The Supreme Effort: Confronting Chief Feature

The supreme effort of the Work lies in making effort against your Chief Feature, whether you are digging in a field or listening to a meeting or cooking or travelling by train or are alone with yourself or surrounded by other people.

The reason is that Chief Feature enters into the way you think, the way you relate yourself to others, it enters into your emotions and enters into your movements and the way you do your life-work as well as into your conceit and appetites and quarrels.

But it is very difficult even to begin to catch glimpses of your Chief Feature and it is quite useless to speculate theoretically on what it is.

Maurice Nicoll, “Further Commentary on Making Work Effort" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 769)