Bringing the Work to Incoming Impressions

How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more we through right self-observation feel our own helplessness, the more we realize our ignorance, the more we see our mechanicalness and that we are a machine, the more we perceive our own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to us.

The work comes up to the place where life is entering us as impressions and stands beside us. We begin to see life through the work and instead of wasting our time in hundreds of forms of useless internal considering or negative reactions, or of identifying, we seek for the power of the work to help us to change these mechanical reactions which we are now aware of by observation and to transform our habitual ways of taking things. We begin to live more consciously at this point where life is entering as impressions.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Idea of Transformation in the Work” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 58)