The Growth of the Passive Side

Have you reached this stage distinctly, so that you constantly realize that there is an active side in you that will keep on taking charge of you at every moment and a passive side that can only look on and be conscious that this is so, and is quite helpless in the face of this active side?

If you can answer with certainty that you have reached this stage, then it is a matter for congratulation because it means that a real and very important inner division has taken place in you, necessary for all further stages of the Work. For it is exactly this passive side, that has become separated from the active side, that can grow. But it is just because this inner division into an active and a passive side is so difficult to attain, and takes so long a time and is attended by so many initial failures, that personal work halts or moves in a circle.

Maurice Nicoll, “Internal Considering and External Considering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 282)