Oil in the Lamp

Take the parable of the Ten Virgins. They all had lamps— that is, teaching—but half of them had also oil in their lamps. These latter were accepted and the others were turned out. If you have a real point in the Work and understand it and act from it, this is oil, in what you have been taught, which is a lamp. You have your own oil.

But those people who have attended meetings so faithfully and have no point yet, always going from place to place, they will not get anywhere. Why? Simply because they do not apply the Work to themselves yet. They do not see that they are negative and have to work on that, in place of hearing further talks about negative emotions. They have not seen the good of the truth of the Work for themselves and followed it, which makes a certain heat in a person and will begin to change the person.

Maurice Nicoll, “The Arrangement of Truth in the Mind" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1468)