Prayer and Self-Remembering: Awakening Beyond the Mechanical ‘I’

Now help only reaches to the third state of consciousness. It cannot reach down to the darkness that people live their daily lives in and in which they are so often content to exist.

So when you pray you must remember yourself. You must be conscious of yourself and of what you are praying for. You must feel the meaning of everything you say and feel yourself saying it. You must feel it is really 'I' in you that prays and not a set of frightened little 'I's or a set of mechanical 'I's formed by habit. And finally you can neither pray nor remember yourself unless you feel there is both a higher state of yourself and something higher than you are.

Maurice Nicoll, “Note on Prayer" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 156)