Skip to main content

The New Man (Person)






'The New Man' is Maurice Nicoll's book that interprets some of the parables and miracles of Christ, first published in 1950. I own a copy that belonged to the novelist, J.B. Priestley and his archaeologist wife, Jacquetta Hawkes (who was a governor of my school).

It is a remarkably compact book that in its 150 pages probably says more and more of value than many commentaries that weigh in at many multiples of its size (and weight).

It shows the evident influence of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Nicoll was a pupil of the former and a friend of the latter) but, more importantly, like the Church Fathers, Nicoll reads the Bible for its inner, esoteric, not its literal meaning. If it has a weakness, it is that it wholly devalues the literal meaning, a devaluing that the subtler minds of the Church Fathers recognised as having an important influence on our outward behaviour and dispositions, even as they saw that the ultimate meaning lay elsewhere. A text can have multiple layers of meaning, each valuable in its own space.

My favourite chapter, in this reading, was 'The Idea of Prayer' which in a mere ten pages gives you a lifetime's programme of practice!

Prayer must be persistent and sincere and its focus is on establishing a bridge to that higher world that is the source of our evolving transformation.

Christ describes its persistence as like a widow who asks for justice from a judge who only acts because he is forced, to save himself trouble (Luke 18, v 1-5). It reminds me of my dearest friend, Ann Wetherall's, research on answers to prayer that demonstrated a connection between persistence (intensity) and being answered. In the gospel of Luke, the word translated 'importunity' (Luke 11, v 8) means literally 'shameless impudence'. It is with 'shameless impudence' we must ask and not ask for 'ourselves' but out of love of neighbour, that place in us that is beyond self-regard.

You immediately see how difficult it is to pray from the 'right place' and yet we can always catch ourselves at it, unawares, as I did driving home today. I am passed by an ambulance and whilst pulling aside find myself offering a prayer for those travellers, carers and cared for, without 'thinking'. Such is the importance of habit - the perseverance of a certain regard - so you can fall into it and ask for your neighbour out of nothing, no self, and trust that God will answer.

And the difficulty, the desire to praise oneself for doing it subsequently... but you keep on habitually practising so as to become so regular as to achieve a normality beyond any desire for self-praise!

And in that paradox, you live!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev