PSYCHOL COMMENTARIES 5 Quotes

“Let me remind you of some of the characteristic phrases used in the Work. One is: “If you change your Being, your life changes.” Now everyone probably wishes his or her life to change. Everyone feels he or she ought to have a better life. But the Work says that your Being attracts your life and that if you want to change your life you have to begin to work on yourself and change your Being which is constantly attracting this life that you made. In other words, you have to begin to quarrel with your Being, with the kind of person you are.
Now this is quite impossible unless you observe your Being from what you are taught to observe in this Work. A very great difficulty lies here because everyone is quite satisfied with himself of herself. Owing to the actions of buffers in us, which are like big blocks of wood, we live peaceably with ourselves without seeing all our contradictions. As you know, if these buffers, which life has made in us and which lie in the Personality, were suddenly removed and we saw all our contradictions and became conscious at the same time in all our different ‘I’s, we should go mad. We could not stand such an experience. It would utterly destroy all our self-conceit and our self-complacency and our excellent estimation of ourselves. But the action of self-observation in the Work makes us gradually conscious of our contradictions and gradually undermines this curious static frozen state that we are all in as regards ourselves. Then we can begin to work on our Being because we begin to see at what level our Being is.”
― Maurice Nicoll, PSYCHOL COMMENTARIES 5