From Vagueness to Clarity: Developing Inner Attention

Simply to see a bus or a tree requires zero attention. To observe them—their colour, shape, and so on—requires directed attention. You see hundreds of buses and trees every day but do not observe them. It is all a vague, confused picture. In the same way, your inner life is a vague, confused picture. You do not observe it, but you are in general aware of it, as you are of buses and trees.

The development of that inner organ of perception called Self-Observing 'I' leads to the development of other inner senses that eventually lead us to an increas ing sensitiveness to Higher Centers and their continual messages to us. In such a case, we are no longer controlled, so to speak, only by outer life as revealed by our five senses but have a source of motive different from the changing scenes of events in outer life.

Maurice Nicoll, “A Note on External and Internal Attention" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 1142)