Remember Yourself: The Most Important Thing

You should always remember yourself but as you are you have not the force and even cannot remember that you have to remember yourself. The most important thing is to remember yourself. Self-Remembering puts us into a different state of consciousness. In that state of consciousness you cannot do certain things without going to sleep at once and you can see it happening—that is, you can see yourself becoming identified. Or, to put the matter differently, if you do certain things and remember yourself at the same time, you will do them in quite a different way.

When you begin to understand the subtlety of this remark: "You can do what you like as long as you remember yourself," you will see that it really means that you cannot do what you like, at least in the ordinary way that you do it. One form of Self-Remembering is feeling the sense of "I doing this" or "I saying this". If when you are angry and speaking internally or externally in a bad way you feel the sense of 'I' saying this, it will completely change the situation. You realize that "It" is saying it—your machine.

Maurice Nicoll, "Self-Observation and Self-Remembering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 532)