No Progress Unless You Remember Yourself

There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. Unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help, and that unless you receive help you cannot reach a different level of being. But at the same time unless you prepare yourself by means of Self-Observation and trying to separate from what the Work teaches are wrong functions, you cannot receive the influences coming from Higher Centers.

We have to prepare our lower centers so that they can hear the voices of Higher Centers which are always speaking to us and always trying to change us but which we cannot hear. I do not mean that the Higher Centers are trying to change us exactly, because they are neutral, not violent or accusatory. You feel the absence of Higher Centers in the general feeling of uncomfortableness as if you had forgotten something you once knew. Unless lower centers can begin to hear Higher Centers there is no possibility of getting help for evolution.

Maurice Nicoll, “Self-Observation and Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 534)