Catching Glimpses: Recognizing Your Chief Feature

If you feel emotional about getting to know your Chief Feature, and really want to know about it, you may catch glimpses. Sometimes you can see Chief Feature in other people. Ask yourselves: "What is it in this person that would make him different if it were changed?" Sometimes it is possible to see this in someone else.

And if you can only see how you have been wrong in your own life, how you have always reacted in the same way in certain circumstances, if you can suddenly catch a glimpse of this, then you can have an aim which will inevitably lead you to Chief Feature. You will find that it is something that you have always known about and suspected, but you have never quite recognized it as that very thing. Perhaps you will see it in a flash for a moment, and you will think: "So it's that after all; it has been that all the time."

You have always known it but not guessed that that was the thing to be changed. And you will see then that if you can change exactly that thing you will be able to change other things. After the first glimpse you may not see it again for some time. Then you will see it again. It is the axle on which your personality turns, and it is the wrong axle, so, unless you build up something behind your personality, you cannot find yourself.

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