Breaking Free from the Web of Associations

Ordinarily impressions do not pass on because at the point where impressions enter the human machine, they fall on a network of long-established associations. After a time, at a certain age, people no longer experience new impressions. This is not because impressions are not new, for they are always new every moment but because they always "ring up", as it were, the same associations and produce the same reactions.

People then live only in their associations and this makes their inner life almost empty, almost dead. Impressions that are taken in in a state of Self-Remembering become emotional. Even the simplest thing can become interesting or beautiful and reflect some meaning you had never perceived.

Maurice Nicoll, “On Hydrogens: IV - The First Conscious Shock" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 199)