Work Ideas Must Be Lived

Very few people assimilate the teachings of this Work either in their minds or their hearts but leave them in their memories where they are useless and as a result the teachings of the Work do not change their ways of thinking—that is, they do not produce metanoia or change of mind.

With our usual ideas of life gained through contact with the senses we cannot undergo the transformation or new birth that the Work indicates. New ways of thinking are necessary and the Work gives them to us, but the trouble is that we do not think with them. We just put them down in notebooks.

Maurice Nicoll, “Contact with Higher Centers" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1438)