The Marshland of Self-Pity: Understanding Internal Considering

Internal considering on one side is defined as making internal accounts against others. You have done a job of work and feel that others have not done a similar job. So you start internal considering —though you may not express it in spoken words. Others do not have to work as you have to. Others do not see what you have done. No one appreciates you—and so on. All this arises from not doing what you have to do from yourself—not you yourself willing what you have to do.

Whatever you have to do, will to do it and you will get through the job without becoming negative and so without being tired and without making internal accounts. This is one of the secrets of right work on oneself. Not only that: it makes force in you. Perhaps nothing destroys one's understanding of the Work as much as internal considering, this making of inner accounts against others with all the resulting self-pity and damp, negative states, which, as it were, turn one's whole psychological country into marshland filled with venomous mosquitoes.

Maurice Nicoll, “Internal Considering and Inner Talking” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 1117)