We Cannot Love With a Broken Instrument

The object of the Work is to cleanse our lower centers, to clear them out, to open their windows, so that they can begin to transmit these ideas and directions coming from higher centers. Now at our ordinary level of development, at our level of being, which is such that we cannot hear, cannot even receive these higher influences, it is necessary to practice Self-Remembering as far as we can and when we can, because it is only at this level of consciousness, called the Level of Self-Remembering or Self-Consciousness or Self-Awareness, that we can receive them.

We begin by hearing them dimly and usually as new kinds of feelings, new kinds of emotions and thoughts and insights. It would be a great mistake to think that our emotional center as it is now is developed. Our emotional centre as it is now is a very poor and inadequate and, in fact, dangerous instrument. It is largely governed by negative emotions and the tragedy is that with this poor inadequate emotional center that we possess, we imagine we can love. So we blunder along in life with this wretched instrument, not realizing that our apparatus is in a hopeless condition for any fulfilment of what we really want, and the result is that we become engulfed in a continual mass of perplexed half-thoughts, half-feelings, half-imaginations and disappointments, and so on, that make up our own inner psychic life.

Maurice Nicoll, “A Note on Personal Work" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 512)