Building a Barrier: Sustaining Conscious Aim Through Insight

Now to nourish one's aim one must ponder the Work and here mental exertion is necessary. Aim can never become mechanical. Aim must be something that is consciously kept going through new supplies of thought and insight. It is just like building up a barrier near the sea. The sea keeps coming in and washing away parts of this barrier which have to be constantly renewed. It is quite true to say that as we are we may not be able to do this for long, but yet I repeat that if we have done it for a time sincerely we get a taste of what it might mean to reach a stage where the influences of the Work are more powerful than those of life.

Let us take once more negative emotions. Here it is really quite possible to do something. But you cannot do anything, even for a short time, if you try to do it as a given task, as something that you were told to do. You have to do it from some degree of individual understanding why negative emotions are useless and harmful both to you and to other people. You have to realize, as deeply as you can, your slavery to negative emotions, and how much is said in the Work

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Memory” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 907)