When the Work Fades: Finding Our Way Back Through Self-Remembering

The Work moves away from us and we pass into life. When this happens it is necessary to self-remember. This opens us again to the influences of the Work. This is quite a definite experience, but, as I said, we usually forget to self-remember and try instead to do something ourselves.

To remember oneself is a surrender of oneself. One realizes one's helplessness. It is impossible to self-remember if one does not realize and understand that better influences can reach us. In one book written some eight centuries ago, by someone belonging to the Sufi schools, the writer compares Self-Remembering with coming to the surface of the sea and drawing in air. "This air," he says, "is miraculous, and will last a whole day, even when one is at the bottom of the ocean."

Maurice Nicoll, “Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 319)