Seeing Ourselves in Others

We are all low down in this total Scale of Being, which means we include very little in our consciousness of what we are like ourselves, projecting on to others all we cannot accept as being in ourselves, so we are very brittle to insult. But as Consciousness increases we include more and more as being in ourselves, with an increasing lack of conceit, until we cannot be insulted.

Nor, then, do we judge. How can I, if I realize I am worse than you, judge you ? At present, of course, we pretend we do not judge—a quite different matter, a matter of being full of meritorious virtues and so of swelling up the False Personality which imitates every virtue inartistically and so causes much weariness and boredom to others, like a bad play.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Suffering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1240)