Higher Centers are always trying to change us

If you take things as you have always taken them, nothing new can form itself, but if you take life from what the Work teaches and take yourself in a new way, you will make a new pattern, new associations in the frontal lobes if you like, and these will connect with Higher Centers. If your aim is right this will happen gradually, but if your aim is a life-aim, a purely ambitious aim, you will not form any new patterns, but just ordinary commonplace ones.

That is why I said that a real aim nourishes your understanding of the Work and a purely life-aim does not, but if you include a life-aim in a Work-aim then the case is different, then new associations can be made and through new associations a new feeling of oneself is created—in fact, through a new set of associations one feels oneself a quite different person—i.e. one becomes psychologically a different person provided one can die to the old associations. It is always interesting to reflect that Higher Centers are always trying to change us.

Maurice Nicoll,"Commentary on the Meaning of Aim in the Work" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 634)