It is only by means of observing myself uncritically and over a considerable period that I begin to understand that I do not remember myself. I realize that most of the time I live in dreams. I realize that I forget myself, forget my aims, forget what I was doing or thinking and so on. But this is not all that I begin to understand. I begin to realize what it means to awaken to some extent and what it means to be asleep. Through self-observation I begin to feel the taste of what it might be to be more awake, more conscious of myself. Self-Observation is not Self-Remembering, but it enables me to realize I do not remember myself and that most of the time I have no distinct and separate feeling of myself, no proper sense of 'I', no real consciousness of myself. From this I realize that I live my life in a state of sleep which people call full consciousness, almost as if in mockery.

Look at today. What is the real explanation of what is happening in the world? The real explanation is that people are not conscious. They are asleep and acting in their sleep. And even if they feel something of this, they do not know how to awaken from the sleep or what they must do. Yet since the creation of the world we have been told we are asleep and must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels: "Awake, watch, sleep not!" But people do not understand it or they think it is a metaphor whereas it is literally true. If people awakened from sleep, if they began to remember themselves, the whole of life would change. And nothing can change in life unless people begin to awaken.

Maurice Nicoll, “On Hydrogens IV: The First Conscious Shock” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 198).