Seeing Beyond Appearances: The Reality of Others

In this Work it is necessary to look at people less personally. People become very identified with each other, especially negatively, by taking one another as physical objects. A person whom you see visually through the senses is not necessarily—in fact, never—the person that you think.

Now as one grows up in the education of this Work one realizes gradually that a person as a physical object, well-dressed or otherwise, is not the real person. We have to become aware that this person is just like us with all our doubts, all our troubles, all our sense of frustration, all our weaknesses, all our vices. Of course, this is impossible unless we do this Work on ourselves and realize quite clearly that our False Personality which we present to life is not really ourselves.

Maurice Nicoll, "On Seeing People Less Personally” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1345)