Awakening to Life: Seeing Through the Lens of the Work

Work has gradually to come between us and life in such a way that we begin to be able at certain moments to see the difficulties we have in life through the ideas of the Work. This at once changes our relationship to outer events, outer problems, outer difficulties. As was said, this takes a long time because, as we are, we are totally identified with the outer world, with people, with things, with happenings, with situations. In this sense we are machines driven by life. For a long time we cannot see how the Work applies to our situation in life. We have nothing intervening, we have no kind of magic mirror or magic lens through which we look.

When we are awake—i.e. when we are surrounded by the strength of the Work and are conscious of what it teaches—then impressions of life are transformed. They have another meaning. It is not the external situation that we think about and react to, but the ideas of the Work to which we react. Life does not fall directly on us, but passes through this medium of the Work, and then life becomes a teacher to us through this medium of the Work. The object of the Work is to change our inner states so that we do not react mechanically to events.

Maurice Nicoll, “Further Notes on Self-Observation” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 556)