The Stale Self vs. the Living Self: How We Take in the World

As long as impressions fall on Personality they will always produce the same effects mechanically. But when they begin to fall on Essence everything is always new and far richer and more varied. In fact, everything is wonderful. Instead of having the feeling that everything is repeating itself, everything is the same, one begins to feel that nothing is ever the same. But one condition that is necessary is that one lives more in the moment and notices those forces coming at the moment.

If one is always living in imagination or in the past this is impossible. When we are in the Personality and only react in set, stereotyped mechanical ways to every moment we soon feel a strange staleness, a deadness in ourselves. We are making no attempt to take in new impressions. We are really in a person that has been formed in us and that we think is ourself.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Internal Considering” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 574-5)