This is Not I

If you say: "I am very irritable," you put the feeling of I into irritable I's, and therefor you cannot separate from them.

Now you cannot begin to change until you are able as the result of self-observation to say: "This is not I." As soon as you can begin to say this internally to something you observe in yourself, you begin to separate it from yourself. That is, you begin to take the feeling of ‘I’ out of it and the result is, eventually, and often only after a struggle, that what you have observed begins to move away from you and so pass, as it were, into the distance in your inner world.

If you observe yourself rightly, you notice these thoughts not as yourself but as coming from a negative ‘I’ in you. As a result what it says does not get power over you, because you are separate from it.

Maurice Nicoll, "On Additional Means of Self-Observation” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 22, Vol. 5, p. 1726)