When Personality Stands in the Way

If we were all more in Essence than we are at present everything would become much more real, much more genuine, much more simple, much more true, and much more good.

When you try to increase what you have been, and to feel bigger and stronger and more powerful, more important, you are going in the very reverse direction to this Work. Then you will get no force in the Work-sense. Such a state means that you are very identified with yourself—with your Personality which ascribes everything to itself.

But you will not get Work-force, as I said, from this identification with yourself. You only get Work-force through non-identifying, through self-observation, and through dissolving these pictures, these ideas, this wonderful proud imagination about yourself.

What prevents the two Higher Centers that are continually working in us, the Higher Mental Center and the Higher Emotional Center, from transmitting their force to us? They cannot get through to us, owing to our self-admiration—our Personality.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Meaning of Force in the Work" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 718)