Seeing Your Deficiency and Lack

We realize what an immense gap lies between ourselves and one who is living more consciously than we do, one who notices when they are becoming identified, one who sees when they are becoming a prey to imaginary anxieties and fears, one who is sharply aware of the fact that they are justifying themselves. This gap is so great that if we ever have such a moment of insight we cannot help feeling by contrast the enormous deficiencies in our quality of Being…

If you begin to see all this about your state of Being you are already much further on, however hopeless you may feel, than a person who has never caught such glimpses of himself or herself, because it is exactly this feeling of vacuum, of deficiency, of lack, that is the starting point of work on one's own Being.

Maurice Nicoll, "Work on Being” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 703-704)