The Grave of Fixed Ideas: Making Room for the Work

When the ideas of the Work and all its significance enter into you and begin to touch your emotional understanding, you are more likely to begin to feel traces of Real 'I' than a person who takes the Work externally, as a thing to listen to and to try to do because one is told to. When we think deeply, we move inwards—towards emotional and intellectual divisions of centers.

Whenever we move inwards meaning increases. Where we saw one thing before, we begin, by self-observation, by inner sincerity, and by much thought, to see a hundred meanings. Internally one feels loosened. How else can anything new enter—and how indeed can Real 'I' enter when one is tightly shut up in one's own narrow ideas which so soon form a grave for so many?

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Will" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 496)