The Two Selves Within

So long as you take yourself as one person you will never move from where you are. Yes, but why? Because you are then completely identified with yourself. Your work only begins when you feel two persons in yourself. One is passive and this is the one who observes: the other is active and this is the one who is observed. This active one calls itself ‘I’. The passive one is the beginning of the path to real 'I'. But it is for a long time weak and can do nothing.

But as the feeling of 'I' is drawn out of the active one so does the passive one become strengthened until the time comes when the passive one becomes active and the active one passive. That is, a reversal takes place and the inner controls the outer, not the outer the inner.

Maurice Nicoll, “Internal Considering and External Considering: X - On Being Passive" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 286)