Three-Sided Seeing: The Path Toward Inner Will

Will from the Work point of view refers to something responding, something flexible and intelligent that it is not one-sided but three-sided. Will is of course from Master or Real 'I' in us and this we cannot expect to know directly. But as long as we are one-sided in every sense nothing can come from this upper level from which the influences of Real 'I' come that give us our real meaning and inner peace.

We must at least learn to have double thinking first of all, to see things from different sides and to externally consider—not only to see the difficulties of other people by putting ourselves in their place, which is a definite conscious act, but to see the difficulties in ourselves without identifying, and as objectively as possible, because in this way we get a new feeling of ourselves and a new and more flexible sense of what we are, which has a very strange effect on us and is due to an increase of consciousness or light and is really the beginning of the action of the Work upon us.

Maurice Nicoll, “A Further Note on Personal Work: On Seeing Second Force in Oneself" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 518)