Giving Yourself the First Conscious Shock

If you begin to live this Work and think about everything from the ideas that it teaches, and struggle to separate yourself from negative emotion and useless ideas that simply drain force from you, and so on, and if you will try to feel yourself walking carefully amidst the events of life as if you had something protecting you on your feet, then you will begin to give yourself the First Conscious Shock.

But you must also know what it is to have a long inner struggle between Yes and No in regard to the Work for it is only your inner attitude that counts. You will notice that your thinking changes. You will begin to understand emotionally, to see the truth of a thing emotionally, and at once you will see endless meaning and you will understand how the Work is inexhaustible in its meanings and in what it can show you. You can see yourself walking about on this earth, you can stand outside yourself, because you are lifted out of yourself.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Enneagram" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 429)