Serving the Work Through Inner Separation

To serve the Work means to obey what it teaches you to practise on yourself. You want to be gloomy and moody, to object, and so on, and you observe your state and begin to separate from it—then you are serving the Work. And in so doing you are giving up some of your mechanical suffering.

Or suppose you are about to pass into one of your typical force-losing states of worry, of complaining, of being upset about everything, of disliking everything—suppose that you observe this and cease to identify with it because of the feeling of the Work in you—then you are serving the Work psychologically. You are beginning to work on yourself, you are beginning to see what the Work means in yourself. You are beginning to obey something that is not yourself. All this belongs to giving up your suffering.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Giving Up One’s Sufferings" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 855)