The Art of Digesting Impressions: Working on the Present, Past, and Future

Now I will speak of the digestion of impressions at the end of the day. If we could work more consciously we would digest impressions at the moment of taking them in, but since we have not this power, since we are not conscious enough yet, we can digest impressions taken in during the day at night-time or even the next day.

Past moments of sleep, past moments of identifying with wrong 'I's in ourselves, can be to a certain extent cancelled by consciously going over the whole situation in our minds afterwards. You must never think that you cannot work on a thing in your past. Never think that you cannot alter it. You can alter the present, you can alter the past, and you can alter the future.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Digestion of Impressions” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 339)