Self-Remembering: The Key to Transcending Negativity

Now we identify through the unobserved petty feelings of ourselves which cause us to make endless internal accounts and build up endless negative systems in us. These negative systems, once formed, are very difficult to deal with. On this level we do everything in a pseudo way, from our self-love, our self-liking, to advance ourselves in some way, to merit praise, and so we are very easily hurt and dejected. Remove this stimulus and we scarcely exist, and may seem to have no objective. This is being a machine. All this basis of self-feeling does not lead far in the Work eventually.

It is only vanquished by a sense of something greater than ourselves. This brings us to the question of Self-Remembering which is so much emphasized in this Work as the constantly necessary accompaniment to self-observation. You should alway remember yourself but as you are you have not the force and even cannot remember that you have to remember yourself.

Maurice Nicoll, "Self-Observation and Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 531)