Maurice Nicoll and the Kingdom of Heaven

Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953), Harley Street doctor, analytical psychologist trained by CG Jung, and disciple of the ’western gurus’ GI Gurdjieff and PD Ouspensky, became in later years a practitioner and teacher of mystical spirituality. This study traces through Nicoll’s published writings his spiritual journey from his early rejection of Christianity to his finding ’what really mattered’ in a re-embrace of his natal religion, but this in a form he saw as being far ’truer’ than what he had earlier rejected. Nicoll learned through practising Gurdjieff’s ’Work’, his system of spiritual training, that the Kingdom of Heaven is neither a post-mortem experience nor a millennial restoration of Christ’s Kingdom, but a state of psychological or spiritual development and the fulfilment of the individual life achievable in this life, and that the Gospels, far from being an ethical discourse or a historical biography of a man/god, describe this spiritual state and how to obtain it. Nicoll’s books The New Man and The Mark, works of biblical exegesis along psychological lines, explain how this message is esoterically encoded in the Gospel narrative, and show how it may be interpreted.