From One to All: The Dynamic Nature of Personal Aim in the Work

If you find you cannot keep your aim as first intended, because it is too difficult, modify your aim, and then you may find that a better aim is suggested to you, especially if you remember your aim whenever you try to remember yourself. Everything taught in this Work on its practical side shows more than one aim to you. You must begin with one thing. But after a time you must include all the rest.

For example, you cannot confine yourself simply to working, say, on one form of irritation or one form of negative emotion and not do anything else. If you really start to work on your being, from one thing in the Work, you will find that it is necessary to do all the other things in order to keep your aim. You must understand that if you hold too long to one small aim exclusively and neglect everything else in the Work, it is useless. Your aim, whatever it starts with, must eventually regard all other things you are taught in the Work. The whole teaching is necessary to effect any change in Being.

Maurice Nicoll, “Personal Aim” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 175)