Taking Life Differently

The Work teaches us that we have to go against our mechanicalness and also how this is impossible unless by long observation we can see our mechanicalness. This is the introduction to the Work. A man, a woman, who cannot observe themselves and their mechanical behavior cannot work on themselves. They take their mechanical behavior for granted, being certain that their automatic condemnations, their criticisms, their prejudices, their contempts, and so on, are absolutely right. In short, they take life in the only way they can as long as they do not observe how they take it.

Sometimes quite genuinely a person may say to me: "How can I take this person differently because I feel sure that this person is wrong and not the kind of person that I would ordinarily know if I could help it?" This means that there is no act of transformation taking place in them. The external impressions come in and, like the automatic telephone exchange, ring up the same reactions in them and they feel that this is the only way to react. Speaking recently about this, I said it was a good thing to read the Sermon on the Mount and to realize that it is all about reacting in a new way.

Maurice Nicoll, "The Psychological Meaning of Foot" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 857)