Self-Observation:The Unused Inner Camera

People get held up in the Work because they do not apply to themselves what it teaches them to do. The first thing that people do not do is to observe themselves. One of our unused inner senses is the faculty of self-observation. We have to train ourselves to use this internal camera. If used, it eventually presents us with full-length portraits of ourselves entirely different from what we should ever have expected.

The inner camera, however, is not easy to use. You stand too close to it at first. You identify with everything going on in yourself—every thought, feeling, sensation, mood, attitude, phantasy. You say 'I' to everything and observe nothing. Everything is you. This is a state of complete sleep. It is like thinking the crowd in the street is you. The next point is that when you do observe something you try to change it right away. This is not what the Work teaches. What it says is that you must practice inner separation—a process of disjoining yourself from yourself.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Doing the Work” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 5, p. 1682).