One Negative Person Can Darken a House

The Work teaches that negative emotions govern the world. They are extremely infectious. One man can make a thousand negative. One negative person can turn a house into a Hell. This ability to affect others gives the negative person a sense of power. It is an evil power. There is some invisible binding force that gets mixed up with everything we do—like a cord that we should have cut through long ago with a sharp knife.

The Work calls the effects of this uncut cord identifying. Being identified is the source of negative emotions. Here you are, for example, as pleased as punch with something that you have just made, mixing yourself with the job and the job with yourself, and then some idiot goes and lights the fire with it. You would have to be very adroit to prevent yourself from becoming negative. But if you had been awake you would have observed how you were identifying while doing the job and that would have helped you not to react so negatively.

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