The Mirror of Others: Recognizing the Shadow in Ourselves

The idea of this Work is to enlarge consciousness. We have, we are told, to become far more conscious to ourselves through direct self-observation, so that all sorts of narrow pictures that we have of ourselves are destroyed and we begin to live in a larger edition of ourselves. We can take it as a general rule in the Work that when we are up against someone else we may be sure that that is the very thing we have to work on in ourselves. This gives us an entirely different orientation and in my opinion it is the beginning of real work.

The thing you criticize so much in other people is something lying in the dark side of yourself that you do not know or acknowledge. You only see this dark side, this unconscious, unknown side of yourself, reflected into other people so that it is always their fault and never your fault. Everyone lives in a very small consciousness, a very petty world of self-reactions, of personal reactions, and this small space that they live in is full of all sorts of sensitivenesses.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Unobserved Side of Ourselves” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 831)