The Slow Unfolding of Who You’ve Always Been

How can we see what we were like in the past if we never observed it ? How can we remember what is not in the memory ? It comes about in the following way.

If I observe something in myself now and remember what I observe, I will become slowly aware of its having existed before I observed it. The observation begins to travel backwards in time, usually very gradually. But it may happen that one experiences a flash of consciousness extending far back into the past of what one has just begun to be conscious of now in the present. One sees one has always been like that.

We are called upon to observe ourselves uncritically and sincerely and, leaving aside imagination, to begin to assimilate what we notice about ourselves. This is indeed to begin to work on oneself.

Maurice Nicoll, “Outer and Inner Stop" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 5, p. 1520)