Weiser, 262 pp.

From 1935 until Maurice Nicoll's death in 1951 Beryl Pogson (1895–1967) was his pupil. For the last 14 years of Dr. Nicoll's life, she was his secretary. Before dying he authorized her to teach. She wrote his biography, Maurice Nicoll: A Portrait, as well as three books which give an esoteric interpretation of Shakespeare's plays: In the East My Pleasure Lies, Three Plays of Shakespeare, and the Royalty of Nature. She also published a number of books of her meetings. The Work Life is the first to be published in the United States.

Like Nicoll, she appears to give great place to Christianity in her teaching. She also introduces a number of Buddhist, early Greek and mythological sources. Every teacher will give his or her own emphasis—as Gurdjieff tells Ouspensky in Search: "All questions are good, and you can begin from any question if only it is sincere.... If it is an aching question for him you can give him an answer and you can bring him to the system through any question whatever."

Every teacher develops not only their own approach to the teaching but also their own focus. As Pogson tells her students, "You must be able to discriminate between the different people who have taught this Work."

Ouspensky, she says, emphasized work on negative emotions while "Gurdjieff emphasized the importance of weakening personality and especially false personality." As for Nicoll, she sees his earlier teaching as emphasizing self-remembering; his later teaching, self-love. [In a later period, Madame de Salzmann appeared to emphasize energy, while Lord Pentland stayed with Gurdjieff's approach.]

Pogson provides an interesting historical picture of the Work. "In the early days the Work was stark and bare," she says. "You went to a meeting. There were no books. You could only get hold of one or two ideas at each meeting. No one spoke to you. It was all very slow. You tried to connect ideas together with difficulty. You just had the bare Work. It was clearer. Now people read so much. The groups have more activities. Knowledge is given more quickly; things are speeded up.... The change is necessary because there doesn't seem to be so much time."

The Work Life gives some interesting perspectives and material from what might be called the Ouspensky-Nicoll line of Work. Students of the Work may find useful the analysis of inner, middle and outer parts of centers; and the various lists and techniques for working with negative emotions. For example, Pogson says "Deep negative emotions have a very high energy which can also be used for self-remembering. If we can do this, we are lifted from the bottom right up to the top in a flash.... It is not that the negative emotion has gone away—we use the energy to go to a place where it is not."