Personality vs. Real 'I': A Journey to Inner Stability

Other feelings of oneself are possible that are not derived from life and personality, and these feelings give you a sense of stability that nothing outside you can take away. And it is from these feelings that you begin to feel yourself free, because they depend on nothing outside you, and so cannot be taken away from you.

Personality, roughly speaking, lives by comparison with others. Real ‘I’ does not exist through comparison. Therefore you will understand that when it is said that personality roughly lives by comparison, you only have to study yourself or others in this light for a short time to see how easily everyone is upset or chagrined, and how brittle this feeling of 'I' is, in which people keep on trying to live—that is, in the feeling of 'I' derived from some aspect of personality.

Maurice Nicoll, “Internal Considering and External Considering” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p 274-5)