Poor Me and Proud Me: Two Faces of the Same Sleep

It is said in the Work that to be awake is to have no False Personality. The more one is in False Personality and all the consequences resulting from meeting daily life through False Personality, the more one is asleep; while, on the contrary, the less one meets daily life through False Personality, the more one is awake.

We understand that False Personality is composed of imagination—of false ideas about oneself. Some people think of False Personality as being something blatant, loud and boasting. But this is wrong. False Personality in one person may sing: "What a fine person I am", and in another person sing: "Poor little me". But the action on Being is the same in both cases— that is, its power to produce disharmony in Being is the same and the effort necessary to bring it face to face with facts about oneself equally difficult.

The object of uncritical self-observation is to collect facts about oneself. For this reason Observing 'I' must not be right in front of oneself in the sphere which False Personality influences but further back. The power of self-observation increases as Observing 'I' moves more internally. This partly depends on the deepening of feeling or valuation of the Work when surface enthusiasms are seen through.

Maurice Nicoll, “A Note on False Personality" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 966-967)