Preparing the Lower Centers for Higher Centers

The Work is about developing the internal side of you so that it is so governed by the power of the Work that you cannot behave badly to anyone in your mind, heart, and soul without feeling a loss of force. We stand between two realities, one given by the senses and the other given by our relationship to Higher Centers. One is external and the other is internal and, I would add, eternal. It has often been said that this Work is to prepare the lower centers for the reception of Higher Centers.

Your lower centers turn you towards life, in their mechanical parts, so that you learn how to catch buses, how to speak, how to read, and, in short, how to relate yourself to external visible life. All this Work is about relating yourself to the internal world, which is represented in the diagram by the two Higher Centers. Here we begin to have a great paradox. You cannot relate yourself to the internal world, which the Work calls the two Higher Centers, unless you have made a good relationship to the external world. This is referred to in the Work by the term that you must be a Good Householder towards the external world before you can begin to make a relationship to the internal world.

Maurice Nicoll, "Relationship with the Internal World" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1322)