From Horizontal Change to Vertical Awakening

You have heard that higher states of consciousness are timeless—i.e. without any sense of Time. Movement on the vertical line is timeless. A higher state of an individual does not lie along the horizontal line, but above the person—namely, on the vertical line. This line is what gives meaning to all things. It represents the eternal scale of meaning.

When you remember yourself you lift yourself in the vertical line upwards and taste for a moment a new state. This happens when you no longer merely think about self-remembering, but actually do it—when you no longer try to escape from negative states by thinking yourself out of them, but stop all your thoughts and lift yourself up into self-remembering. And it is only by this inner movement that new influences can reach you.

You are born as a self-evolving organism. You can rise from one level to another in this vertical scale. The vertical line represents the line of transformation, and this line cuts at right angles the horizontal line of Time, which is the line of change.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Effort" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 100-106)