The Supremely Beautiful Idea: Remember Yourself

In connection with the necessity of seeing the beauty of the Work-ideas so that they fall on the right place in us, let us now try to approach the most supremely beautiful idea—namely, the idea that we must remember ourselves. This idea is of such great density of meaning that it is impossible to deal with it in summary fashion. But once you begin to understand that the meaning of our life on Earth is that we were created self-developing organisms—you can appreciate better what has happened to humankind, for we live in a very bad state of life full of hatred, jealousy, lies and violence. The reason is that we do not remember ourselves, because we have fallen asleep in life and therefore are governed by negative emotions.

For this reason the Work says that we are all under a hypnotic sleep and unless we try to awaken in ourselves, each one of us separately, we shall remain under the power of this hypnotic sleep where we are governed by entirely wrong influences, one of the chief of which consists in the effect of negative emotions upon us.

Maurice Nicoll, "Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1481)