Lifting Yourself Above the Inner Uproar

Sometimes by completely relaxing, knowing that one is in a wrong state, and trying to stop all thought and movement and tension both in the muscles and in the brain, the situation is quite suddenly reversed and a better state takes its place. Everything becomes lighter. It is as if you had been wearing a lot of oppressive garments and they suddenly fall away from you and you feel free again.

This stopping of thoughts and relaxing, which it is so important to practice every day, is a form of Self-Remembering. You can think of Self-Remembering from one standpoint as a kind of lifting oneself up from the uproar of things in oneself, or of opening a door and going into another room and shutting the door and sitting down quite quietly.

It is a very marvellous thing to experience a moment of not being identified with oneself, with all this uproar, with all this ever-returning and useless turmoil. And we realize how true it is that help cannot reach us while we are in this ordinary state.

Maurice Nicoll, “Deeper Self-Observation" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 450)