The Struggle with Identification Never Ends

The Work says that we must struggle every day with identifying and that this struggle takes very many forms, and very many directions. For example, you may through your observation realize that you identify with someone, and may for a time separate yourself from that particular form of identifying. But you will begin to identify with something else far more.

Why should we pass into a greater state of identification subsequent to having observed and separated from one state? The answer is that if you take force away from one mechanical reaction it will pass into and strengthen another mechanical reaction —unless you remember yourself and all the meaning of the Work and your aim, and so give it a definite direction. If you do, the force of the Work in you will increase—i.e., you starve yourself to increase the power of the Work. If you starve a negative 'I' by not identifying and that is all you do, the force liberated will go to some other negative 'I'. But if you give the force abstracted from the negative 'I' to the whole sense and meaning and valuation of the Work, it will be absorbed and stored by all those 'I's which lead eventually to Real 'I'.

Maurice Nicoll, "Separation and Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 1066)