The Prison-House of the So-Called Waking State

If you never identified, you would not mix what should not be mixed with what you do, and you would not be negative. If you always remembered yourself, you would never identify, and if you never identified you would never be negative. This simply means that if we lived at the level of the Third State of Consciousness we would never identify and so would never be negative. But we are asleep.

People live in the Second State of Consciousness—the so-called Waking State-—and do not know that this is the prison-house in which they unknowingly live, perhaps rather puzzled by what happens, but not seeing the cause of it all. Thinking in this active way about life from what the Work teaches instead of the other way round, you can see that to struggle piecemeal with this or that negative emotion is like trying to deal with a newspaper in a gale of wind. In the atmosphere surrounding the earth above a certain altitude, there are no storms. It is the same with us. If you could reach the altitude of consciousness belonging to the state of Self-Remembering, Self-Consciousness and Self-Awareness, you would be travelling above the inevitable and natural storms that belong to the lower level of consciousness.

Maurice Nicoll, "The Prison of Negative Emotions" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 5, p. 1710)