Keeping the Work Alive in the Desert Within

The Work begins in you when you have to struggle for it yourself and keep it alive for and by yourself—because all that is best in you really wants it and feels a loss if it is not present.

What then does inner or higher mean? It means a continual struggle in yourself to get to what is real and to discard the pretended and invented side. Here one enters a sort of desert in which one is tempted a great deal in regard to the Work itself.

Maurice Nicoll, “Continuation of Commentary on Real Will" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 505)