The Gradual Path to Understanding Your Chief Feature

But you cannot come into the inner perception of your Chief Feature until you are ready for it. All your separate observations and aims in regard to your own work on yourself, if done sincerely, will gradually combine and shew you what it is that you have to work against and will give you the reason why you are down here on earth. This is finding one's meaning, or rather, the meaning of one's existence.

But it is useless striving to find one's Chief Feature directly. You must quite honestly begin always to work on one or another thing that you have observed and try to change it sincerely. People feel the Work sincerely often, but never think of starting sincerely from something they notice in themselves and working on it.

Maurice Nicoll, "Karma-Yoga" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 89)