Life or the Work—Who Works You?

If you work on yourself in the presence of the Work—that is, in correspondence with the ideas of the Work—your efforts on yourself will be aided by the ideas of the Work in your mind. The ideas of the Work conduct very great force when they are taken in and become part of your inner thinking.

But life-ideas drain you of force. They make you identify with life and all its events. Life drains people. The Work-ideas protect you from life and help you to create more force. They prevent life from "eating" you—that is, the Moon. They prevent life from "working you"—that is, as a machine driven by outer events. The Work-ideas re-interpret life for you. They tell you what life is like.

Maurice Nicoll, “Thinking from Life and Thinking fromt the Work" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 237)