Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky Quotes

“Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“The 4th Way is based on understanding. The Work is the 4th Way—that is, it is not the Way of Fakir or the Way of Monk, or the Way of Yogi. In this Work understanding is the most powerful thing you can develop. Therefore it is necessary to begin to to try to understand what this Work teaches and see for oneself why it teaches it. What does that mean? It means in brief that you must understand for yourself why negative emotions must go, understand why self-justifying must go, why lying and deceit must go, why internal considering and grievances and making internal accounts must go. (Notice the Lord's Prayer says: "Forgive us as we forgive others.") You must understand for yourself why egotistical phantasies must go, why self-pity and sad regrets must go, why hating must go, why the state of inner sleep must go, why ignorance must go, why buffers and attitudes and pictures of yourself must go, why False Personality, with its two giants walking in front of you, Pride and Vanity, must go, why ignorance of oneself must be replaced by real uncritical self-knowledge through observation, why external considering is always necessary, and finally you must understand and see why Self-Remembering is utterly and totally necessary for you at all times if you want to awaken from the great sleep-inducing power of nature and the increasing mass-hypnotism of external life. All this is the Work and what it teaches —namely, what it is we have to do in order to awaken from the state of sleep in which we live.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“Now if you could start the day from the sense of the utter mystery of your life you would begin to understand something about psycho-transformism. But you pick up your to-day self from your yesterday-self and so carry on everything as before. You think that the familiar is right and so remain the same. You do not understand what was meant when it was said that those born of the spirit are unpredictable. Now if you worship the same, you transform nothing. You turn even what might be new into the old. In that case, certainly, you do not remember yourself and you remain a machine. You remember only the wrong self —what is not you. So you carry all the negative states of yesterday into to-day untransformed.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“To-day I want those who heard the last paper to consider the question as to whether they can agree that their acquired and unchallenged attitudes receive their secret force from this intractable and violent basis of what orthodox religion calls "unregenerate Man" —that is, Man not yet re-born in himself. I believe, from my own observation, that this is the case. Now when a man observes himself, he observes a lot of things that have their own importance, but he does not observe his attitudes. To speak with exaggeration, I may believe myself God—as so many lunatics do, which shews you how close this idea is to people. Since I believe myself God, I will never think of observing this in myself. Why? Because I take this attitude for granted. To believe oneself God is an attitude. So of course I will never think of observing that. Well, it is just the same with all attitudes. One simply accepts them—or, rather, one simply does not know that one has them, so one does not think of observing them. In fact, one simply cannot observe them and cannot hear anyone who is such a fool as to try to call attention to them. You cannot observe anything you take yourself as. A man, says the Work, before he can shift from where he is internally, must divide himself into two—an observing side and an observed side. That is, he must make his subjectivity objective. He must take himself as the object to observe. But if he remains entirely unconscious of his attitudes, how can he observe them? The most of what self-observation we can do is made useless by subsequent self-justifying. "A man", said Mr. Ouspensky, "who always justifies what he observes in himself cannot become objective to himself." That is understandable, if you reflect. But how can one observe something that is, so to speak, unobservable? One's attitudes are oneself. One takes them as oneself. No—one does not know anything about them. One does not say: "These attitudes I have acquired are me." On the contrary, one does not say anything. They are what you take for granted as you. If one could say: "These attitudes are me"—then it would mean that one has begun to become a little aware of them. That is, these attitudes would begin to be objective to you—to things in yourself that Observing 'I' can observe. But if you remain in inner darkness, how can you proceed? Well, I will end this short commentary by saying that although it is impossible to observe ingrained and fixed attitudes directly, one can begin after some time to notice the results of them. For example, you may begin to wonder why you always grunt like that when someone asks you to do something useless. You may say to yourself after a time- "I wonder why I always think that thing useless." The answer is: "Probably because of some fixed attitude that you are entirely unaware of." In this way one is led down to the fact of the existence of these attitudes in oneself. If such a merciful thing has happened to you— that is, if the Work has given you internal help—you will realize that behind this attitude, that you begin at last to become conscious of, dwells secretly this intractable factor common to us all. Remember that you cannot work on yourself unless you begin to wonder why you say what you say and do what you do and behave as you behave and feel what you feel and think what you think. To take yourself for granted, to imagine you are always right, to ascribe to yourself all that you do ascribe to yourself—all that form of sheer imagination will prevent you from seeing what esotericism means, what the Gospels mean, and what you mean.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“Lying in bed in the morning I saw thoughts coming in, jealous thoughts, anxious thoughts, sad thoughts, self-pitying thoughts, which followed one another, and seemed to pass through my mind and then went out again, and they were nothing to do with me at all." Now to have this experience means that you begin to realize what is inner freedom. You have heard it sometimes said that this Work is to give inner freedom. But if a man cannot understand what self-observation is or if he has always identified himself with everything he has observed, if he has always said 'I' to it—how can he ever reach the state illustrated in the above quotation? Try to see what is meant here for yourselves.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“we change Being, even a little, as not disliking so easily, not identifying with every worry, our life alters. Unless we change Being the taste of our life and our actual life-situations remain nearly the same. Without positive ideas—that is, without contact with C influences via B influences—all the real meaning of Man perishes. He is cut off from influences that could change him. So he becomes wholly under the power of A influences. He then serves life and the big machines of life—politics, trade, war, mass-exercise, mass-propaganda, etc. He will not possess Magnetic Centre. He will not seek positive ideas. His inner mind is shut. His inner life dies, and, esoterically speaking, he becomes useless, meaningless, dead. Much was said in the Gospels about the quick and the dead and many warnings were given about Man being cut off, which can be understood far more distinctly from the Work-ideas. On the other hand, a culture comes to an end, and has to be destroyed, and the flood comes—namely, barbarism, violence, loss of truth. Then an Ark is made to survive the Flood and keep alive knowledge for the next culture. What do you think of this time in the light of these ideas?”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“We observe Personality which has been formed in passing Time by the action of life. We observe the different 'I's in it which have appeared at different periods of Time, chiefly through imitation. Essence is not of passing Time. It is not a temporal thing. In remembering oneself one does not remember the Personality but something prior to it that lies in the direction of Essence and can only be reached through it. To remember oneself in the Personality would be to strengthen it—to say "This is I" to it instead of "This is not I". If you say 'I' to the wrong thing you increase its power over you. You do not then separate from it. Life makes us identify with the Per- sonality. It naturally makes us identify with what it has itself created in us. The Work is to make us cease to identify with what life has created in us and is now doing to us. To remember oneself, to summon up the purest, subtlest feeling of 'I' in connection with some prominent side of Personality would be to identify still more with what life has formed round Essence. It would be like washing paint off with paint. The purest, subtlest, most luminous and total feeling of 'I' lies behind the multiple feeling of Personality and its uproar of ambitions, anxiety, violence and negativeness.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3

“And yet we are given a chance as the Side-Octave shews.”
― Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky 3