CHIEF FEATURE & CHIEF LOVE Maurice Nicoll: It takes everyone in The Work a long time to observe what they love most.
I ask you what it is you love most. Can you answer? I am sure you cannot answer. There is a reason for this strange ignorance of ourselves. The Work explains it in the following way. It teaches that everyone’s psychology turns round a central axle.
It has the strongest hold over them because it is the seat of their Chief Love. It is the axle round which everything turns. If you are sensitive to qualities in people, you may come near to seeing the Chief Feature in another person. But you will usually find it very difficult to put into words.
You can say his Chief Feature is Miser and his Chief Love gold.
SAINT or SINNER, everyone has a hidden weakness that can spoil his or her life.
This unconscious acting skill has blossomed thanks to an agent of our chief weakness, which it has created precisely to prevent any more than the slightest hint of its existence becoming known.
The mentioned agent of chief weakness takes advantage of these thoughts and feelings to create a personality that will play out our lives in ways that best suit the most secret part of us.
Introduction Elusive chief feature
his teaching is exceptional in asserting that one major, idiosyncratic weakness in our being occasions, orchestrates all our dysfunctioning. Comparatively few people are ever aware of what Gurdjieff called their ‘chief fault’, their particular, fundamental weakness. That it should remain so secret is not surprising.
Another deterrent is that, for those who have no wish to see the reality and face the debt of their existence, this chief weakness can be a great strength in their everyday activities. It can be likened to the ego, which can be relied upon to direct us towards attaining selfish desires.
Its modus operandi is to form a fictional ‘self’ that operates continuously to maintain its secrecy. As its object is to present a favourable self-image, this usually involves a considerable distortion of reality.
Chief weakness uses this personal partiality to deform personality into a separate and more powerful entity known in the Work as false personality.
The term false personality emcompasses the many acquired, negative aspects of a person’s psychology. Because chief feature purports to be quite the opposite to chief weakness, it is seen to be compensatory. If, for instance, a person’s chief weakness happens to be fear, chief feature will generate and the person will feel compelled to enact a show of bravery. The smokescreen is so effective that no observers – or even the person himself or herself – is likely to suspect the underlying weakness. This enactment of a being free from fear, or any of a multitude of other characteristics, becomes such an habitual part of the person’s nature that in the Work it is called ‘chief feature’.
Chief feature is ever on duty to persuade us that our behaviour is natural, inevitable, just or correct, depending on circumstances, and is certainly never the result of any personal fault.
it would be better to remain asleep – any who gave up midway would find themselves ‘between two stools’: disillusioned with their customary life yet lacking willpower to change it.
CHAPTER 1 Main obstacle to perfection
This is fortunate for mankind in general, for an unprepared revelation of this chief weakness would shatter people’s comforting, imaginary pictures of themselves and create a tension that would threaten their sanity.
many subsidiary shortcomings we exhibit. Even students of his teaching may easily forget Gurdjieff’s advice that the quickest way to develop essence – that is, our real self – is to make work on chief feature the main task of our inner
‘Yes, but very indirectly,’ Dr Nicoll replied. ‘I think that conversation about chief feature is not very advisable at present. A great deal of sincere self-observation over a very long time and growing evaluation of the Work is necessary before one can catch a real glimpse of chief feature.’ At the same time he stressed: ‘But it is impossible to reach Real I, which has real will and is active in the real sense, until one dethrones chief feature. This can only take place gradually because it means a total shift in the whole basis of one’s psychology.
the essential self. This arrangement works satisfactorily only when essence and personality develop in unison – and finally if personality is prepared to give way to the matured essence. If personality alone is nurtured, essence is stunted and the person’s overall being is pegged at a low level. Only rarely will he or she notice this, thanks to the attentions of false personality. Chief feature, as self-observation can show anyone seriously seeking self-knowledge, distorts the natural role of personality to create a false version, one cunningly devised to appeal to all of a person’s appetites, often by indicating how to take the easiest or pleasantest course in any situation. Now
Cosmic origin A significant point, intimated earlier, is that, unlike the invented chief feature and the acquired false personality, chief weakness cannot be regarded as a phony part of one’s makeup. As will be asserted by Work teachers in this account, this basic flaw is an authentic part of a person’s being, having been chosen by the Self before the person began life on Earth.
It may suffice to say here that Gurdjieff revealed chief weakness’s role as providing the opposing force needed to persuade our active force to find a way of achieving self-realisation. This is not to suggest that, because of its cosmic origin, it should be allowed to exert a major influence on our lives – just the opposite; it is meant to be opposed.
In Beelzebub’s Tales Gurdjieff exposes the human weaknesses of credulity, vanity and self-love. We will see that it is such flaws that empower chief feature, for it only has to direct our attention to one or more of them and the resulting suggestible ‘I’s that have momentarily captured our ‘feeling of I’ will swallow whatever distortion of truth and reality is presented.
You will see that in your life you receive exactly what you give. Your life is the mirror of what you are; it is in your image. You are passive, blind, demanding. You take everything for granted, you accept everything without ever feeling obligation. Your attitude in front of the world and in front of life is the attitude of one who has the right to demand and to take, of one who has neither the need to pay nor to earn.[…]You do not have a measure with which to measure yourself. You live solely according to ‘I like,’ ‘I don’t like.’ That is to say, you place value only on that which is for yourself.[…]Yes, there is your ‘self appreciation’, you blind one! That is the greatest obstacle to a new life.[.
And in order to see, it is necessary to learn to see: that is the first initiation of a man into self-knowledge.[…]The only exact measure – never changing, objective, real – is the measure of inner vision ‘I see’ – ‘I see myself’[…].
It is an advantage to recall it because the recognition of each vain impulse, one of the ‘spokes’, can denouce an agent of chief feature and together with other similar insights may give clues to the nature of the governing influence.
Even if labelled by a nick-name, the person’s protective psychology will prevent him or her from taking seriously any implications.
A very short list of Beelzebub’s descriptions of human weaknesses include being vainglorious, proud, self-loving and self-calming. Fear must be added to this general list, and each flaw contains numerous sub-species.
Chief fault, it is taught, forms a chief feature as a compensatory disguise to protect itself. One view of the motivation for this is fear that if a man were to become aware of such a flaw he would be bound to try to eradicate it. This may not be fully convincing in the light of the cosmic arising of the chosen weakness, but as our observed reactions indicate a cause of this nature, it is a more than adequate premise to assume at this stage.
We create buffers, he says, to separate our many inner contradictions, because feeling them simultaneuously, as we would in conscience, is too painful.
Buffers are artificial; they are not organic; they are acquired chiefly by imitation.[…]imaginary personality or imaginary ‘I’ generally appears in a child at the age of seven or eight. Sometimes people ask whether we can see buffers in our present state of consciousness. We can see them in other people, but not in ourselves (ibid. p.55–56).
a man were to feel all these contradictions he would feel what he really is. He would feel that he is mad.[…]But if ‘buffers’ are created in him he can cease to feel them… Gurdjieff added that buffers make a man’s life easy – but prevent inner development, which requires awakening shocks. They also help man ‘not to feel his conscience’.
What is significant to the study of chief feature is the important role played by buffers, one that can be seen from two perspectives: buffers are essential if in our present state we are to remain comfortable with ourselves, even to retain our present level of sanity; on the other hand, they prevent us not only from experiencing conscience but also of seeing our chief weakness and real level of being.
However, a significant part of the answer is suggested by Ouspensky’s revelation that buffers, while a permanent part of our being at present, are not organic. Like chief feature or false personality, their formation is influenced by a person’s environment and circumstances, factors that arise during and after childhood.
to see more connections in what is pre-eminently a universe of relationships’. In one of his books inspired by Dr Nicoll’s teaching he makes a most useful reference to chief feature in a chapter on ‘Imaginary I’ and to one of the usually unsuspected ailments it causes, internal considering.
Reyner says of one false personality tactic: Internal considering is a subtle