Observing the Emotional and Intellectual Centers: Breaking the Cycle of Mechanicity

We should try to observe our Emotional Center and our Intellectual Center together. Every negative state, every negative emotion, connects up at once with certain gramophone records in the lowest part of the Intellectual Center so that you say over and over again the same typical things that belong to this particular negative state. And you do not observe it, until you suddenly one day say to yourself: "Have I not said this before many times?" This means an increase of consciousness.

This Work says that we are what we are because we are not conscious and yet attribute consciousness to ourselves. When, for example, I become conscious that I have said all this before, I receive a shock because we are all born with an inner dislike of being purely mechanical people, and we hate to think that we are saying something that we have said over and over again. We should observe not only vaguely our emotional state but the words or gestures or expressions that accompany this state—and this means to observe two centers.

Maurice Nicoll, "Commentary on Knowing and Observing How We Behave Mechanically" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1401-1402)