Real Effort vs. Imaginary Effort: The Inner Carpenter's Workshop

Now when you make a real effort or a relatively real effort, you never become negative when you fail. This is a sign. Your failure makes you think more and remember more. But when you make an effort in imagination, an imaginary effort, not a real effort, you become negative very quickly and pass into your gallery of self-pity with all its ancestral portraits.

Now the outer is like the inner. If you go to a carpenter's shop and pretend to saw a piece of wood, you are making an imaginary effort. You may handle lots of tools and make a noise as if you were working but you are really doing nothing and you will get no result. It is exactly the same thing in the inner psychological world. You have got to really make an effort, as far as is in your power, in your psychological world.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Parable of the Horse, Carriage and Driver” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 830)