Level of Being: Transformation Through Conscious Work

As long as there is no change in the level of being, your personal history remains the same. Everything repeats itself in your own life: you say the same things, you do the same things, you regret the same things, you commit the same things. And all this belongs to this immensely deep idea that the level of being attracts your life.

All work on oneself, all personal work which deals with stopping negative emotions, with self-remembering, with not being identified with one's woes and troubles, with not making accounts, is concerned with a certain action that can take place in oneself at this moment—now—if one tries to be more conscious and remembers what it is we are trying to do in this work. That is to say, the work is about a certain transformation of the instant, of the moment, of the present, through the action of this work.

Maurice Nicoll, “Letter to Mr. Bush” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 2-3)