Fourth Way Wisdom Work : Fourth Way Wisdom Work: Self-Observation

About the Course

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 01:00:00 GMT

This study work group originally took place January 15 - March 27, 2018, and grew out of Cynthia's challenge to take a deep dive into Fourth Way ideas and practices. Knowing that Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales for His Grandson is a heavy lift, we aimed for a "softer and gentler" approach to Fourth Way inner practices via Maurice Nicoll's five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

This was what started me on my own Fourth Way journey. While on a five day silent retreat in a Franciscan hermitage, I had daily contact with one of the Franciscan brothers. Every day I came to his office to check in, and noticed this set of commentaries in his library. I took volume two back to my own cabin, and it lilterally exploded within me. I asked him where I could find others in my area that are working in this way, and it ultimately led me to a local group where I have been in an active Fourth Way Work group for the past twelve years. I have gone through these volumes two times already, and next year want to go through them again -- only this time, not privately, but with many of my friends in the Wisdom School network. These commentaries are ultimately what led me to find Cynthia and the Fourth Way community at Claymont where Cynthia has done a number of Fourth Way Wisdom Schools.

While working with Fourth Way practices, I wanted to know how to integrate that Work into my own Christian framework and understanding. Everybody kept saying, you've got to talk to Cynthia, but everytime I tried to sign up for a Wisdom School, it was already full. In desperation, I sheepishly caught her after a talk at Shalem in Washington DC, and asked, "If I do all the grunt work and hosting, will you come to a Wisdom School at Claymont in the Washington DC area?" She graciously accepted, and I knew I was "in" because now I was the one organizing the school!

In Love is Stronger than Death, Cynthia recounts her relationship to “Rafe” — Brother Raphael Robin — the hermit monk who so profoundly influenced her life. Cynthia writes:

Like me, Rafe was fascinated by G. I. Gurdjieff, that early twentieth-century spiritual genius who had laid out a path of inner transformation frequently referred to as the "Fourth Way." When Rafe finally won permission to join an experimental Trappist community in North Carolina, he bumped into a copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Later, after he arrived in Colorado, someone gave him the five-volume set of Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which he read from every day, along with his Bible; these became the twin cornerstones of his spiritual work. Most of Rafe's library up at the hermitage (in addition to his Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare) consisted of books by Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff 's three most prodigious disciples, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and J. G. Bennett. In a self-taught fusion of Fourth Way ideas and Christian apophatic mysticism, his deepest wish was "to have enough being to be nothing.”

I propose that we create the same study conditions as Rafe’s hermitage — weekly readings from the Bible (Gospel and Psalms) using the Ecumenical Lectionary and Nicoll’s Commentaries, with an added spice of one of Thomas’ Logion. Nicoll’s Commentaries are transcripts of the talks he gave to a weekly Work Group that he led in Britain from 1941 through 1953. Unlike P. D. Ouspensky’s book, his is not a systematic and ordered treatment of the Work ideas, but short commentaries that were given to meet the ongoing needs of the group he led. The Gurdjieff Society of Washington DC, encouraged by Mr. Hugh Ripman, produced a topical index to Nicoll’s commentaries. I propose that we use that index to topically explore some of the key work ideas, such as autopilot (“man is a machine”), three-centered knowing, attention, sensation, self-observation, identification, self-remembering, external considering, conscious labor, intentional suffering, and many others.

There are many places we could begin, but I suggest that we start with self-observation. One of the first steps in inner transformation is to actually “see” the state of our being. The practice of self-observation is, as Cynthia has remarked, “one of the most valuable tools in the Gurdjieff toolkit.” To really understand the tool, we will need to set aside many of our own conceptions about what “seeing” and “self-observation” actually are. In the Work sense, it is a very refined and subtle tool that takes time to learn how to use properly. It is not seeing with one of our centers (usually the head), or making inner comments and judgements about our own inner condition.

Cynthia writes:

According to contemporary psychological models, a person is self-aware if he or she is in touch with what's going on inside and can articulate these feelings accurately and expressively. In Work terms, however, that kind of self-awareness is simply wandering in the mazes of the mind, still completely in the grip of the intellectual center and its mentally-constructed sense of selfhood. This is introspection, not true self-observation. Real seeing moves faster — and as one contemporary Work teacher trenchantly observes, "it is present only when thinking is excluded."
The palpable difference between thinking and seeing is no doubt the hardest nuance for newcomers to the Work to master. Certainly it was for me. We are so trained in our culture to talk endlessly, rhapsodize on ideas, and articulate our feelings in vast emotional librettos that it's hard to value the direct, blunt power being offered in this new way of seeing.

I propose that we start our Nicoll study on self-observation with a special focus on observing “internal considering” and “external considering.”

Cynthia writes:

External considering is the bridge between the inner world of personal awakening and its real-time practical applications in the collective.
External considering is basically the Work equivalent of "practical compassion." It is fundamentally no more complicated or exotic than simply the capacity to actually see the condition of another, to walk in his or her footsteps, to "love my neighbor as myself" — all familiar territory in every religious tradition. But so often in the West these ideas have become infused with sentimentality and duty; there is no real consciousness involved. In the Gurdjieff version, as by now you might expect, the chief operatives are conscious attention and a well-honed moving center.
The opposite of external considering is internal considering, of course, which for Gurdjieff meant an excessive interiority and a preoccupation with one's own internal states, needs, and narratives. In this state, lost in one's story, it is very difficult to assimilate the actual condition of another, let alone see how to help. Everything moves in relationship to one's own interiority. Like trying to understand a phrase in French by first mentally translating it into English, one moves from "self" to "other" and back to "self" again without ever grasping the relationship directly.
That is why, according to Gurdjieff, so much of what we call "self-awareness" nowadays is merely narcissism writ large. True self-awareness begins at the next level out, when those rigid boundaries between self and other are dissolved in a single, flowing energetic field. External considering does not require great personal empathy or emotional drama. It requires a quiet mind, a complete lack of inner talking, and an ability to take one's cues directly from the present moment. If the tuition fee is a problem, drop me a note and I will gladly set you up with a free account. Or donate an amount of your choosing and in the order comments, let me know that you want to be signed up for this study group.

So that's the deal. Feel free to call or email me if you have questions. I have also created a private Facebook group for discussion.

Weekly Lessons

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Week 1: The Slow Work

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

My self-observation: I like to gulp. I like to go fast. I like to take shortcuts. I look for the quick fix. I prefer reading over doing and being.

First time through Nicole, I almost never read one chapter at a time.The chapters were short and tasty, and I could read through four or five in one sitting. Like a lost dog wandering the neighborhood and discovering a large bowl of chopped meat left on the front porch by some kind woman, I gobbled the whole thing down and wanted more.

If I've learned anything from my own work group in DC over these past years it has been to value not sizzle and pop, but the slow work of learning to see myself as I really am and to celebrate the millimeters of growth that takes place over time. It turns out that the big work is in the small things. Deep transformation needs a slow cooker, not a flash in the pan. We are in this for the long-haul not for a weekend high. Slower, slower, smaller, smaller needs to be our mantra.

For this week, let's just read the Introduction to the Commentaries and do our primary work on Commentary I: Additional Means of Self- Observation. We will leave Commentary II and III for the next two weeks.

The point of the fourth way is that we are to carry this work into our already overcrowded and turned upside down lives. We are not going to seminary or cramming for an exam. Our classroom is the circumstances of our life, in exactly the conditions that we find ourselves.

As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week One Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 15-19.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Introductory Note to Commentaries on Work Ideas

Preserving the Work-Ideas in Their Pure Form

In the teaching of the ideas of this system of work, it is necessary to give the work-ideas in pure form—that is, the work-ideas as originally taught must be handed on just as they were taught. This is the task of anyone who is given permission to teach the work to others., Otherwise people begin to alter the ideas a little according to their own level of understanding, with the result that in process of time they become quite different, according to each person's prejudices, buffers, bias, and so on. In the talks about the work itself, the ideas are given in their original form.

The Purpose of the Work-Ideas

But the object of the work-ideas is to make people think for themselves by means of them, for none of the ideas of the work can really take hold of a person unless he or she begins to think about them and tries to see what they mean individually, and begins to value them and think about life and its meaning and themselves from the standpoint of these ideas. And it must be added here that no one can be different from what he is now unless he begins to think in a new way. The work is to make us think and awaken our individual minds or what is called in this system the driver in us, which in the vast majority of people is fast asleep and remains fast asleep throughout life in spite of all troubles and disasters, one reason being that man prefers to live in the basement of himself, in the lower part of him—in the instinctive and moving centres—that is, in sensation, appetites, and muscular activity. But since the first object of the work is to make people think for themselves about its ideas and from its ideas, what are called commentaries have a place in the work.

The Role of Commentaries

Commentaries are reflections about the work, individual thoughts arising out of it through personal observation and application of the work-ideas practically, additional illustrations, and so on. These commentaries form, therefore, an additional side of the work, but they are, so to speak, personal contributions to the general system of ideas of the work and therefore must never be taken as being the actual teaching of the work itself or confused with it, and they can be accepted or not, according to individual choice. The teaching of the work-ideas is one thing: the commentaries are another thing. The teaching of the work-ideas is permanent. The commentaries are of another order and more in the nature of suggestions, possible amplifications, explanations, and so on.

But as a body, the commentaries are merely additional and may be changed according to circumstances. The important thing is to be able to remember what is the work itself and what belongs merely to commentaries, as they are called. In this respect, it must be understood that there are several things in the work, as it has been given so far, that are obscure and need some additional thoughts, in order to try to make their meaning more distinct. But such additional thoughts are nothing but commentaries. They are additional material, and nothing more, and as I said, can be accepted or not according to individual choice. If they assist in understanding the work better, they are useful, and if not, they need not be taken as the work itself.

Two Types of Commentaries

The commentaries on the work fall under two headings. The first is: commentaries which contain ideas not definitely found in the work itself. The second is: commentaries which are merely additional reflections and illustrations directly referring to one or another aspect of the work—such as commentaries on self-observation, self-remembering, and so on.

On Additional Means of Self-Observation: Commentary I

Understanding “My Life” vs. Life in General

Can you observe the difference between your own lives and life in general? What do you mean by the term my life—as when you say: "My life has been a happy life" or "My life has been an unhappy life"? Do you mean that outside things have been pleasant or otherwise, or inside things—that your moods and feelings and so on have been pleasant or otherwise? You will agree with me that sometimes a person who is in a good external situation in life with enough money and with pleasant surroundings, and without any serious trouble, etc., is unhappy and miserable, and on the other hand that a person in very different and even adverse circumstances is often quite the reverse. Let us look at this situation more closely. What is one's life—this thing we talk of so glibly without seeing what it is? When people gratuitously wish to tell the history of their lives, what do they speak of? They speak of events, of other people, of external things.

Differentiating Between Inner States and Outer Events

But one's life consists of two distinct things, which for the purposes of self-observation must be realized. One's life consists not only of events, but of states. States are inner and events are outer. States are states of oneself, that is, inner states, such as bad moods, habits of worrying, habits of fear and superstition, forebodings, depression, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, better states, states of feeling happy, states of enjoyment, and mercy. They are in oneself—that is, all states are states of oneself. Events are external and come in to us from outside. Now one's inner state may correspond to an external event, or may be caused by it or may have no relation to it.

The Misalignment Between Events an Inner States

But it is necessary to try to see that states and events are two different things, first of all, before thinking of how they may be connected together. Take, for instance, a pleasant event. Does your inner state correspond with it? Can you say for certain that when the outer event occurs your inner state corresponds to it? Say you know some desirable event is going to happen and you look forward to it. Can you say that when it does come about, your inner state can meet with it in a delightful way? Or will you admit that, though the event happens perhaps even as you hoped, something frequently is lacking? What is lacking? What is lacking is the corresponding inner state to combine, as it were, with the outer event that was so eagerly anticipated. And, as you probably all know, it is usually the entirely unexpected event that affords us our best moments.

Now let us take this idea—namely, the correspondence of inner states and outer events. Unless we have in ourselves the right state we cannot combine rightly with the happy event—that is to say, something in us must exist to engage with and so enjoy the outer event. Yet people are very much inclined, in thinking of their lives, as I said, to believe that their lives are only outer events and that if a certain number of outer events of one kind or another have or have not happened to them, their lives have been unfortunate.

The Importance of Inner Development

But a person's capacity for life depends on his inner development—that is, on the quality of his inner states. For internally, in regard to our states, lies the apparatus for living, and if this apparatus is, for example, swamped by self-pity and worries and other negative emotions, no matter how delightful the outer events, nothing can happen rightly, simply because the apparatus for living—that is, the person in himself—is quite unable to combine in a fortunate way with such events that come from external life that might give him some pleasure and delight. A person may look forward to a trip abroad and when it comes about, it is an event. But he may be so mean, so careful about small unimportant things, etc., that the whole trip is nothing but a disaster. And in such a case it will be the man's inner state that is at fault.

So if we ask ourselves what our life consists of, we cannot say merely of events, but that it consists far more of states. Suppose that a man, whose chief love is to be pessimistic and melancholy and gloomy, complains to you that life is a bad business and not worth living, will you suppose that this is caused by a lack of suitable events or by the man's inner states, and will you be so silly as to think by arranging a nice party for him he will change? The disease is in the man himself—and how many people do you not observe every day who make their own life and the lives of others miserable owing to their wicked inner states— and who, in fact, deserve imprisonment because they have not begun to see what their own inner lives really are and imagine life, as it is called, as being something altogether outside them?

Observing the Relationship Between States and Events

Now in self-observation, try to distinguish between outer events and inner states and notice where you are standing both in relation to your inner state and to the nature of the outer event. Outer events are of any kind. Outer life is not a smooth sheet of paper that we are crawling over like ants. It is full of hills and valleys, of good weather and bad weather. This is the nature of life—but, as a rule, all events we take as exceptional, or at least unpleasant ones, as illness, war, etc. Life is a series of different events coming along, on larger and smaller scales, to meet you, and each event has its special nature. And inner states are again of every kind.

All personal work is about inner states and you have all heard of what wrong states one must work on and try not to identify with. If you work on these wrong states and try to separate yourselves from them, then the unpleasant events of life will not catch you, as it were, so easily, and draw force from you. Events are influences changing at every moment in their various combinations, and some are better than others, but all have to be taken consciously, even good ones—at this low level, where we are in the universe—namely, on the earth—and some of them are very dangerous and must not be identified with at all costs.

Taking Responsibility for Inner States

From what has been said, it will become clearer that one's life is more to be thought of as one's inner states and a true history of one's life would be a history of one's inner states and negative emotions especially. To live anyhow in oneself—in this internal vast world accessible only to each person through individual self-observation and always invisible to others—is the worst crime we can commit. So this work begins with self-observation and noticing wrong states in oneself and working against them. In this way the inner life becomes purified and since our inner life attracts our outer life, by changing our inner states, starving some and nourishing others, we also alter not only our relation to events coming from outside but even the nature of the events that come to us day by day.

Only in this way can we change the nature of events that happen to us. We cannot change them directly, but only through changing states—that is, through beginning to put this disorderly house we live in into some order. It is not the events of to-day that happened to you that matter—such as that you lost something or something went wrong or someone forgot you or spoke to you harshly, etc., etc.—but how you reacted to it all— that is, what states of yourself you were in—for it is here that your real life lies and if our inner states were right nothing in the nature of external states could overcome us.

Practical Exercise: Observing Inner States in Relation to Events

Try therefore to distinguish, as an exercise in living more consciously, between inner states and outer events, and try to meet any outer event, after noticing its nature, with the right inner attitude—that is, with the right state. And if you cannot, think afterwards about it—first try to define the nature of the event and notice if this kind of event often comes to you and try to see it more clearly in terms such as "This is called being late" or "This is called losing things" or "This is called receiving bad news" or "This is called unpleasant surprises" or "This is called hard work" or "This is called being ill".

Begin in this very simple way and you will soon see how different personal events, and so how in this respect one's outer life, are changing all the time, and what you could not do at one moment, you can at another. For events as it were are like the opening and shutting of doors. Then you will be able to see, in regard to the small events of daily life, what events are partly due to your own cause, and what are accidental, and so on. And then think about your state and with what state you usually meet some rather typical event and whether the state is, as it were, the right tool to use, the right ticket to offer, the right method to employ for that event.

The Power of Non-Reaction

Towards very many events one has to learn to be passive—i.e., not react at all, not do anything. But to be passive demands a great inner activity of consciousness, to prevent any mechanical reaction taking place when the event, coming in as a mechanical impression, touches the purely associative machinery of mind and feeling which we mistakenly take as ourselves.

Week 1 Self Observation

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Week 2: Our Many Selves

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

We are continuing our study of self-observation. This week's chapter focuses on our many selves. To paraphrase some of this chapter:

"The lack of unity in ourselves is the source of all our difficulties and troubles. A multitude of different people live in each of us. These are all the different I's belonging to personality. The work of self-observation will show us that we do not have real unity of being or a real permanent, unchanging 'I', and that as long as we take ourselves as one we cannot change."

"It is only through the effort of self-observation that we can eventually see for ourselves that we are not one and so break the illusion that we are one permanent unvarying individual. When we begin to observe ourselves from the angle that we are not one but many, we begin to work on our being."

"If we begin to observe ourselves, we will then, at that moment, become two -- an observing side and an observed side. We cannot begin to change until we are able as the result of self-observation to say: This is not I. As soon as we can begin to say this internally to something we observe in ourselves, we begin to separate it from ourselves, to take the feeling of 'I' out of it."

The practice this week will again be to let this week's reading live inside of you throughout the week, and sometime during the week to post into this week's discussion group: what parts of the reading "grabbed you" and called your attention? Is there an inner practice that the reading invites you to? Think of yourself as an "inner life scientist" reporting back to other collaborators the results of your experiment for the week.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practrice

Week Two Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 19-25

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language. This is an unusually long reading for the week. You may want to work on bits of it each day, rather than in one big gulp!

On Additional Means of Self-Observation: Commentary II

Section I

The Multiplicity of ‘I’s

The following is a commentary, which refers to the idea of different 'I's in us. As you know, in this system of teaching, man is not regarded as a unity. The lack of unity in a man is the source of all his difficulties and troubles. Man's body is a unity and works as an organized whole unless it is sick. But man's inner life is not a unity and has not organization and does not work harmoniously as a whole. Man, in regard to his inner state, is a multiplicity, and from one angle in this teaching, this inner multiplicity is spoken of in terms of ‘I’s or egos in a man.

The Illusion of a Single ‘I’

Man has no one permanent ‘I’ but a host of different ‘I’s in him that at each moment take charge of him and speak out of him as if in his voice: and from this point of view man is compared with a house in disorder in which there is no master but a crowd of servants who speak in the name of the absent master. As you have probably all heard, it is the greatest mistake that can be made either to suppose that oneself or others have one permanent unchanging ‘I’ —or ego—in them. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. But he imagines that if a person is called James he is always James. This is quite untrue. This man whom we call James has in him other ‘I’s, other egos, which take charge of him at different moments, and although perhaps James does not like telling lies, another ‘I’ in him—let us call it Peter—likes to lie and so on. To take another person as one and the same person at all times, to suppose he is one single ‘I’, is to do violence to him and in the same way is to do violence to oneself.

The Need for Self-Observation

A multitude of different people live in each of you. These are all the different ‘I’s belonging to personality, which it is necessary to observe, and try to get to know, otherwise no self-knowledge is possible —that is, if one really seeks self-knowledge and not invention and imagination about oneself. Not one of you here has a real permanent, unchanging ‘I’. Not one of you here has real unity of being. All of you are nothing but a crowd of different people, some better and some worse, and each of these people—each of these ‘I’s in you—at particular moments takes charge of you and makes you do what it wants and say what it wishes and feel and think as it feels and thinks.

The Urgency of Inner Work

But you already know all this and I want to speak in more detail about this doctrine of many ‘I’s in a man and suggest to you something about its deeper meaning and significance. If some of you cannot understand what follows, it is either because you have not yet had sufficient practice in self-observation, in which case you must be patient and wait a little, or it is because, if you have been longer in the work, you have not even begun seriously to observe yourselves yet—that is, you have not begun to work on yourselves and perhaps even have never seriously thought what it means. In the latter case, I can only say that you must really try to make an effort to understand what it means, through actual self-observation, and as soon as possible, for time is counted in the work, and opportunities begin of themselves to get fewer and if one does not take them while it is possible it may, in the very nature of things, become too late to do anything with oneself in the way of inner change, which is only possible through self-observation and the self-knowledge that comes from it.

The Barrier to Change

The first point to which I will draw your attention in connection with the doctrine of many ‘I’s in a man is that as long as a man takes himself as one he cannot change. But have you thought for yourselves —that is, from your own private thinking—why this is so? You all know that this work is to make a man think for himself and that to hear the ideas of this system without thinking about them for oneself and so making them become part of oneself is so much waste of time. The work is not something external, but internal, and people who imagine that the work, as an external organization, will carry them along are sadly mistaken about its meaning.

Personal Responsibility for Observation

The very fact that the work begins with self-observation surely is sufficient to shew that it demands a personal effort on the part of each Individual and only each of you can observe himself or herself and no one else can do this for you. Now it is only through the effort of self-observation that a man can eventually see for himself that he is not one and so break the illusion that he is one permanent unvarying individual. For as long as a man has this illusion that he is always one and the same person, he cannot change —and, as you know, the object of this work is to bring about a gradual change in one's inner life. In fact, the whole of this work is based on the idea that self-change or transformation of oneself is a definite possibility in everyone and is the real goal of existence.

The Struggle Against Illusion

But the startingpoint of this self-change remains hidden as long as a man is under the illusion that he is one. A man must realize for himself that he is not one but many and he can only do this by means of uncritical observation of himself. But for a long time the illusion that he is always one and the same person will struggle with his attempt to observe himself uncritically and make it difficult for him to realize the significance of his observations. He will find excuses and justify himself and so cling to the idea that he is really one and has a permanent individuality and that he always knows what he is doing and thinking and saying and is always conscious of himself and in control of himself at all times. It will be very difficult for him to admit to himself that this is not the case. And on the other hand, it will be quite useless if he pretends to believe that he is not one and does not see the truth of it for himself.

From Knowledge to Understanding

It is a part of the knowledge of this system of teaching that man is not one but many. But merely as knowledge it lies only in a man's memory. Unless a man sees the truth of this knowledge by applying it to himself, by working on his being, it cannot become understanding. A man may say: "I know I am not one but many—the work says so." But that is nothing. The knowledge remains external to the man himself. But if he applies this knowledge practically and through long self-observation begins to see the truth of it, then he will say: "I understand I am not one but many"—and this is quite a different thing. The knowledge will have borne fruit in him, so to speak, and will no longer be merely knowledge, but understanding, because the man has applied the knowledge to himself and by means of it worked on his own being. And you will remember the great emphasis laid in this system on the difference between knowledge and understanding and how often it is said that in these times to-day knowledge has gone far beyond understanding, because man has developed only on the side of knowledge and not correspondingly on the side of being.

Becoming Two: Observer and Observed

When a man begins to observe himself from the angle that he is not one but many, he begins to work on his being. He cannot do this if he remains under the conviction that he is one, for then he will not be able to separate himself from himself, for he will take everything in him, every thought, mood, feeling, impulse, desire, emotion, and so on, as himself—that is, as 'I’. But if he begins to observe himself, he will then, at that moment, become two—an observing side and an observed side.

The Hidden Influence of ‘I’s

And unless he divides himself in this way and struggles to make this division more and more distinct, he will never be able to shift from where he is, because, always taking everything that takes place in him as himself, he will say to it all and so everything will then be I in him, and by identifying himself with everything that happens in himself, and taking it all as ‘I’, he will make it impossible to change everything, for everything will hide itself behind this illusion of 'I' and continue to live in him. In fact, the whole crowd of people in a man—the crowd of separate ‘I’s in him—both the useful and useless—will have, as it were, equal rights and be equally protected by him because he will be quite unable to distinguish them from one another since he takes them all as himself.

Separating from False ‘I’s

This is merely one way of putting the situation within a man who remains convinced that he is one. Now a man cannot begin to change until he is able as the result of self-observation to say: "This is not I". As soon as he can begin to say this internally to something he observes in himself, he begins to separate it from himself. That is, he begins to take the feeling of ‘I’ out of it and the result is, eventually, and often only after a struggle, that what he has observed begins to move away from him and so pass, as it were, into the distance in his inner world. But this is impossible if he thinks that what he has observed is himself, for then it will still be ‘I’ in him and 'I' cannot change ‘I’, for then no separation will be possible and he will remain united with what he has observed, by taking it as ‘I’—that is, as himself—instead of taking it as an ‘I’ in him.

The Source of Thoughts

When a man is thinking he believes that it is himself thinking. But our thoughts come at random, unless we are thinking deeply and with attention, which is very rare. The thoughts that pass across our minds come from different ‘I’s in us. Let us suppose a man notices that he is having negative thoughts about the work or about a person or something that has happened. Let us suppose that he takes these thoughts as his own—as himself—that is, as ‘I’—and let us also suppose that he feels some discomfort about them. He says to himself: "I must really not think in this way." This may have some result or it may not. But the point is that he is making a mistake—namely, the mistake of taking all that happens within him as himself, as ‘I’. If he observes himself rightly, he notices these thoughts not as himself but as coming from a negative ‘I’ in him, which perhaps he knows something about already.

The Power of Negative ‘I’s

Let us suppose he knows this ‘I’ in him fairly well. He recognizes at once that this ‘I’ is talking in him and communicating its thoughts to him through the mental centre and stirring up at the same time a particular kind of negative emotion. He does not for a moment take this negative ‘I’ as himself but sees it as something in him apart from himself. As a result what it says does not get power over him, because he is separate from it. But if he goes to sleep in himself—that is, if he ceases to be conscious of what is going on in him and which ‘I’s are close to him—he falls under its power and, becoming identified with it, imagines that it is he himself who is thinking in that way. By doing this, he strengthens the power of this negative ‘I’ over him—because, as you know, whatever we identify with at once has power over us, and the more often we identify with something, the more we are slaves to it.

Negative ‘I’s and Inner Resistance

In regard to the work itself, our temptations lie exactly in negative ‘I’s—that is, in ‘I’s that hate the work because their lives in us are threatened by it. These negative ‘I’s start certain kinds of thoughts through acting on the mental centre and using the material stored there in the form of rolls. If we go with these thoughts—that is, with these negative ‘I’s that are at the moment working in us—we are unable to shake off their effect. Their first effect is to make us feel a loss of force. Whenever we feel a sudden loss of force, it is practically always due to the action of a negative ‘I’ which has started a train of thought from our memories and, by carefully selecting its material, represented something in a wrong light—and it must be remembered that all negative ‘I’s can only lie, just as all negative emotions can only distort everything, as, for instance, the emotion of suspicion. Unless we can observe the action of the negative ‘I’ in the mental centre, it will gain power over us. It will gain power instantly if we take it as ‘I’—as ourselves. But if we see it as an ‘I’ at work in us, it cannot do so. But in order to realize that it is an ‘I’ in us, we must already have become certain, by practical work on ourselves, that many different ‘I’s exist in us, and that we are not one, but many.

Section II:

The Myth of Conscious Individuality

Let us return to the illusion everyone has that he is one. This illusion exists in each of you. It can only be discovered gradually by personal observation. Each of you ascribes to himself the possession of individuality and not only individuality but full consciousness and will. But as you know this system of ideas that we are studying teaches that man is not one, but many—that is, he is not one individual, but many different people—and also that he is not properly conscious but nearly always asleep in dreams, in imagination, in considering, in negative emotions, and so on, and as a result does not remember himself and so, as it were, wastes and destroys his inner life, and lives in a sort of darkness and finally that he does not possess will but has many different wills which conflict with one another and act in different directions. If man were a unity instead of being a multiplicity, he would have true individuality. He would be one and so would have one will. The illusion, therefore, that a man has about himself that he is one refers to a possibility. Man can attain unity of being. He can reach his true individuality.

Illusion as an Obstacle to Growth

But it is precisely this illusion that stands first of all in the way of man's attainment of this possibility. For as long as a man imagines he has something, he will not seek for it. Why should a man strive for something that he has never doubted for a moment that he possesses already? This is one of the effects of the imagination, which fills up, as it were, what is lacking or makes it appear that we are like this, or like that, when actually we are the reverse. In this work it is constantly said that we must struggle with imagination and you must understand that this refers also to imagination about ourselves. It is necessary to struggle with our imagination about ourselves, not only because it puts us into false experiences, artificial emotions and often ridiculous situations, but because it stops all possibility of inner growth. And it is easy now to see why this is so from what has been said already.

The Danger of Self-Deception

For if we imagine that we have already got qualities of being that we are far from possessing, we can never expect to have them. Our imagination will supply the deficiency. In fact, we will never know that we lack anything in regard to ourselves—that is, in regard to the quality of our being—and will think that the only things that we lack are appreciation, fame, money, opportunity or some other external thing, but that in regard to ourselves nothing is seriously lacking. This is the power that illusion has and for this reason it is said, in the work-parable of the sheep and the magicians, that man is hypnotized through his imagination and is under the illusion that he is a lion or an eagle when he is really a sheep; and at the same time, as a sheep he has the power of escaping from the magicians, who are too lazy or too mean to build fences to shut him in.

Imagination as a Universal Force

What we have to understand from all this is that an illusion is something very real and definite in its effects. The imagination is not merely nothing—"nothing but imagination", as we say. It is something very powerful indeed. It is an actual force acting universally on mankind and keeping man in a state of sleep, whether he be primitive or civilized. And until a man begins to know what it is to remember himself —that is, to reach up to the third state of consciousness—-the force that manifests itself as imagination in the two lower states of consciousness does not find its right direction and so acts against him. As we have seen, man imagines he is one and because of this illusion he cannot shift from where he is in himself. Everyone is, in himself, at a certain stage of himself, and no one can shift from this stage where he is in himself unless he sees very distinctly for himself that he is not one and the same person, but many different people and that to continue to think he is one is an illusion.

The Shift in ‘I’ Through Realization

This realization, this inner perception, changes a person's feeling of himself. It changes, or begins to change, his feeling of 'I'. As long as he lives in the illusion that he is one, he has a wrong feeling of 'I'. But he does not know this: nor does he know that because of it not only is his life all wrong, and his intercourse with others all wrong, but his own evolution is made impossible. For a man cannot change as long as he ascribes to himself oneness of being, for then everything in him is himself. He will ascribe to himself everything good or bad in himself. He will be responsible for every thought and for every mood, through taking everything in himself as himself, because if he believes that everything he thinks and does and says, he thinks and does and says from himself, then it will be his own because he makes it all his own by ascribing it all to himself.

Self-Observation Reveals the Truth

The illusion that he is always one and the same person and that he is fully conscious of everything, and that he has will and so is in control of himself, will totally blind him to the fact that he is not the conscious origin of all that he thinks and says and does. Self-observation will shew him that he has practically no control of his thoughts and cannot even stop thinking if he tries to do so and that thoughts of every kind come and go in his mind whether he wishes them or not. And it is the same with his feelings and with his moods, and his words and his actions. But if he cannot admit that he is other than fully conscious of all he says and does and in full control of his thoughts and moods and feelings and always one and the same person, all this will remain hidden, concealed from him by the power of his own imagination, and the whole sense of himself, his whole sense of 'I', and his relationship to his inner states, will be false.

The Beginning of True Change

But if a man, through practical and sincere self-observation, no longer believes that he is one and no longer ascribes to this imagined one person all that exists and all that enters in his inner world, he begins to make it possible for him to change. For a man can receive help only through what he believes. If he believes he is one, help cannot reach him, for he ascribes everything to himself and so is not only guilty of everything, but is, as it were, filled entirely with himself, and there is no room for anything else. But when a man sees that he has no right to think of himself as one and that very many different people and some very unpleasant ones exist in him and that he is by no means fully conscious and certainly has no individual will, although this goes against his vanity and is painful to his pride, it is the starting-point of change of being.

Week 2 Self Remembering

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Week 3: Working Today

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

We are continuing our study of self-observation. This week's chapter focuses on the necessity of working on ourselves today. In Gurdjieff's classic Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, he warns us about "the disease of tomorrow:"

"This strange disease "tomorrow" brought with it terrifying consequences, and particularly for those unfortunate three-brained beings there who chance to learn and to become categorically convinced with the whole of their presence that they possess some very undesirable consequences for the deliverance from which they must make certain efforts, and which efforts moreover they even know just how to make, but owing to this maleficent disease "tomorrow" they never succeed in making these required efforts."

"By putting off from "tomorrow" till "tomorrow," those unfortunate beings there who do by chance learn all about what I have mentioned are also deprived of the possibility of ever attaining anything real."

"Thanks to the disease "tomorrow", the three-brained beings there, particularly the contemporary ones, almost always put off till "later" everything that needs to be done at the moment, being convinced that "later" they will do better and more."

Perhaps we can all engage in a practical work exercise this week. To paraphrase from this week's reading:

"There is a certain average day that each person passes through, apart from very unusual events. the events of the ordinary day have, as you will admit, a certain recurring similarity for each person. Now suppose that a person never realizes this and never observes herself in connection with the typical events of her average day, how can she even think she is working on herself and how can she even suppose she can change herself? Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way."

"To get to know yourself, begin with observing your behavior towards the events of a single day in your life. Notice how you react—that is, notice your mechanical reactions to all the little events that happen and to other people and notice what you say, feel, think and so on."

"Try to make the work-exercise of behaving consciously for a small part of one day in your life. Because everything we do affects us for ever. A single moment in which one is conscious enough not to behave mechanically, if it is done willingly, can change many future results."

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Three Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 25-29.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

On Work On Oneself: Commentary III

The Importance of Daily Work

It is necessary to work on oneself today. Each day is an epitome of one's life. One's life is what remains at death—that is, a person is his life, and this is what is meant when it is said in the scriptures that the book of one's life or the book of life is opened at death. A man is his life. A day in one's life is a small replica of one's life. If a man does not work on a day in his life, he cannot change his life, and if he says that he wishes to work on his life and change it, and docs not work on a day in his life, his work on himself remains purely imaginary.

The Disease of Mañana

He solaces himself with the imagination that he is going to work on his life and actually never begins to work on a single day of his life. One's life is broken up into days and years. If a man does not work on a day of his life by self-observation by means of applying the ideas of this work practically to what he observes, there is no starting-point. He says, perhaps, that he will work tomorrow. You remember the saying that we will have jam to-morrow. But it is always tomorrow. If a man says: "I will begin to work on myself tomorrow", then he will never work on himself, for it is always to-morrow that he will work and never to-day. This is sometimes called in the work the disease of mañana —tomorrow. As long as a man says always mañana—that is, tomorrow —he will never change.

The Work of for Today, Not Tomorrow

In order to work on oneself it is necessary to circumscribe the field of work—that is, not to dream idly of working in the future on some grand occasion but to work to-day—to circumscribe practical work to to-day, to this very day with its events, and not think in terms of to-morrow. Have you begun to observe yourself in regard to the day —the ordinary every-recurring day that is the cosmically determined miniature of the year and of one's whole life? You all know that saying: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof". But have you thought what this saying means and have you considered the context in which Christ made this remark? What, for instance, does it mean when it is said sufficient. Sufficient for what? It is sufficient to work on the evil of to-day. If a man begins to work even a little on the day and its vexations and troubles, he then begins to work practically on himself. But he must get to know his day and get to know himself in relation to his day.

The Pattern of the Average Day

There is a certain average day that each person passes through, apart from very unusual events. The events of the ordinary day have, as you will admit, a certain recurring similarity for each person. Now suppose that a man never realizes this and never observes himself in connection with the typical events of his average day, how can he even think he is' working on himself and how can he even suppose he can change himself? Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way. If you behave in the same way every day to the same recurring events of the day, how can you believe that you can change?

To get to know yourself, begin with observing your behaviour towards the events of a single day in your life. Notice how you react—that is, notice your mechanical reactions to all the little events that happen and to other people and notice what you say, feel, think and so on. Then try to see how you can change these reactions. Of course if you are certain that you always behave consciously and rationally and that you are never in the wrong, and so on, nothing will ever change in you, for you will never be able to realize that you are a machine, a mechanical person, always saying and feeling and thinking and doing typical things according to changing circumstances over and over again.

Becoming Aware of Fragmentation

But perhaps, owing to a grain of modesty or a sense of humiliation or, better still, owing to increasing consciousness of yourself, you may realize that you are not one—not a fully conscious individual, willing his life consciously at every moment, but at one moment a mean person, at the next an irritable person, at the next a benevolent person and the next a scandalous or slanderous person, at the next a saint, at the next a liar.

Conscious Effort Changes the Future

Try to make the work-exercise of behaving consciously for a small part of one day in your life. Because everything we do affects us for ever. A single moment in which one is conscious enough not to behave mechanically, if it is done willingly, can change many future results. If you learn, say, a little French to-day, you will know more to-morrow, but if you do nothing to-day, you will know nothing more to-morrow. It is the same with work on oneself. But one must work willingly on oneself and not because one is told to. To work sullenly or for merit, is one thing; to work on oneself because one dislikes something in oneself and longs to alter it, is another thing.

Our whole manner of taking a day in our lives is wrong because by habit it gets fixed and so mechanical. Then indeed we are mechanical and so have no real feeling of what we are doing and our days pass in a strange unfelt way—i.e., we follow the mechanical habits of the day and so have no real life and take in no new impressions. "It" acts— that is, the machine. But if a man starts his day consciously, the whole day may be rather different for him.

Applying Psychological Work to Daily Life

But he must get to know what it means to work on himself, taking his life as a day—to see, observe, and realize what a day is for him, and not think that a day for him is unimportant because it is so usual and that work means something in the future—or that work is something "he has no chance yet to apply to himself, because he is so busy with his day's work", as someone once said to me in a serious manner. How do you get up, in what mood are you at breakfast, what always upsets you, etc., etc. ? Please do not think that to change yourself is merely to smoke less or eat less. Remember this work is psychological. Our daily life, our profession, our trade, our occupation, etc., are nothing but a dream with which we identify. But this understanding comes slowly—when we understand better what sleep and mechanicalness mean and why mankind is called asleep and life is called mechanical.

Daily Bread as Inner Nourishment

To work on yourself, begin to work on daily life and then you will understand what is meant by the strange phrase: "Give us this day our daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer. For the word "daily" here means in the Greek supersubstantial bread or "bread from above". The ideas of this work are to give us bread for life in the double sense of ideas and force to meet with the troubles of daily mechanical life and so supersubstantial "bread"; and to feed a new life beginning in oneself, for in the work everyone seeks to become a new person.

Preparing Lower Centers for Higher Influence

Now no one can alter his life or change anything in regard to his mechanical reactions to his daily life unless he has the help of new ideas and is helped by the force coming from these new ideas and the new thoughts that are born in his mind if he begins to understand them.

Remember that the slightest thing counts in regard to mechanical reaction to ordinary daily life—the slightest negative reaction matters, and the slightest wrong thinking about oneself or another, or internal considering, or negative imagination, and so on. To prepare lower centres to receive the ideas and force always coming from higher centres (but not heard, as it were, owing to our heavy inner state of sleep) is long work.

The Power of Willing Effort

But every attempt, done willingly, to correct or separate from a negative reaction, every attempt to remember oneself in the presence of a difficulty, every act of sincere observation of oneself, as when one is lying or shewing off or making oneself over-important from false personality, or twisting the truth to injure another, helps to make right connections in lower centres and so to prepare them for conjunction with higher centres and the help that comes from them.

Insulation in Difficult Times

NOTE ADDED: Now let us speak for a moment on personal work at the present moment in which the added fact of war exists. A man in this work has to insulate himself from the effects of life, otherwise he is eaten, as it were, by life. All work on oneself is connected with insulating oneself so that something can grow and develop which cannot do so under the influence of life because life does not develop anything beyond personality in us, and this, though necessary, is not yet the development of the real part of us, but is something artificial.

Leaking Force Through Identification

If a man does not insulate himself, but identifies with everything and wastes his force in negative emotions and considering, imagining and mechanical talking, and so on, nothing can develop in him beyond what he is, mechanically. Actually, in esotericism, a man must become hermetically sealed, as an ancient phrase puts it, and this refers to something internal, of which we will speak at some other time, connected with the power of silence. The phrase belongs to the language of ancient times when there existed a teaching on man's inner evolution connected with the name of Hermes.

A Work Attitude to Life

Apart from this, you can understand that if you leak all the time, and have no insulation from life, there will never be enough force in you to lead to the growth of anything in you. You will not be able even to develop ordinary accomplishments.

So it is necessary to learn how to hold off things and struggle against life each day. That is why it is said sometimes that this work is against life—at least, this is one meaning. But if you have fundamentally a wrong attitude to life, and believe that everything should go right in life, you will take even the most ordinary troubles as exceptional and be continually disappointed and upset and lose force and simply be a weak person—that is, weak in life. A great deal of sentimental nonsense is spoken and written about life. But you do not meet this in the work. The work says life is mechanical and humanity is asleep and men cannot do and everything happens.

The Trap of Believing in Life

Yet people cannot believe this, even when terrible things take place, and imagine it is due to this or that person and that it is exceptional, and so on. All this is due to a wrong attitude. You remember what the definition of good householder is in this system—a man who does his duty and is a responsible person, etc., but who does not believe in life.

A Perspective for Difficult Times

Now you will see that here lies a very difficult thing to understand, so difficult that I am not going to say anything more about it, except that, in these times, it is very important not to let what happens in life weaken your thoughts and feelings and experience of the work itself, in the way that it does to so many ordinary folk, who, seeing the horror of war, feel convinced that there can be no meaning in things and no God.

The Need for Inner Standards

Remember the work says that life is mechanical and man is asleep. It does not, in other words, start from any false ideas of the nature of life or the nature of man. If you take the outer scene—that is, life—as your criterion and standard, do you not see how this war can drag you down and make you lose force? Now can you see how, if you have a work attitude to life, this war can increase the reality of the work? Try to find out what is meant in what I have briefly said and try to act upon it—that is, try to think from the ideas of the work and so get the right attitude to this life on earth, where, as you know, we are under so many laws—where, indeed, we are in almost the worst part of the whole creation.

Transforming Impressions as Conscious Shock

You have often heard it said that in this work it is necessary to transform impressions and that this is the essence of the first conscious shock, as it is called. I know that many of you do not understand the nature, in a practical way, of the first conscious shock, and simply say that it means self-remembering. But a word does not explain what it means.

Practical Tools for Insulation

The transformation of daily life, that is, of its impact upon us, depends on understanding all that has been taught you about practical work—about self-observation and work on negative states, work on identifying, and so on. It is this that insulates you. When you realize that you need not take a thing or a person in the way you are taking them, you transform something and at the same time you insulate yourself.

Practicing Higher States

Self-remembering, non-identifying and not-considering all help to insulate us from the influences of life. Acting consciously at a difficult moment has the same effect. Similarly, if you experience a moment of real consciousness, a moment of self-remembering, you will feel that it is just as if you were insulated from life and that nothing could touch you. And such would be the case if we were always in a state of self-remembering. Our task is to try to imitate higher states of consciousness, so as to attract them

Week 3 Self Observation

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Week 4: Singing Our Inner Secret Song

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

In this week's reading, Nicoll writes about our habitual "sad songs" that we sing to ourselves. This week, let's try to observe the typical songs we sing, especially the ones we sing when we are alone—our inner secret songs.

Nicoll writes:

I am calling attention here to these inner inarticulate songs that we should try to observe and which can make us easily lose force, without our knowing what is happening. They are, as it were, strange little sad private relationships we have with ourselves, that steal force from us and that we do not notice because they are habits.

The inner secret songs stand in our way, and very often they are not observed, although they are all the time secretly eating our life. Only deeper self-observation will reveal them. All self-observation is to let light in—to oneself. Nothing can change in us unless it is brought into the light of self-observation—that is, into the light of consciousness—and all self-observation is to make us more conscious of what is going on in us. By inner work on ourselves when we are alone, we can often change a whole outer situation.

This week, let's try to observe our singing habits. What are the songs we sing to ourselves?

Nicoll goes on to say:

Are you listening to some I's that are singing some sad far-away song, perhaps a song without words or words you have forgotten. Try to observe it. It takes force from you and is quite useless.

Try to think what this means: and then try to observe what it means in yourself and then finally try to do what the Work says—i.e. separate. And do not imagine it is quite easy. The Work means work—hard work—on yourself. Remember that this Work is for those who really wish to work and change themselves.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Four Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 253-257.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary I

Internal Considering

Among the many things that we have to observe in ourselves and work upon is the psychological state called internal considering. This refers to a process which takes a great deal of force from us and keeps us asleep.

Internal considering is a branch of identifying. The study of identifying is one of the most important forms of practical work on oneself. Those who identify with everything are unable to remember themselves.

Thinking what others think of us and making accounts

One of the most frequent forms of internal considering is thinking what others think of us, how they treat us, and what attitude they show towards us. We may feel we are not valued enough and this torments us and makes us suspect others and causes us to lose an immense amount of energy.

Closely connected with this is that form of identifying called making accounts. We begin to feel that people owe us, that we deserve better treatment, more rewards, more recognition, and we write all this down in a psychological account book, the pages of which we are continually turning over in our minds. And such people begin to pity themselves so much that it may be almost impossible to talk to them about anything without making them at once refer to all their sufferings. All accounts of this kind, all feelings that you are owed by other people and that you owe nothing yourself, are of very great psychological consequence to the inner development of a person.

Forgiveness

Those in the Work can only grow through the forgiveness of others. That is, unless you cancel your debts, nothing in you can grow. It is said in the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." Feeling you are owed, feeling debts, stops everything. You hold back yourself and you hold back the other person. This is the inner meaning of Christ's remark that one should make peace with one's enemy "lest you be cast into prison" and "not come out until you have paid the last farthing."

If you are going to exact psychologically every pound of flesh from a person who owes you—that is, if you are going to make everyone apologize and make amends and eat the dust, then you will put yourself in prison, and you will not get out until you have paid on your side for all your own faults.

Putting yourself under new influences

But there is a law of mercy. If you want to put yourself under new and better influences, you must behave differently, take everything differently—that is, work. You must put yourself first under the influences of the Work. You must hear and do the Work.

Now if you make inner accounts, then you feel always that someone owes you. Try to observe what this means in yourself and then finally try to do what the Work says—separate. Do not imagine it is easy. The Work means work—hard work—on yourself. Remember that this Work is for those who really wish to change themselves.

Singing your song

Another aspect of internal considering is called in the Work "singing your song". This is psychological, not physical, singing. It is based on internal considering—making inner accounts—that is, feeling what you are owed and recording it in memory. Everyone has a song to sing in this respect.

If you really want to know what kinds of inner accounts you have made throughout your life, begin to notice the typical "songs you sing". When a person in the Work is called a "good singer", this refers to the songs he or she sings. Sometimes people sing their songs without any encouragement and sometimes, after a few glasses of wine, they begin to sing openly.

They sing about how badly they have been treated, about how they never had a real chance, about their past glories, about how no one understood their difficulties, about how they married wrongly, about how their parents did not understand them, about how nice they really are, about how they have been unappreciated, misunderstood, and so on, and all this means how everyone is to blame except themselves. All this is the result of making accounts.

Singing our song takes our life energy

Now why do you think it is necessary in the Work to get rid of our songs? Why is it necessary to notice them, to starve them, to push them away, out of a central position in one's life, until they are sung only on rare occasions, in a faint voice, and perhaps, finally, never? Because they cripple you inside. They take energy.

A good singer in the Work cannot get beyond himself or herself. They are a victim of their own account making. As soon as anything is difficult we begin singing. This stops us: we cannot grow. We cannot change our level of being. We cannot get beyond what we are—crippled by sad songs.

Instead of working on ourselves in some difficult situation, we begin to sing at once, perhaps very nicely and quietly. If we are criticized or spoken to sharply, we begin to pity ourselves, or get furious, and feel we are not understood. And then we begin to sing, either softly to ourselves or to others, especially to people who will listen to us. Often we make friends with another person only because it is easy to sing our song to him or her, and if the latter suddenly tells us in so many words to "shut up", we are so deeply offended that we go in search of a new friend— a person who will really understand us.

We prefer to sing the song that we are misunderstood and so we dream of a marvelous world in which everything is arranged so that we are the central figure in it. And this attitude and these dreams create a weakness, for which a person may have to pay all through life.

Our inner secret songs

But you must realize that this does not apply merely to people who make no effort. It applies also to people who do make ordinary efforts and who yet are sick in this sense, because they feel life owes them things that they have never attained. They feel they should be happier and very often think that other people seem to be happier. And although they do not sing their songs openly, perhaps songs go on in them secretly. They feel an inner sadness, a sense of monotony, a kind of inner tiredness or frustration around which thoughts gather.

These inner secret songs stand in one's way, and very often they are not observed, although they are all the time secretly eating one's life. Only deeper self-observation will reveal them. All self-observation is to let light in to oneself. Nothing can change in us unless it is brought into the light of self-observation—that is, into the light of consciousness.

Observing yourself when alone

You must observe yourself when you are alone, just as much as when you are with people. Self-observation is inner attention. When you are alone, quite different I's, different forms of imagination, different thoughts, different moods, come forward. Your most negative and most dangerous I's may come forward when you are alone.

You may have quite well written songs that only come when you are quite alone—when you feel no one is looking. You must never feel that you can indulge yourself in your worst negative I's just because you are alone and that therefore you can behave as you like in yourself. You must cultivate quite a new idea of your responsibility to yourself. To think that you can go to sleep in yourself just because there is no one there and that you can enjoy all your inner negative talking is to have no proper conception of what this Work means.

Inner sincerity

This Work demands inner sincerity as the first thing that is essential. In life we keep up outer appearances. But in the Work the case is quite different. It is about what goes on in you—inside yourself, in your thoughts and feelings. By inner work on ourselves when we are alone, we can often change a whole outer situation. But we cannot do that without inner sincerity and observing which I's in us are lying or twisting things and so on. We can undo a week of work in a few moments.

If we do not go with negative I's in public, but indulge them in private, what do we think we are doing? We certainly have not begun to understand what work means. On one occasion I was sitting with Mr. Ouspensky. We had been silent. He looked up at me with a smile and asked me why I was so sad. I said I did not know that I was.

He said: "It is a habit. You are listening to some I's that are singing some sad far-away song, perhaps a song without words or words you have forgotten. Try to observe it. It takes force from you and is quite useless."

Sacrificing our suffering

I give this as an example of what I call "inner secret songs". We know that the Work sometimes speaks of sacrifice —that we must sacrifice something in order to get anything. What does the Work say that we must sacrifice first of all? It says we must sacrifice our suffering. We express our suffering often in songs, articulate and inarticulate.

Week 4 Self Observation

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Week 5: External Considering

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

In this week's reading, Nicoll comments:

"In the practice of external considering it is necessary to realize that other people are mirrors of ourselves. If you have taken an album of good photographs of yourself through long self-observation, then you will not have to look far in it to find in yourself what you object to so much in the other person and then you will be able to put yourself in the other people's position, to realize that they have also this thing that you have noticed in yourself, that they have their inner difficulties, just as much as you have, and so on."

"Remember that when you find the same thing in yourself that you are blaming in someone else it has the magical effect of cancelling the whole situation out."

A suggestion for this week's practice comes from Elizabeth O'Connor, Our Many Selves: A Handbook for Self-Discovery, "From Judgment to Empathy: Exercise Four", page 71:

"What you criticize in another, try to find in yourself. We want to discover our dark selves, not in order that they may be blamed and banished out of sight, but in order that we may have conversation with them and they may lead us to the light. This is the promise if we will attend to them."

"An added discipline for this week might be to say nothing negative about anyone else or about yourself. This will give you more energy for inner work on the subject. If you find it a difficult discipline to keep, do not be discouraged. A discipline is to help us learn, and there is often more learning in failure than in success."

From Cynthia's basic course on Spiritual Practices from the Gurdjieff Work:

"External considering is the bridge between the inner world of personal awakening and its real-time practical applications in the collective."

"External considering is basically the Work equivalent of "practical compassion." It is fundamentally no more complicated or exotic than simply the capacity to actually see the condition of another, to walk in his or her footsteps, to "love my neighbor as myself" — all familiar territory in every religious tradition. But so often in the West these ideas have become infused with sentimentality and duty; there is no real consciousness involved. In the Gurdjieff version, as by now you might expect, the chief operatives are conscious attention and a well-honed moving center."

"The opposite of external considering is internal considering, of course, which for Gurdjieff meant an excessive interiority and a preoccupation with one's own internal states, needs, and narratives. In this state, lost in one's story, it is very difficult to assimilate the actual condition of another, let alone see how to help. Everything moves in relationship to one's own interiority. Like trying to understand a phrase in French by first mentally translating it into English, one moves from "self" to "other" and back to "self" again without ever grasping the relationship directly. That is why, according to Gurdjieff, so much of what we call "self-awareness" nowadays is merely narcissism writ large. True self-awareness begins at the next level out, when those rigid boundaries between self and other are dissolved in a single, flowing energetic field. External considering does not require great personal empathy or emotional drama. It requires a quiet mind, a complete lack of inner talking, and an ability to take one's cues directly from the present moment."

"External consideration is the Gurdjieffian version of 'skillful means.' It's about being uncluttered enough, alert enough, and present enough to see what will actually help, and balanced enough in your three centers to bring the right force and the right timing."

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Five Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 257-260.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary II

External Considering

The Trap of Making Too Many Requirements

The more requirements you make, the more internal considering you will have. You will always be disappointed and feel that somebody else is to blame. People who make many requirements make life very difficult for themselves. Nothing is right: they are not surrounded by the right people, they are not treated properly, and so on. In this Work we must gradually feel our own nothingness by observation.

The Command to Practice External Considering

The opposite to internal considering is external considering. External considering is thinking of others. It is one of the few things in the Work that we are actually told to do. We are told not to internally consider and not to have negative emotions, and so on, but we are told to externally consider just as we are told to remember ourselves. When we are in a state of internal considering (and this is our usual state) we are really thinking only of ourselves.

Internal Considering as Self-Centeredness

We regard ourselves as the center of the Universe. Like Copernicus, we have to realize that we are not the center of the Universe. To internally consider gives us only self-emotions and as these increase the character becomes more shut in. You all know people, surely, to whom you cannot speak for a moment without their beginning to tell you what troubles they have, what a hard life they lead, and so on. Such people are ruined. They are dead.

Negative Emotions Rule the World

You know that the Work says that it is negative emotions that govern the world, and not sex or power. Just think how many people are completely ruined by constantly indulging in negative emotions. Internal considering is a branch of identifying. It is closely connected with negative states in us.

External Considering: An Entirely Different Orientation

The opposite of internal considering, and what is in part a means of fighting against it, is "external considering". External considering is based upon an entirely different relationship towards people from internal considering. It is adaptation towards people, to their understanding, to their requirements. By considering externally we do that which makes life easy for other people and for ourselves.

The Difficulty and Discipline of External Considering

External considering requires a knowledge of others, an understanding of their tastes, habits and superstitions. At the same time external considering requires a great power over oneself, a great control over oneself. Very often we desire not to express or to show to others what we really think of them or feel about them.

The Illusion of “Sincerity”

But if we are weak, we will of course give way and say what we really think and afterwards justify ourselves and say that we did not want to lie, did not want to pretend, but we wanted to be sincere. Then we convince ourselves that it was the others fault. We really wanted to externally consider them, even to give way to them, not to quarrel, and so on. But the other person did not at all want to consider us, so that nothing could be done with that person.

When External Considering Turns into Internal Considering

It very often happens that we begin with a blessing and end with a curse: we begin by deciding to externally consider, and afterwards blame other people for not externally considering us. This is an example of how external considering passes into internal considering.

Seeing Others as Machines Like Ourselves

But if we really remember ourselves, we understand that other people are a machine just as we are ourselves, and then we will enter into their position, we will put ourselves in their place, and we will be really able to understand and feel what another person thinks and feels.

Releasing the Grip of Requirements

If we can do this, our work becomes easier for us. But if we approach another with our own requirements nothing except new internal considering can ever be obtained from it.

External Considering in the Work Itself

Right external considering is very important in the Work. It often happens that people who understand very well the necessity of external considering in life do not understand the necessity of external considering in the Work. They even imagine that just because they are in the Work they have a right not to consider others.

The Value of External Considering as Work

Whereas in reality, in the Work--that is, for our successful work--ten times more external considering is necessary than in life, because only external considering on our part shows our valuation of the Work and our understanding of the Work--and success in the Work is always proportional to the valuation and understanding of it.

From Self-Emotions to Others-Emotions

In the Work external considering is more necessary than in life. It does not make "self-emotions", but "others-emotions." The second line of the Work, Work in conjunction with others, brings in the necessity of external considering, of putting ourselves into another person's place, of realizing other people's difficulties.

Seeing Ourselves in Others

In the practice of external considering it is necessary to realize that other people are mirrors of ourselves. If you have taken an album of good photographs of yourself through long self-observation, then you will not have to look far in it to find in yourself what you object to so much in the other person and then you will be able to put yourself in the other people's position, to realize that they have also this thing that you have noticed in yourself, that they have their inner difficulties, just as much as you have, and so on.

A Practice You Can Do Alone

External considering can be practiced when you are alone. I will give you one example: go over carefully what you said to someone and put yourself in their place by visualizing them saying the same things to you and using the same intonation.

Emotional Center and External Considering

External considering is as vast and as varied in its range as is internal considering. There cannot be right development of the Emotional center without the practice of external considering: valuation of this Work, and the practice of external considering develops Emotional center. The more you value this Work the less can false personality govern you, the less vanity can you have, and the more you externally consider the less important will you think yourself.

External Considering Is Not Pretending

In this Work there is no such thing as pretending to do good when you really will bad. It is no use pretending to be nice to other people when you hate them in your heart. All this Work depends on inner sincerity. External considering is not hypocrisy, it is not "good works," but it is a question of inner attitude.

The Magic of Real Forgiveness

Remember that when you find the same thing in yourself that you are blaming in someone else it has the magical effect of cancelling the whole situation out. This is real "forgiving".

The Shock of Self-Blame

You know that our natural state is to be very surprised that there is anything wrong with ourselves. Of course we often blame ourselves, as it were. We say, for example: "Yes, I am afraid I was very much to blame for that incident." "Yes, certainly you were," says the other person. Are you not then very startled? Why, you will be hurt and offended at once. All this is because it is very difficult to think that anything is wrong with us and it is all part of the sleep we are in, the deep sleep that covers all humanity.

Harsh Self-Observation Opens the Way

Now self-observation is very harsh and becomes more harsh. If it is done sincerely it will hurt. But it lets light in and stops all sorts of rank weeds from growing within, and amongst them all the strange growths due to internal considering and self-pity and song-singing. And then at last we begin to see what it means that we must realize that we are nothing before we can expect to be something.

Feeling Cheated by Life

With regard to that form of internal considering which is based on feeling that life has cheated you, that you should be in a different situation, you must remember that the Work says very emphatically that everyone starts from where they should be. It says that the conditions under which you encounter this Work are the right conditions for you. Nothing is more absurd than to think that one's life is being wasted in this Work.

Unrealistic Prescriptions for Life

It is extraordinary that people have very narrow opinions as to what life should be like. They have as it were one or two prescriptions for life and if a person's life does not correspond to these prescriptions it is regarded as being wasted or useless and with such an outlook we may internally consider a great deal and feel that everything is against us, even God and the whole Universe, and it is simply because we do not take our life in the right way. We makes requirements which cannot be satisfied.

Not Asking Life for the Wrong Things

We are like a person who goes into a grocer's shop and asks for a top-hat or a sewing-machine and do not take what can be sold to us. The forces of hypnotism which keep us asleep are the same for everyone. If awakening is your aim, then whatever your circumstances are, it should make no difference to you, unless perhaps you are forcibly deprived of the Work.

Karma Yoga and Meeting Life as It Is

You heard the section on Karma Yoga read out a week or two ago. No better formulation has been made as far as I know about how to avoid internal considering in connection with the ordinary circumstances of your life.

Detachment and Non-Identification

Since internal considering is a form of identifying you will realize that the practice of non-identifying which Mr. Ouspensky outlined in terms of the word detachment is the cure for internal considering. If you realize that internal considering can become a real illness and can ruin you, if you can see it at work in yourselves, then you will do all in your power to try to escape from it.

Seeing Internal Considering as a Threat

It is no good saying, for instance, "Oh, so and so has no idea what life is like for a person like me." It will only increase your internal considering. It is the internal considering in yourself that has to be stopped or else it will grow and grow and grow. It will spread a fire over everything young and growing in you.

There Is No Quick Fix

Do not ask what is the remedy for internal considering please. You have got to study it in yourselves and notice what harm it does you and from that gain a real desire to free yourself from it. You have got to see it first in yourself and then you have to take it seriously, in conjunction with all the other things that you are told in this Work to practice. For the whole Work is necessary. The application of all the parts of the Work is necessary, for the whole Work is a living organism.

Karma Yoga: A Science of Action

A note about Karma Yoga (from On Effort in the Work, pp. 250-251 and Karma Yoga pp. 88-89 )

Karma Yoga is the science of action with non-identifying -- meeting with unpleasant things as equally as with pleasant things. When this is possible, life becomes one's teacher. Nothing can change being so much as this practice--namely, to take the unpleasant things in life as an exercise.

Non-Identifying Is Not Detachment from Action

To take life with non-identifying does not mean empty acting; it means to act from a real basis, from aim and from understanding the ideas and meaning of the Work. We are born into this planet with an inner task and life is so arranged that we cannot find ourselves and our meaning through life alone, but only through seeing what this inner task is.

Accepting the Right Conditions for Inner Work

The Work says that everyone is born into, and is in, exactly the best circumstances in regard to this task, and that if we meet this Work our conditions are just what is best for the purpose of work.

Keeping the Chief Aim Alive

Karma Yoga is always connected with the aim of inner development. It helps us not to fall asleep inwardly amidst the entangling influences of life, especially in the midst of the hypnotizing influence of activity. Without Karma Yoga we become absorbed in the nearest, the visible aims, and forget the chief aim.

The Power of Attitude to Transform Life

Karma Yoga teaches us to change our fate by altering our inner attitude towards things and towards our own actions.

The same action can be performed differently; one and the same event can be lived through differently. If we alter our attitude towards what happens to us, this will in the course of time inevitably change the character of the events which we encounters on our way.

No Such Thing as Failure

Acting and feeling in this way, we can never meet with failure in anything, because the greatest failure, the greatest "unsuccess", may further success in our inner work, in our struggle with ourselves, if we only find the right attitude towards this "unsuccess."

Welcoming Difficulty as Inner Training

In ordinary life, no matter what the conditions may be, our chief aim consists in avoiding all unpleasantnesses, difficulties and discomforts, so far as this is possible. In a life governed by the principles of Karma Yoga, we do not seek to avoid unpleasantnesses or discomforts. On the contrary, we welcomes them, for they afford us a chance of overcoming them.

Life Becomes the Teacher

From the point of view of Karma Yoga, if life offered no difficulties it would be necessary to create them artificially. And therefore the difficulties which are met with in life are regarded not as something unpleasant which one must try to avoid, but as very useful conditions for the aims of inner work and inner development. When we realize this and feel it constantly, life itself becomes our "teacher.”

Week 5 Self Observation

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Week 6: Like and Dislike

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Inscribed in a special script above the walls of Gurdjieff's study house at The Prieuré in Fontainebleu France are 38 aphorisms, the first of which is "like what it does not like." Noticing like and dislike, and changing our relationship to both, is part of developing self-observation.

In this week's reading, Nicoll comments:

"Dislike grows very early. You cannot externally consider another person, if you nourish dislike only. Everyone splits easily into like and dislike, and in relationships the dislikes must not be allowed to grow mechanically. By self-observation we notice we have two memories for a person. When we are negative we remember only unpleasant things: when not negative we forget them."

"We have some idea of what fair treatment means in regard to outer behavior. But we have to be fair in ourselves to others and this really is work on oneself that takes the form of external considering."

"I suggest that for practical work each of you decide to externally consider a particular person during this next week. Observe your mechanical reactions to this person - your likes and dislikes. Observe your mechanical criticisms. Observe where you feel superior.

Try to find in yourself the same things that you complain of in the other person. Think how you would like the other person to think of you as you think of him or her. Put yourself in the other person's place.

Try to see where the trouble lies in yourself as well as in the other person. Try not to identify. Notice your inner talking and what it is up to. Keep awake to what you are doing, which will be your aim for a week.

Remember it every day on getting up. Think of it at night--where you failed, why you failed, where you began to internally consider instead of to externally consider. Then you will see better the meaning of externally considering and how it can change being."

John Bennet speaks of freedom from like and dislike:

"Subjection to likes and dislikes really makes people's lives miserable. And some people it makes very miserable. With others it narrows down and constricts their possible responses to the world. In spite of that, there is something in us that clings to these things and which identifies ourselves. When you hear people saying, as if it were a merit, that they do the things that they like and do not do the things that they dislike, or that they know which people they can get along with and which they cannot and how they are able to keep away from people they cannot get along with and consort with the people they can, as if this were a mark of wisdom; what does it mean? It means one's shutting oneself off to a whole lot of possible experiences. In the ordinary mechanical way of life, we say we will go along with the things we approve of and avoid the things we disapprove of. Like and dislike is a kind of guardian, a kind of warden that keeps us in prison. As long as we are daunted by this, we remain in the prison of our imagination. When we are bold enough to walk through, we see that the warden has no power to stop us and we can go free."

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Six Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 261-264

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary III

External Considering: A Requirement from the Beginning

Last time we spoke of the necessity for considering externally in the Work. External considering must begin from the start of the Work, as far as a person is capable of it. A person who is self-centered--that is, who only thinks of himself or herself and of others only in reference to himself or herself--cannot go far. Such a person works only along the first line of Work, the line of Work on oneself, and that only to a very limited extent. The second line of Work has to do with other people and one's attitude to them. This demands work on oneself also. It does not mean merely that you must endure the unpleasant manifestations of others--and remember that they have to endure yours--but it means rather the practice of external considering in general.

Our Fixed and Hostile View of Others

Everyone has a more or less fixed way of taking other people, due to attitudes and buffers. We see others through our attitudes and buffers. In general we do not like other people. Instinctively we are hostile. I remember G. once saying that when we pass someone in a lane we tend to tense our muscles. You know that it has been said that we should not pretend we like other people, but try to work on dislike.

Dislike as a Barrier to External Considering

Dislike grows very early. You cannot externally consider another person, if you nourish dislike only. Everyone splits easily into like and dislike, and in relationships the dislikes must not be allowed to grow mechanically. By self-observation we notice we have two memories for a person. When we are negative we remember only unpleasant things: when not negative we forget them. We have some idea of what fair treatment means in regard to outer behavior. But we have to be fair in ourselves to others and this really is work on oneself that takes the form of external considering.

Neutralizing Poisonous Inner Attitudes

A cluster of unpleasant thoughts and feelings about another person, that you have allowed to enter consciousness willingly, can begin to grow. It is both for the sake of yourself and the other person that something must be done--that is, that you must work on yourself to neutralize, as it were, this unpleasant and powerful material in you. All your intelligence and sincerity and work-memory will be required probably to neutralize this poison, so that you can once more treat the other person fairly inside yourself. You will have to put yourself in the other person's place. You will have to drop all self-justifying, and above all you will have to remember what you have observed in yourself, and what you are like, before you criticize so easily this other person.

Choosing Internal or External Considering

On the other hand, you need not do this. You can simply internally consider. You can make accounts--saying to yourself that the other person is wrong, that you have not been properly treated, that you are owed, that the other person is indebted to you--that is, in debt to you.

Internal Considering as a Basis for Most Relationships

All this is the basis of so many relationships in life. The basis is internal considering. Have you also noticed that in a relationship between two people, one of them usually externally considers a little more and the other often only internally considers and complains about everything?

Emotional Center and the Purpose of External Considering

In the Work, external considering must go more deeply than in life. It really belongs to the purification of the Emotional Center. One of the great objects of this Work is to awaken the Emotional Center, which is drugged with negative emotions and all the small emotions of self, of vanity, of self-conceit, etc.

The Effort Required for True External Considering

External considering (in the Work-sense) requires conscious effort, whereas internal considering is mechanical --that is, it requires no effort but goes on by itself and grows by itself just as do negative emotions. In the Work, external considering does not spring from life-motives. That is why it requires conscious effort. You have to consider people whom, in life, you would probably not for a moment think of considering. It is this kind of external considering that can change the level of being.

Life-External Considering: The Case of the Head-Waiter

Let us take a person who practices external considering in life--for example, a head-waiter. Head-waiters are perhaps very clever. They notice what people like, what their peculiarities are, what they expect from them, what forms of irritation they have, what food they prefer, and so on. They pander to all this. Like St. Paul they are "all things to all people" but not from the same motives. They are intelligent enough to adapt himself to people's requirements. They put himself out for the sake of others. They are tactful, observant, they efface themselves, and so on. But they do all this because they are playing a game. And they are quite right. They are intelligent.

Life vs. Work Motives for External Considering

But in the Work the case is different. External considering from a life point of view is not the same as external considering from a Work point of view. At the same time, a person who knows what external considering means in life and who is trained in studying the requirements of other people may perhaps learn better what external considering means in the Work.

The Meaning of Work External Considering

What I want you to see tonight is that the kind of external considering done by the waiter is not the same as that which becomes eventually necessary for everyone in the Work. You come to the necessity and to the meaning of external considering in the Work from a different side which is certainly connected with yourself and your self-interest, but not in the same way.

Identification and the Sabotage of Work

Our object is to try to awaken, not to be so identified with everything, not to be slaves to useless negative states and blank minds, and so on. If we continually make accounts against one another, by privately despising, by wrong talking, by psychologically murdering others and so on, all work on oneself is spoiled.

The Need for Unified Awakening

In the process of awaking from sleep, one thing hangs on another thing. One leg cannot get out of bed. The whole of you must get out of bed, if you want to stand upright. After a time in the Work you come to that point of sincerity with yourself in which you realize that you simply cannot allow yourself to be in some particular state that you observe you are in.

Sincerity and Deepening External Considering

It is then that you will begin to see why you must externally consider--that is, that you must get things right in yourself with regard to other people. So you will see from this brief note that external considering, in the Work, is not something superficial, but something very deep. At first you must practice external considering quite externally, so to speak, but notice the quality of it. The more sincere it is, the better the quality. The more superficial and pretended, the worse the quality.

A Practical Exercise in External Considering

All efforts in the Work, as has been often said, depend for their results on their quality. I suggest that for practical work each of you decide to externally consider a particular person during this next week. Observe your mechanical reactions to this person. Observe your mechanical criticisms. Observe where you feel superior. Try to find in yourself the same things that you complain of in the other person. Think how you would like the other person to think of you as you think of him or her. Put yourself in the other person's place. Try to see where the trouble lies in yourself as well as in the other person. Try not to identify. Notice your inner talking and what it is up to. Keep awake to what you are doing, which will be your aim for a week. Remember it every day on getting up. Think of it at night--where you failed, why you failed, where you began to internally consider instead of to externally consider. Then you will see better the meaning of externally considering and how it can change being.

INTERNAL CONSIDERING AND EXTERNAL CONSIDERING: COMMENTARY IV

Feeling Undervalued and Making Accounts

When you feel that some one has not behaved rightly to you, you feel that you have not been estimated at your proper value. For example, to feel insulted is to feel that you are not estimated at your proper value. So people often say, when insulted: "Do you know who I am?" or something like that. They mean that they have a certain valuation of themselves, so they say: "Do you know who I am?" meaning that if other people did know, they would not dare to behave as they do.

Self-Valuation and Susceptibility to Offense

Of course, if you have little or no picture of yourself as being valuable, you will not be so easily upset. A high estimate of yourself naturally will make it more easy for you to feel that others do not estimate you at your proper value. So you will internally consider more easily. A person may even be so pre-occupied with the question of others treating him rightly, and with suspicions about whether others are laughing at him, that his whole life may be said to be involved in internal considering.

Clinging to Suffering and Emotional Entitlement

Or again, some persons may value themselves above others because of sufferings. People cling to their own suffering and come to regard themselves as worthy of special evaluation because they have had all kinds of hardships, miseries and sufferings. They are offended if another person begins to talk of his own suffering. They feel that the other person does not consider them enough and that they are selfish. It is difficult for them to realize that other people also have sufferings.

Selfishness and the Mirror of Others

Nor do they realize that to see selfishness in others is to see the reflection of one's own selfishness, for the more requirements you make from others, the more selfish will others appear to you.

The Origin of Making Inner Accounts

What is it that causes us to begin to internally consider? Let us ask the question: "At what point, or where, do you start making accounts?" You start when you feel you are not estimated aright, when you feel you are undervalued. The waiter does not come when called. The shop-assistant serves another person first. Perhaps people do not look at you enough in the street, or, let us say, pay sufficient attention in general. Or one person seems persistently to ignore you. Or perhaps you hear what someone said of you: that is nearly always unpleasant. There are a thousand and one possible examples, less, and more, serious. Small incidents upset us easily--the waiter, the shop-assistant. These form short accounts and may eventually become a habit.

Long-Standing Accounts and Their Origins

But we have all sorts of long-standing accounts against others, some of them stored up in the past, unfortunately for ourselves. They all begin with this mysterious question of one's own valuation of oneself.

Self-Observation: Seeing the Mechanism of Offense

A person with some self-observation might well exclaim: "What is this thing in me that is offended at this moment and has already begun to make accounts?” Look, I can observe it at work in me collecting materials and beginning to remember unpleasant things and to find words and phrases to use against other people so as to make them feel that they are underestimated by me--in fact, to make them realize they are so much dirt.

False Personality and the Roots of Identification

Is it a picture of myself? Is it imaginary 'I'? Is it false personality? or what is it that is at the bottom of it all? The answer is that what is at the bottom of it all is where you identify with yourself. All forms of internal considering, of which making accounts against another person is one form, belong to identifying.

Studying Identification at Its Root

The Work says that we must study identifying down to its very roots. One is only offended where one is identified with oneself. And the Work also says that the study of identifying must begin with a study of where you are identified with yourself . It is here that you can be upset, hurt, offended, insulted. The being identified with oneself comes first, being upset and offended comes second, making inner accounts comes third

Week 6 Self Observation

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Week 7: First Conscious Shock

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

I hope we are all getting a sense of why this is called "The Work". If we go through our week passively, slipping into "auto-pilot" mode and letting our inner machine respond to all our life events, then we fall asleep and are not "in the work." Ironically, the first step of waking up is seeing our sleep.

Nicoll relates a funny story in this week's reading:

"Now suppose you have to live with a person called yourself. I once read a story of a man who died and went into the next world where he met numbers of people some of whom he knew and liked and some he knew and disliked. But there was one person there whom he did not know and he could not bear him."

"Everything he said infuriated and disgusted him--his manner, his habits, his laziness, his insincere way of speaking, his facial expressions--and it seemed to him also that he could see into this man's thoughts and his feelings and all his secrets and, in fact, into all his life. He asked the others who this impossible man was. They answered: 'Up here we have very special mirrors which are quite different from those in your world. This man is yourself.'"

For our practical work this week, let's suppose that you have to live with the person who is you. Bring to mind the person in this world who knows you best, and put yourself into that person's place, looking out of this person's mind and consciousness at yourself as they see you. What is it like for them to live with you? How do they hear you, and experience you in your daily behavior? Can you see yourself through their eyes? Can you see yourself as this other person sees you, at least to some extent? Can you begin to realize practically what the other person's situation is?

If you have no or little self-observation, you may imagine what a great blessing it would be for this other person to live with you. But can you see what some of their difficulties are and what it might mean if you had to live with yourself? Can you see how difficult you are for the other person?

There is a harsh seeing and a gentle seeing. Harsh seeing judges, shames, and wants to mount a direct assault against what it sees. We have to develop a soft, gentle kind of seeing that does not judge or try to change what we see. For now, just see and try to bear what you see. According to Nicoll, an hour of this kind of work can free us from the effects of weeks of internal considering.

This week's lesson also speaks of the "First Conscious Shock" and the need to form "some transforming agency" at the place of the intake of impressions. As the tumble of life events rolls through our lives this week, can we can experiment with building a "transforming agency" at the gate of "impression intake"? What can we learn about the "First Conscious Shock?"As part of your practice this week, you might also explore connections between the weekly lectionary reading for the current week and the Nicoll commentary reading for this week, as well as choose a logion from the Gospel of Thomas as part of your weekly meditation.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Seven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 265-268.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary V

Putting yourself in the other person's position

Some people find it difficult to understand what external considering means and others to understand what internal considering means. In this Work external considering must be done and internal considering stopped. To externally consider another person it is first necessary to put yourself in the other person's position. To do this you must think of yourself as being this other person, having to do the same things, having the same difficulties, the same handicaps, the same life.

Now if you will begin to think of this preliminary step, you can hardly say that external considering has anything to do with being indifferent. To put yourself in another person's situation calls upon your whole understanding. It requires a directed effort of the mind and feelings and not merely once but time and again. And you will certainly be quite incapable of doing this if you are always pre-occupied with your own personal problems and woes and with the way you are being treated--that is, if you are always taking your life from the standpoint of internal considering.

I remember the case of a man who was always internally considering, always suffering, who wrote on his wife's tombstone: "From your heart-broken husband." You see, even then he could only think of himself, of his own suffering. Now if you begin to externally consider another person over a considerable period, you must again and again put yourself in the other person's place. In this way you become more conscious. The object of the Work is to become more conscious. Self-observation makes you more conscious of yourself: external considering makes you more conscious also of others. Through externally considering, things you were not conscious of before are revealed to you.

A simple example

Let us take a simple example of revelations of this kind: you put yourself in another person's position and after a time you realize that you expect this person to do things you would not think of doing yourself--for example, you expect this person perhaps to put up with conditions that you would not put up with for a moment. Do you see that you have gained in consciousness? Now if you have a revelation of this kind it means that you are really beginning to externally consider, to understand what it means to put yourself in another person's position.

People who make a great many requirements expect a great deal from others and if they do not get what they expect, they are disappointed and they feel they are owed. That is, they begin to form a great background of internal considering to their lives. This makes them bitter. They feel they have scores to settle. For a person of this kind to externally consider becomes very difficult. But it should not be so difficult for you unless you are crystallized.

Expecting others to do things you would never think of doing yourself

To realize that you expect the other person to do things you would never think of doing yourself makes a very good starting-point from which to begin to externally consider another person. It is a practical starting-point and a Work starting-point. You realize then that you expect the other person not only to do things you would never think of doing but to be different from you, behave differently, put up with things differently, and so on.

Let us suppose you have always compared yourself very favorably with other people and perhaps even are sure that none of the unpleasant things you notice in others exists in yourself. It will be very surprising, then, to have the revelation that you are unjust and that you expect others in the Work to do what you would not dream of doing yourself. It is always painful to realize that there is really anything wrong with oneself.

As was said in an earlier paper, you may often say that you are to blame for something, but if someone agrees with you, it is startling and you feel offended. Yes, we easily pretend we are wrong. But to see it, direct and unmistakable, in oneself, is pain. This is real and so, useful, suffering, for all real suffering purifies the emotions. It only lasts a brief time as real suffering and then gets infected by false personality and changes into some complicated negative state, some sort of unpleasant self-pity or endless self-justifying, which is useless suffering.

Suppose you have to live with a person called yourself

Now suppose you have to live with a person called yourself. I once read a story of a man who died and went into the next world where he met numbers of people some of whom he knew and liked and some he knew and disliked. But there was one person there whom he did not know and he could not bear him.

Everything he said infuriated and disgusted him--his manner, his habits, his laziness, his insincere way of speaking, his facial expressions--and it seemed to him also that he could see into this man's thoughts and his feelings and all his secrets and, in fact, into all his life. He asked the others who this impossible man was. They answered: "Up here we have very special mirrors which are quite different from those in your world. This man is yourself."

Let us suppose, then, that you have to live with a person who is you. Perhaps this is what the other person has to do. Of course, if you have no self-observation you may actually imagine this would be charming and that if everyone were just like you, the world would indeed be a happy place. There are no limits to vanity and self-conceit.

Now in putting yourself into another person's position you are also putting yourself into their point of view, into how they see you, and hear you, and experience you in your daily behavior. You are seeing yourself through their eyes. If you have no self-observation you cannot do this, because you will simply take yourself for granted as being "quite all right" in everything.

But if you have become sufficiently trained in self-observation to have begun to lose your former ideas of yourself and if you already have a collection not only of snapshots but of cabinet-size photographs of yourself in your most typical roles, the case will be quite different. You will be able to see yourself to some extent as the other person sees you and so you will begin to realize practically what the other person's situation is and what some of his or her difficulties are and what it might mean if you had to live with yourself.

Of course, the other person must do the same. Some of you may think, on hearing this, that it is quite right to say that the other person should try to see how difficult he or she is. But notice that we are beginning the other way round. It is you who have to see how difficult you are for the other person. Let me tell you that all this is not at all easy to grasp. You may think you know it all already. You may have heard it already, but a life-time at least is needed to see all that it implies.

Relationship is important

In the Work, relationship is important. Work relationship is impossible without external considering. In general we must approach one another through the medium of the Work. The Work and its teachings must lie between you and the other person. You must look at one another through the common window of the Work. You must be related through the common valuation of the Work--but quite practically--by working.

When two people in the Work quarrel, they have a great deal of work to do. They may not be ready for it, in which case sore places will be made, just as in life. They may refuse to work on themselves or in connection with one another: they then will both internally consider, both think they are owed, both think that the other should apologize.

Of course if you do not work on yourself and just live and do nothing extra, the Work cannot become Third Force for you. Third Force is relating force. In this case life will be Third Force and life divides, whereas the Work should unite. Life divides because in life people do not understand one another. They have no common basis, no common language.

But in the Work there is a common basis and people can begin to speak a common language and so to understand one another. But ten times more external considering is necessary in the Work than in life--and of quite a different quality, because the Work is the relating force. If two people in the Work quarrel, and are ready to work and wish to, then both of them will do so from themselves -- not by meeting and talking it over -- but simply as part of the Work itself. Each will put himself in the other's position and each see himself from the other person's viewpoint. External considering is very good work. It is not about whether you were right or the other person. It increases consciousness. It includes the first and second lines of work.

The first conscious shock

If you base your existence on internal considering, you will end your lives as most people do. Your lives, then, are all one-sided, undealt with, undigested, so many unhappy things just left lying about, and rotting, so to speak, in the past, so many violent or bitter feelings, so many places to which one has become glued down by past identifying. All this is certainly due to not giving oneself the First Conscious Shock, to not letting life fall on the Work in one.

I think one can see so often how internal considering has spoiled life and what a terrible form of identifying it is. It is really like looking at life the wrong way round. And people who can only internally consider and feel that others should be different, take hold of one another so wrongly that they accumulate between one another, as it were, a mass of heavy, dense, negative material, to which they get fastened, and which they will not give up.

But external considering is utterly different. It cleanses you. It frees you. It joins together what is missing by making you see the other side and realize the effect of what you do. It cancels all the feeling of being owed by bringing together the debit and credit sides of the accounts. An hour of external considering will free you from the effects of weeks of internal considering.

And the more you can see yourself by observation, at the moment, and the more you can see the kind of person you have been all your life, the more will you be able to externally consider rightly. But remember that external considering can only begin, in its practical application, with putting yourself in the other person's place, and looking out, as it were, of the other person's mind and consciousness at yourself as they see you. So do not think that external considering is merely doing something for the other person.

THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION IN THE WORK: THE FIRST CONSCIOUS SHOCK, pp. 51-53

Most people think that external life will give them what they crave and seek. Life comes in as impressions. The first realization of the meaning of this work is to understand that life, coming in as impressions, must be transformed. There is no such thing as "external life". What all the time you are receiving is impressions. You see a person you dislike--that is, you get impressions of this nature. You see a person you like--that is, you get impressions once more. Life is impressions, not a solid material thing such as you suppose and believe is reality. Your reality is your impressions.

I know this idea is very difficult to grasp. It forms a very difficult crossing-place. You are, perhaps, sure that life exists as such, and not as your impressions. The person you see sitting in a chair wearing a blue suit, smiling and talking, you think is real. No, it is your impressions of him that are real for you. If you had no sight, you would not see him. If you had no ears, you would not hear him. Life comes in as impressions and it is here that it is possible to work on oneself--but only if you realize that what you are working on is not external life but the impressions you are receiving. Unless you can grasp this, you will never understand the meaning of what in the work is called the First Conscious Shock.

Creating a transforming agency at the point of intake of impressions

This shock relates to these impressions which are all we know of the outer world, that we are taking in, that we take as actual things, actual people. No one can transform external life. But everyone can transform his or her impressions. For this reason this system of teaching says that it is necessary to create a transforming agency at the point of intake of impressions. This is the meaning of the work regarded in the light of psychological transformation and this is the point at which work begins.

It is called the First Conscious Shock because it is something not done mechanically. It does not happen mechanically--that is, it needs a conscious effort. One who begins to understand what this means, at the same time begins to be no longer a mechanical person, serving nature, a person asleep and merely used by nature for its own purposes, which are not in the interests of men and women.

If you now think of the meaning of all you are taught to do in the way of effort, beginning with self-observation, you will see beyond any doubt that everything on the practical side of this work relates to transforming impressions and the results of impressions. Work on negative emotions, work on heavy moods, work on identifying, work on considering, work on inner lying, work on imagination, work on difficult 'I's, work on self-justifying, work on states of sleep, and so on, is all connected with transforming impressions and the results of them.

First conscious shock and self-remembering

So you will agree that in a sense work on oneself is comparable to digestion in the sense that digestion is transformation. Some transforming agency must be formed at the place of the intake of impressions. This is the First Conscious Shock and it is given the general description remembering oneself.

If you can, through the understanding of the work, take life as work, then you are in a state of self-remembering. This state of consciousness leads to the transformation of impressions--and so of life as regards yourself. That is, life no longer acts on you in the old way. You begin to think, and to understand, in a new way.

And this is the beginning of your own transformation. For as long as we think in the same way we take in life in the same way and nothing changes in us. To transform the impressions of life is to transform oneself, and only an entirely new way of thinking can effect this. All this work is to give you an entirely new way of thinking.

One example

Let me give you one example. You are told in the work that if you are negative it is always your own fault. The whole situation as recorded by the senses must be transformed. But to understand this, it is necessary to begin to think in an entirely new way. You all can understand that life is continually causing us to react to it. All these reactions form our life--our own personal life. To change one's life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one's reactions.

But unless we can see that outer life comes in as impressions which cause us to react in stereotyped ways, we cannot see where the point of possible change comes in, where it is possible to work. If the reactions that form your own personal life are mainly negative, then that is your life. Your life is chiefly a mass of negative reactions to the impressions that have come in every day.

The transformation of impressions

The transformation of impressions so that they do not always provoke negative reactions is then one's task, if one wishes to work on oneself. But for this, self-observation at the point where impressions enter us is necessary. Then one can let the impressions fall in a negative mechanical way, or not. If not, then that is to begin to live more consciously.

If one fails to transform impressions at the moment of their entry, one can always work on the results of these impressions and prevent them from having their full mechanical effect. All this requires a definite feeling, a definite evaluation of the work, for it means that the work must be brought forward, as it were, to that point where impressions enter and are being distributed mechanically to their customary place in personality to evoke the old reactions.

We will speak later much more about transformation, but it can be added that no higher level is possible of attainment unless there is transformation, and the very idea of transformation is based on the fact that different levels exist, and refers to the passage from one level to another level of being. No one can reach a higher level of development without transformation

Week 7 Self Observation

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Week 8: Making Accounts

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Here is a practice suggested by Elizabeth O'Connor in her book on Our Many Selves, Exercise 6 -- practicing empathy:

Choose a person you feel critical of and for a week try living in that person's world. Even though you can never know the mystery of another life, it is possible to see another more accurately and with greater understanding.
Say something of genuine praise to someone each day.
Remember that the writings are not intended to aid you in condemning yourself. Scripture tells us to love others, forgive, and not judge, but the writers knew that it is not something we can decide to do and then do. The Scriptures point us the way we are to go. They give us the task of working with our lives, for it is in that work that the Spirit comes and we learn what freedom redemption, and the new birth are all about.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Eight Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 268-273.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: VI

Making Accounts

As long as you externally consider another person with a view to trying to change him or her--that is, as long as you think the other person should be different--you are not externally considering, but internally considering. The basis of internal considering is thinking that others should be different, and from this comes "making accounts" against others. It is necessary to understand this point clearly.

You feel other persons should not treat you as they do, or should not annoy you, or should not be as they are. Are you then making demands or not? Of course you are. Now in real external considering you cannot start from this point. You are starting from the idea that you are right and they are wrong. And because you think you are right and they are wrong, you feel that they owe you something.

In what sense do they owe you something? You feel they should correspond to your ideas and because they do not you feel that something is lacking which they should do. So you feel they owe you right behavior, according to your private standards of what is right and wrong. You see that all this means that you are putting yourself in the position of a judge. You are judging the other person from your own acquired ideas of what that person should be like. This is a source of internal considering in regard to that side of it called "making accounts". In short, you feel the other person owes you something.

Thinking the other person should be different

Now if you start by trying to externally consider another person from the basis of internal considering, from the basis of thinking the other person should be different, your external considering will be nothing but internal considering. You are making no attempt to start from the right basis of external considering, which is putting yourself in the other person's situation. On the contrary, you are starting from your own situation, not from the other person's. And in comparison with the real external considering, this is nothing but a form of hypocrisy and you will probably end only by shrugging your shoulders and saying: "Well, I have done my best for this person and I cannot do more." So you will wash your hands of him or her in your own feelings of merit and virtue. But I assure you that external considering in the Work-sense is nothing like that.

Take an ordinary mechanical individual--that is, an ordinary person. They are full of buffers, prejudices, negative attitudes, pictures of themselves, vanity, typical gramophone records, and so on. Suppose they attempt, as they are, to externally consider, really to put themselves in another person's life, into their situation, into their mind. Do you think they will be able to do so? Of course not. They do not see themselves. So how can they see the other person?

And if they do not see the other person, how can they put themselves in the other person's position? That is why it is said that before you can begin to externally consider in a real way, you must have reached some degree of self-observation and it is only according to your degree of self-observation and self-knowledge that you can externally consider another person.

Seeing yourself

In so far as you know yourself, you will know aright the other person: in so far as you can see yourself you can see others aright. Do you know, each one of you here now, how tiresome, how difficult, how unpleasant, how prejudiced, how exacting, you can be? Have you noticed it? If so, then you are in a better position to externally consider other people, for when you see their faults you will also see your own faults.

But as we are made, looking out from our senses, and not looking in at ourselves, we only see other people's faults and to balance the account takes a lifetime of work and insight. We all have pictures of ourselves; we are all, in one way or another, smug. Let me give you the dictionary definition of smug. The word is derived from a German word meaning to dress up; smock, smuggle, and so: "to be scrupulous in keeping up the appearance of respectability, to be absurdly self-satisfied and complacent."

One thing is quite certain, and that is that the more sincerely we observe ourselves and what is in us, the less smug we shall be. And from this it follows that we shall be less satisfied to think that we know what the other person should be like. So we shall judge less and in consequence be able to put ourselves in another person's position more easily.

You will remember the two examples of praying in the Gospels--the man who prayed thanking God he was not as other men, and the man who beat his breast and said he was a sinner. Which of these two men do you think would best be able to externally consider? And which of those two men would you rather be judged by?

Realizing our own nothingness

There is a saying in the Work that you must have heard more than once, that unless a person begins to realize their own nothingness, they cannot do this Work. They will not jump to catch the rope let down from above to save them.

But all this takes time: and we must take the Work, stage by stage, in our gradual understanding of it. No one can outstrip himself--that is, his level of being. As being alters, so does understanding alter.

Work on being

Now external considering is work on being, as was said. Your being is roughly how you take things. In life, people do not really externally consider one another because of their level of being. If people really externally considered one another, war would be impossible. But war is possible because of humanity's level of being, which is such that only internally considering, making accounts, thirsting for revenge, and so on, is understood.

So you will understand that to externally consider in the Work-sense is to take a step beyond your ordinary level of being. Or, to put it in another way, if you can really externally consider, your level of being will be different.

Conscious effort

Now all external considering, in the Work-sense, requires effort, whereas all internal considering is easy, mechanical, self-indulgent. The taste of the two is quite different. A conscious effort has quite a different taste from a mechanical automatic reaction. To be offended is extremely easy. It is a mechanical reaction. Not to be offended, or to transform being offended, is difficult. It requires conscious effort. It requires a lot of thought, a lot of inner adjustment, a lot of remembering what one is like oneself, and so on, to transform the first impact of being offended. But that is real work on oneself.

Do you wish to belong to the terrific chain of cause and effect which makes up mechanical humanity or do you wish to get out of it? Then, if you do, you must work on your mechanical reactions. If you follow the law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", then you will always remain in the circle of mechanical humanity which leads nowhere.

Esotericism brings a new law--the law of non-identifying, the law of self-observation--in fact, the application of the Work itself to daily life. This Work is esoteric Christianity. Christ said: "I bring you a new law". The Work says the same. Do you not see how the Work brings you new laws for behavior, inner and outer? How then can you say you do not know what it means to think from the Work ideas?

* * *

Externally considering a person in life

Now you can make it your aim to externally consider a person in the Work or in life, as you like. I would add, you should practice external considering in the Work, because it is easier if the other person is working also, but if this is not possible--or, let us say, not too easy for the moment--then you must do the same in life.

Life can become your teacher. It becomes your teacher as soon as you begin to work from yourself, from a genuine desire to work, which means an evaluation of the Work. Remember the Work can become very cold and distant if you do not keep it alive and you will not keep it alive if you do not love it.

To externally consider a person in life is just the same as in the Work, only you will not be helped by the other person necessarily, and so it will be very easy for your attempts at external considering to turn into an increased form of internal considering.

You must calculate second force--that is, the difficulties. It will be useless, of course, if you start off from a superior position and try to put the other person right. Remember that when you feel offended you are beginning to internally consider. You must be quite passive to the other person and work on yourself all the time, if you can, and not get offended.

You must never find fault

If you are sincere in your aim, you may be able to carry it out. You must never find fault, or show that you are finding fault. You must be ready to bear false accusations And of course you must be ready to bear the unpleasant manifestations of the other person and not lose your temper and begin to chant: "Here am I doing my best to be nice", and so on.

Once this begins, then it means you are internally considering. And if you do that, you are starting from a very shallow basis--that is, not from a real, matured aim. And in externally considering a person in life, which means that you must change yourself, you must have already gotten some idea of what it means to be "all things to all men".

Not showing your work openly

You must be able to eat and drink and joke and listen and talk without any trace of the Work being behind you. You may have an opportunity to say something, and you may not. That doesn't matter. A person in the Fourth Way of Work must be able to be quite ordinary in life. There must be no kind of superiority, no hinting, no persuasion, no dark remarks.

But if you work on yourself, when the other person is difficult, that will make the other person aware that you are different. But you must not show it openly. When life becomes one's teacher, then the highest work is reached. And then you are right in the track of the Fourth Way. But it is difficult--Oh, how difficult!--and requires much and long work on oneself and patient understanding.

You must, as it were, be able to suffer all things at the hands of others and yet keep on working. But if you externally consider a person in life, feeling superior, and so feeling a constant judgment and showing it openly, you are not working. That is not the way of the Fourth Way.

Becoming passive to another

To become passive in the Work sense to another person requires very great inner work, especially so to a person in life. In some ways, it is easier than becoming passive to a person in the Work. But you must realize what I mean for yourselves, by experience.

You know how in life people are always trying to improve one another by reproving one another, always finding fault with one another. This is quite useless and leads to all the endless strife in life. But making oneself passive to a person and working on oneself therefrom--for to be passive requires constant inner work on yourself--this, I assure you, can effect a change in the other person, because your work makes room for them to alter. But if you react mechanically all the time it makes no room for the other person to turn about and change. By not reacting, you leave room.

In regard to externally considering a person in life, remember that you must really aim at doing this. Do you really want to, or not? You must have a genuine matured conscious aim that starts in the light of the Work and to which you hold on every time you remember yourself and every time you think of what you are doing practically in this Work. Only then will the Work help you.

Many I's

Let me add one thing which is of the greatest importance in external considering. You cannot externally consider another person unless you can break him or her up into different 'I's. And you cannot do this unless you can see different 'I's in yourself. If you always think of yourself as 'I' then you will also always think of others as having one single permanent 'I'. Can you yet think of different 'I's in yourself and not say 'I' to everything in you? Then you will, in the same degree, be able to see different 'I's in another person. You will see their good and their bad 'I's. This will help you to externally consider the other person

Week 8 Self Observation

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Week 9: On Being Passive

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Our inner practice for this week comes directly from our weekly reading of Nicoll:

"Can you be passive to your mechanically-arising objections for even five minutes?"

"Observe how your personality reacts every moment to everyone and everything. It is this constant mechanical reaction that must be worked on in order to begin to be passive to oneself. And this requires a constant conscious state of self-observation. No one can do it as yet for long. But you can practice being passive in this sense for a short time, say, five minutes."

"Notice when you begin to object inside--notice what reactions arise in you--and try to be passive to them, not to the people who cause them to arise. Is this clear? You must make yourself passive to your own re-actions, not to the people you are reacting to. To do this you must be awake inside yourself and capable of seeing different I's in you and what they want to say or how they want to act at the moment."

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Nine Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 273-277.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: VII- On Being Passive

The Work meaning of being passive

It was said last time, in connection with external considering, that it is necessary to be passive to another person. Today we will begin to speak of the Work meaning of being passive. What is the central theme of the Work in regard to its practical side--that is, in regard to work on oneself? And in this connection what does inner change mean?

Practical work on oneself is directed towards making something passive in oneself which is at present active, and something active which is at present passive. Personality which is active must become passive so that essence which is passive can become active. This is the central idea of practical work on oneself. The Work is a second education.

Pesonality and essence

First of all life must develop personality so that it surrounds essence. This is the first education. Then, if you wish to go further in your development personality must become passive so that essence can grow and become active. So you see that a reversal must gradually take place.

First of all, a child is born with only essence which is active. Then life forms personality round essence, and personality is active. This situation will remain unchanged unless you begin to work on yourself. If you do so, personality will gradually become passive and essence active.

Three possible orientations

There are thus three possible orientations: first, in the child, essence active, second, in the adult, personality active, and third, in the case of those who work on themselves, personality passive and essence active. The whole aim of the Work is to make acquired personality passive. In the Work sense to become passive means inner work on personality. It means eventually separation from personality.

Personality

By the action of life there has been formed in every one of you a very complex built-up thing called personality. This has been formed by imitation, by custom, by the influence of the period you grew up in, by example, by fantasies derived from novels, from drama, from the film, by attraction, hero-worship, and by a thousand and one other influences acting upon you from the outside and entering through the external senses, from outer life. All this forms the acquired side of you and is called, in general, the personality.

Essence

Essence is what you are born with: personality is what you acquire. And what you are born with, or born as, is changed by all these things that you acquire and accept and consent to and believe in and identify with. A new person therefore grows around the original essence. This is personality. And all this must take place because essence by itself cannot grow beyond a limited point. You cannot grow straight up from essence. This is one of the strange things the Work teaches.

Your center of gravity

Now in consequence of the formation of personality your center of gravity of consciousness shifts from essence (in childhood) outwards into the personality acquired from the particular circumstances you are brought up in and the particular things that have interested you on the one side or have attracted your vanity on the other side. In this way, you, as it were, lose your original basis and become something acquired, something invented. Your feeling of 'I' passes outwards into all sorts of feelings derived from life. We feel no real inner stability when we derive our feeling of ourselves from life. That is, we are always afraid that something may happen to us, or to our fortune, or to our position, or our reputation. This is due to our identifying with everything that life has formed in us and this means that we only feel ourselves through personality.

But other feelings of oneself are possible that are not derived from life and personality, and these feelings give a use a sense of stability that nothing outside us can take away. And it is from these feelings that we begin to feel ourselves free, because they depend on nothing outside us, and so cannot be taken away from us. Such a person begins to be no longer so much a slave to outer things.

Some examples

Now let us say that as a young child you get into the first team at school. Then you begin to feel yourself outwardly through this and you wear a cap that gives you this feeling. You become a young person in the first team and this is now your greatest feeling of 'I'. Then you are thrown out of the team. What a tragedy! All this is necessary in regard to the first education.

So you become this or you become that, in life, and you should and must. You have this or that success or triumph and so on, and you should. It is a sort of training. It is all necessary at first. All this forms feelings of yourself in personality, which, roughly speaking, lives by comparison with others. That is, you feel a loss of yourself in the presence of a person who wears a more distinguished cap and so on. I repeat, all this is necessary, but it gives a wrong center of gravity.

Let us suppose that you are a great actor or a great soccer player. You will not easily listen to praise of another actor or soccer player. Why? Because your feeling of 'I' is derived from personality and you will feel a loss of 'I', a loss of the very feeling of yourself, if someone else surpasses you. But all this is to train you in illusions about 'I'. For if you have any trace of real feeling of 'I', this is impossible.

Real "I" does not exist through comparison

Real 'I' does not exist through comparison. Therefore you will understand that when it is said that personality roughly lives by comparison, you only have to study yourself or others in this light for a short time to see how easily everyone is upset or chagrined, and how brittle this feeling of 'I' is, in which people keep on trying to live--that is, in the feeling of 'I' derived from some aspect of personality.

The growth of essence

Now let us keep for the time being to the great formulation of the Work concerning personality and essence. The third or neutralizing force of life makes, and must make, personality active and essence passive. So the Work says that if you come into the third force of the Work, which opposes life, personality must gradually become passive to let essence develop. All individual evolution, all real inner development of yourself, depends upon a growth of essence.

If you are full of false feelings of 'I', of invented ideas of yourself, then there can be no growth of essence. Real inner change is a development of essence--that is, of what is the most real and the deepest part of you. For this to take place, personality must gradually become passive. This is the real meaning of being passive in the Work. It is becoming passive to personality in yourself.

Becoming passive to the reactions of your personality

So when it is said that in real external considering you must be passive, the meaning is that you must become passive to the reactions of your personality. And this requires the most conscious and most concentrated work on oneself. That is, it requires a very active conscious inner state. And we must not suppose we are capable of reaching this state in a moment.

Owing to the formation of personality, you all have typical, habitual ways of reacting to circumstances and events, and to other people. If you cannot observe your typical reactions, your continual mechanical ways of taking things and people, your usual stereotyped behavior, your ever-recurring unpleasant manifestations, your vexations and strictures, etc. then of course you have no idea that you even have an acquired personality. You take yourself for granted--as a kind of solid virtuous lump.

We are not solid

But, although we take ourselves for granted so easily, we are not one and the same person at different moments, as we suppose. We are not solid. If we saw clearly that we are not one and the same solid person always, we would not take ourselves for granted as we do. Something of our vanity and self-conceit which binds personality together would begin to leave us. Remember that personality is many. It is composed of many different and contradictory I's that have been acquired.

And it also contains all sorts of other things about which the Work often speaks: negative attitudes, buffers, pictures of oneself, mechanical associations, songs, gramophone records, typical forms of imagination, negative states, characteristic forms of lying, and, in short, all that the practical side of this Work teaches us to notice and observe in ourselves throughout life. Once the Work begins to act on a person genuinely, all these forms of feeling oneself, all these feelings of 'I' derived from personality, begin to dissolve away.

The action of the Work is very gradual

But the action of the Work in this respect is very gradual, because the Work acts on people very gently and only in reference to what each of us can stand. When you really begin to see something in yourself, then it means that you can stand it. If you cannot see any I's it means that you are not ready. To see oneself as one really is would be intolerable. So the action of the Work is gradual. You may begin to see something--some 'I'--that you do not, let us say, quite like, but you will not be freed from it until you either see or know some better 'I' and prefer it, or until you can be freed from this 'I' without danger to yourself. But we will speak of this in the next paper.

An inner practice

Now let us come back to the meaning of being passive. In the full sense it means being passive to the personality, and this, in turn, means being passive to oneself. Can you be passive to your mechanically-arising objections for even five minutes?

Well, I advise you to observe how your personality reacts every moment to everyone and everything. It is this constant mechanical reaction that must be worked on in order to begin to be passive to oneself. And this requires a constant conscious state of self-observation. No one can do it as yet for long. But you can practice being passive in this sense for a short time, say, five minutes.

Notice when you begin to object inside--notice what reactions arise in you--and try to be passive to them, not to the people who cause them to arise. Is this clear? You must make yourself passive to your own re-actions, not to the people you are reacting to. To do this you must be awake inside yourself and capable of seeing different I's in you and what they want to say or how they want to act at the moment.

Your reactions are not you

Let us try to get all this quite clear. Do you all understand that you have acquired many things in yourselves that you take as you? Can you agree that by education, imitation, example, what you were taught, and so on, you have all sorts of ideas, ambitions, estimations, values, judgments, expectations, ways of showing like and dislike, characteristic ways of speaking, and, in short, many typical reactions to life? And is it too much to say that all these built-up acquired reactions in you are usually taken by you as yourself? You think them necessary, do you not, or natural, because you think that they are you.

But the real you, or rather, the real 'I' in you, is not all these things that you keep holding on to and taking as yourself. If you will start from this simple basis you will begin to understand what it means to be passive--that is, passive to yourself--or rather, passive to what you always have been taking as yourself. To be passive to oneself, one must not take oneself for granted. There is no such thing as 'I' in you.

Which "I" is speaking?

When a person, totally identified with his acquired personality, says, for example, "I think this," "I think that," the Work answer is "Which 'I' is speaking?" Do you see how powerful this idea is? And can you begin to apply the power of this Work-idea to yourself? Certainly not, if you do not begin to break yourself up into different I's.

If you take yourself for granted as a solid, then there is no breaking up of yourself and so no change is possible. The word 'I' will come out of your mouth at every moment, but you will not see that it is a different 'I' speaking at every moment. One 'I' will shout, another 'I' will speak tenderly, and so on. Yet you do not see that each 'I' is utterly different.

There is no such person as "I"

It is a great shock to self-conceit to realize that there is no such person as 'I'. But unless this begins to dawn on you, you will never be able to begin to be passive to yourself. You cannot begin to be passive to yourself unless you see yourself as many different people by inner observation and learn about your different I's and know especially which I's in you that you must never allow to take full charge of you.

Next time we will speak of identifying with oneself more fully, and the different forms of practicing inner separation. Let me say here that I's that value this Work must never be allowed to lose their authority in you. Notice the I's you are consorting with. Do not keep company with wrong people in you.

Remember you are a city

Remember you are a city, with slums and dangerous streets, and also better streets and good citizens. Remember you are a house full of servants under no control. Has not our first education partly to do with not going with wrong people outside us? Our second education is not to go with wrong I's inside us. Our first education is external: our second education is internal. Life does not give us the second education. Only esoteric teaching gives us the second education--that is, for those who are looking for something different from life

Week 9 Self Observation

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Week 9: On Being Passive

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice and Movements Exercise

Our inner practice for this week comes directly from our weekly reading of Nicoll:

"Can you be passive to your mechanically-arising objections for even five minutes?"

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Week Nine Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 2, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 601-606.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: VII - On Being Passive

There is a certain emotional feeling aways connected with Self-Remembering

In a conversation recently held here the talk turned on Self- Remembering. It has often been said that unless you believe in something higher you cannot remember yourself. There is a certain emotional feeling always connected with Self-Remembering. You cannot just in cold blood remember yourself.

It is necessary to get into a certain state, whereas one can observe oneself without getting into this particular state. Yet the two actions finally meet. Through Self-Remembering we come under new influences which otherwise cannot reach us.

The state necessary for Self-Remembering

If you feel the extraordinariness of your own existence, if you feel the miracle of your body, of your consciousness, of the world that surrounds you, if you begin to wonder who you are, then you are in the state necessary for Self-Remembering.

On the other hand, if you are completely identified with yourself and take everything for granted, you are not in the state that is necessary for the act of Self-Remembering. I often said to you in the past things such as “Look at your hands, do you know what they are or how they move?” or “Look at the trees and ask yourself how it is you see them”, and many other things of a similar nature.

The sense of the miraculous

In all this the sense of mystery is in us, the sense of the miraculous. It is not necessary to go to Tibet to find the miraculous. You can find it here, now at this moment. How do you hear these words that are read out to you? How is it that you are conscious of what they mean; and how indeed are you sitting here listening?

But usually we do not ask ourselves such strange questions, and even think they are absurd, or we imagine that they have all been explained by science whereas nothing has been explained by science.

Unless you can look on life differently you cannot remember yourself.

Remembering that one is in the Work

One form of Self-Remembering is remembering that one is in the Work and that one has to take everything in a different way according to the meaning and instruction of the Work. This is a very powerful form of Self-Remembering which can be practiced very often.

Life is coming in through your senses in bundles and packets at every moment but how are you reacting to it? Does the Work stand between you and external life or are you just immersed, asleep, in external life and its events? If so, you are not remembering yourself.

Mechanical humanity

You are then what the work calls mechanical man or woman driven by life and its events as a machine is driven by a belt. To stand up in life with a feeling of distinctness of yourself experiencing life, of yourself looking at life and noticing the reactions it makes in you, to feel that you are living life and not that life is living you–all this belongs to the idea of Self-Remembering as well as a thousand and one other thoughts and feelings of the same kind.

But if you think that nature created itself, that matter created matter, then you cannot remember yourself. On the other hand if you often think internally about the Ray of Creation coming down from above or about the side octave from the Sun from which we ourselves are created, and if you no longer think that such great ideas are unimportant but are absolutely necessary for the right ordering of one’s thoughts, then you may have a moment of Self- Remembering and catch a glimpse of what it means.

A feeling of something higher is needed

It is only through a feeling of something higher that you can separate from something lower, and, after a time, when you have experienced what this means, you will do everything you can to keep the feeling of something higher alive in you at all costs and you will begin to hate those periods in which you are totally identified with external things.

Here we have a definite stage in the Work. We then know to a small degree what it is to be awake and by contrast we know what it is to be asleep, and for a long time this stage remains with us in such a way that we know that we are more awake and know that we are more asleep.

Inner choice

Then it becomes a matter of inner choice, inner taste, and this stage inevitably lasts a long time. Here, in this stage, there is, as it were, a long test depending entirely on oneself, provided that one is constantly reminded of the Work and its ideas.

We need reminders from others

For this reason it is necessary to find a person who will teach you the Work and keep reminding you about it, and such a person must know the Work and be constantly thinking about it and applying it.

Yet, as I say, this stage depends on oneself finally. For the Work seeks to make a new arrangement in our minds and it can only do so when it is allowed to enter a person’s mind. Nothing will enter anybody’s mind unless they feel an affection for it, a desire for it.

Choosing I’s that wish to work

And this means in so many words that unless one has ‘I’s in oneself that wish to work, ‘I’s that have always felt there is something else, ‘I’s that can hear the Work, not merely through the ears, but through the mind and understanding–unless such ‘I’s exist, the Work can never enter, but if it does enter then it becomes a matter of choice.

Self-Remembering begins with preferring better I’s

One can always go with bad ‘I’s and even spend one’s whole life in the company of such ‘I’s, or one can choose by very slow and gradual insight to notice bad ‘I’s and to prefer not to surrender to their power. It is in this feeling of choice, of preferring better ‘I’s, that Self-Remembering begins.

One experiences the fact that by a curious kind of mental act, or if you prefer, an act of the will, it is possible to separate oneself from the immense morass of negative ‘I’s and, as it were, stand upright. This is a lifting of oneself above oneself, but, as was said, this is impossible unless one knows for certain that there are better states and worse states of oneself.

Separating from the immense morass of negative I’s

It is not a question of theoretically believing there is something higher, but of the actual perception of it in oneself, for the subject of this Work is this strange and complex thing called oneself. One can often observe a regular horde of unpleasant mean little ‘I’s that surround one and wish to drag one down to their level, to their way of taking everything.

And the act of transformation consists in being aware of this and not identifying because one knows, because one can remember, that there are quite different ways of taking things, even if for the time being one cannot get into those ‘I’s that know better.

Why do we think, for example, that things should always go right and why are we upset when they do not go in this way? Why is it we never remember about Second Force? The reason is that only ‘I’s that are in the Work can remember such things and that there lives in us a vast crowd of ‘I’s that have never heard of the Work and simply take things in their own way.

We have in us crowds of I’s that have never heard of the Work

It may sound very strange that we have in us crowds of ‘I’s that have never heard of the Work. It sounds strange because we will keep taking ourselves as one and find the greatest difficulty in moving away from the power of this illusion and catching a glimpse of our multiplicity of being.

Catching a glimpse of our multiplicity of being and our mechanicalness

Even such a glimpse is called in the Work a moment of Self-Remembering. It is called a moment of Self-Remembering because it is a moment of realizing one’s mechanicalness. To realize emotionally one’s mechanicalness is called a moment of Self-Remembering, whereas to be identified with one’s mechanicalness, to be identified with every ‘I’ that takes charge, is called a state of sleep.

Everything happens

Again, to realize what the Work teaches when it says that everything happens, to catch a glimpse of the meaning of this phrase, may constitute a moment of self-remembering, that is, a moment when through inner taste and perception you perceive you are not in your usual identified state.

Just reflect what it means that “everything happens” and think how completely contrary this idea is to your ordinary way of thinking which is based on the idea that one can do, and that life is run intelligently. I think in these present times this is one of the most useful forms of thinking. It at least prevents us from being completely upset when things do not turn out as we expected, or when some unhappy, insoluble thing meets us.

What is the solution? The solution lies in the direction of Self-Remembering. It lies in the direction of all that the Work teaches because, if we could remember all that the Work teaches, if it became a living reality to us, a thing that we really begin to live by, then our relationship to life and its events would no longer be that of a person completely asleep in life, a person who is full of useless suffering, who takes everything as a matter of astonishment, who is made negative by the most ordinary events.

Remembering one’s aim at a difficult moment is a form of Self-Remembering

Now when we make an aim it should always have some connection with the Work. Remembering one’s aim at a difficult moment is a form of Self-Remembering by definition in the Work, but if the aim has nothing to do with the Work–if, for example, my aim is to make £100,000 or gain a title–and I remember my aim, it will have no connection with the Work.

Work aim and life aim

It is said that we must make aim in the Work–a Work aim. But a Work aim is not the same as a life aim unless in some way the two are connected. If my aim is to make £100,000 in order to make possible some form of this Work which requires money, and if this is genuinely so, then this apparent life aim will be connected with a Work aim.

If I am clever at making money, and at the same time put the Work first in my valuation, my cleverness in life and my feeling for the Work will reinforce each other and there will be no contradiction.

So you will understand that when the Work says that one form of Self- Remembering is to remember one’s aim, or when it says that when you try to remember yourself you must remember your aim, if your aim is merely a life aim such as making plenty of money and getting a title, it will not be of any use.

Three lines of Work

Remembering an aim of this kind will take you straight into life and its power and will rob you of any force you may possibly have that belongs to the Work. I will just add one thing here about Work aim connected with life–namely, that the Work has three lines of work in it, work on yourself, work in connection with other people in the Work, and work in connection with the Work itself. Unless these three lines are satisfied, at least provisionally, your aim will lead nowhere.

There are three aspects to all Work aims. If you only wishes to work on yourself you will get nowhere, in fact you will become much worse than you were in ordinary life. So try to think what it means that an aim should have three forces in it, and what the three lines in the Work indicate. To work simply for other people and not on yourself is wrong. To work on yourself and regard other people as a nuisance is wrong. And again to work on yourself in connection with other people without thinking of the Work itself and what it needs is wrong.

You must insulate yourself from life

Now we will speak about insulation of oneself in connection with Self-Remembering. On one occasion Gurdjieff said that you must insulate yourself from life in order to work. This is very easily misunderstood.

Its deeper meaning is that you must insulate yourself from your mechanical self so that you are not exposed to every change of external circumstances. I will quote you something from one of the esoteric books connected with the Sufi School, which was the esoteric school which worked on the Koran.

One teacher in this school used the following phrase: “Safety lies in solitude”. He added: “Let none imagine that solitude consists in living alone”. I will paraphrase what this Sufi teacher said. He was dwelling on the importance of how we think of other people and whether our thoughts are entirely governed by their behavior. We all know that at one moment we dislike and the next moment like the same thing or person and think accordingly.

Not indifference but becoming conscious between the opposites

When we know this by observation and reach a point in which both liking and disliking and all their thoughts do not govern us we become insulated from the ordinary power of life over us. Remember that this is not indifference but is a state of becoming conscious between the opposites that are always swinging our life to and fro as on a pendulum.

Indifference is mechanical but keeping between the opposites is conscious. It is like keeping our balance. This Sufi teacher points out that whether a person takes pleasure in disliking the thing itself or in the thought of it, it is the same thing, and vice versa.

Creating inner silence in ourselves

Now the Work speaks about creating inner silence in ourselves, which is comparable to this idea expressed by the Sufi teacher that “safety lies in solitude” but that solitude does not consist in merely living alone in a physical sense.

We are taught in this Work to keep silence about things we should not express or which would do harm. This, so to speak, is an external ritual, an external discipline. No proper group in this Work can ever be made if everybody chatters. Chattering always comes from small mechanical ‘I’s through which all force in the Work runs away into life.

In the Gospels it says you must reach that state in which your left hand does not know what your right hand does. On one occasion Ouspensky was speaking a great deal about this subject and said it referred to the power of inner silence, and he connected it with Self-Remembering.

Making inner stop in ourselves

One could, for example, say many things, but one does not. That is external. But, more deeply, one could allow many ‘I’s to talk in oneself and one stops them, does not listen to them, does not go with them and above all does not believe in them by inner choice.

On this occasion Ouspensky talked to us about making inner stop in ourselves and connected it with a form of Self-Remembering. Inner stop means stopping thinking in a certain way. You may prevent yourself saying certain things outwardly for various reasons, for social behavior, fearing the consequences, from manners, from some picture of yourself being charitable and so on.

But this is not inner stop. This is not keeping inner silence which is so necessary for everyone to understand after a certain time in this Work and must arise from inner choice. Here then we have people who begin to understand the Work at a certain stage and begin to apply it internally to themselves and begin to realize its meaning from something internal in themselves. And here you no longer work for a reward, but from inner choice.

Week 9 Self Remembering

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Week 10: Taking Mental Photographs of Ourselves

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Our inner practice for this week comes directly from our weekly reading of Nicoll:

We must gradually learn to take photographs of ourselves as a whole, and not merely observe single details. We must begin to see ourselves altogether, in all centers, at any particular moment.

"For this purpose," it was said, "we must learn to take, so to speak, mental photographs of ourselves in different moments of our life, and in different emotional states, and not photographs merely of details, but photographs of the whole as we saw it. In other words these photographs must contain simultaneously everything that a we can see in ourselves at a given moment: our emotions, moods, thoughts, sensations, postures, our behavior, our movements, our tones of voice, facial expressions, and so on."

"If we succeed in seizing interesting moments for taking these photographs, we will collect a whole album of portraits of ourselves which, taken together, will show us quite clearly what we really are. But it is not so easy to take these photographs of oneself at the most interesting and characteristic moments. It takes time to learn how to do it. But if the photographs are taken successfully, and if there are a sufficient number of them, we will see that our usual conception of ourselves with which we have lived from year to year is very far from reality."

"Instead of the person you had supposed ourselves to be, you will see quite another person. This 'other' person is yourself and at the same time not yourself."

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Ten Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 277-281.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: VIII - On Being Passive (2)

This Work is to weaken personality

This Work is to weaken personality. This is a disadvantage at first, because actually one feels weak when one can no longer react in the usual way. Let us suppose that you were always accustomed to fly into a temper over something, and now you cannot. You feel weak. You feel a loss. A loss of what? A loss of a part of personality. At the same time, you gain something and are really stronger.

Allowing essence to grow

Let us try, in these commentaries on internal and external considering, to understand better about what it means to make personality passive. The object is to allow essence to grow. Every time you go against personality consciously, you gain something. Of course, you must not take this arithmetically. You cannot expect that you have instantly some exact gain. It is rather more complex and subtle than that.

Personality keeps you where you are

Personality keeps you where you are. It is acquired. It has become you: or you have become it. It does, it acts, it says, it finds fault, it spoils a happy time, it takes charge of you at every moment. So it keeps you where you are and your life what it is.

Now where are you? You are where you are in the sense of what you have in you that is active, and so what you experience, what you think you enjoy. You see life, just there, outside you, and perhaps want all sorts of things, but you cannot get into life and get things from it save in so far as your personality allows you.

You go into life accoding to the shape of your personality

You go into life according to the shape of your personality. You encounter life, people, and so on, through your personality, not directly. Is this clear?

Personality is your apparatus for contacting life

Now you do not see your personality. It is not conscious to you. So perhaps you blame life or people, or feel disappointed, and so on. The trouble is that you have acquired a certain mechanical device for making contact with life called personality that renders life to you according to its shape, as it were.

And so here you are, always carrying about with you your personality, your apparatus for experiencing life, and always hoping perhaps, if you had a new environment, new people, a new house, new clothes, etc. that everything would be utterly different. How can that be? You are carrying about your apparatus for contacting life--that is, your personality.

You may pack your bags and fill them with new clothes and go to the Antipodes --but you carry your personality with you, with all its acquired habits of mind, habits of emotion, habits of behavior, habits of talking, habits of finding fault, habits of movement, habits of health, and so on.

The necessity of studying the apparatus of personality

Now this Work is about how to get away from oneself, not from life. You do not get away from yourself by changing your outer scene. For this reason it is necessary to observe oneself and see what one's personality is like and study it and see what one's apparatus is like. We all have all sorts of dreams about a new life--about ideal circumstances, marvelous people, etc. But such dreams are idle because even if we were placed in exceptional and beautiful conditions, such as are said to obtain in Paradise, we would react to them through our personalities and very soon be turned out as quite unsuitable, I fancy.

The receptive-reactive machine used to contact life

The trouble really is that none of us knows how to live, because none of us sees that the trouble lies in the personality--that is, in the receptive-reactive machine we use to contact life. And we shall never learn how to live even a little aright if we do not work on personality in us, and see what it is in us in each case and what troubles arise from ourselves and not merely from others and from life.

All this Work is about imitating Conscious Humanity

All this Work is about imitating Conscious Humanity. But if we do not work on personality, we remain mechanical people. Then it will act.

The machine will speak. It will get angry. It will take charge of everything. And even if you begin to be aware that there is something else in you, something deeper, that does not want to act, to speak, to feel, to think, in the way that you do, you will not be able to alter anything--at least, for a long time.

Personality is a machine that controls us

But even so, if you see this, you are in a far better position than that of a person who does not perceive that something is always taking charge of them and spoiling everything. In the Work we have to realize that we are at the mercy of something called personality in us and that this is a machine that controls us. You may lie in bed in the morning in a half-sleep state and see quite clearly what you should say or think or feel or do, but immediately you get up something takes charge of you. It takes charge of you and it begins to act and speak in a way quite contrary to what you perceived and planned.

What takes charge of you? It is personality. And in a short time--in a moment--you are fully under its sway and everything you thought and planned when you were more awake, more free, that is, from personality, seems far away, or even nonsense. So you behave exactly in the same way as yesterday. Something grips you and you fall asleep in its grip.

This is our tragedy, that we cannot change

This is our tragedy, that we cannot change, and we even forget that we should change, for a whole day, or a week, or even more. Once we are in personality, everything goes by machinery. Only, once in the grip of personality, we do not see it as machinery. One thing leads to another by the easy paths of association and habit and so today is like yesterday and tomorrow like today. And it seems to us to be all logical, all reasonable, all justifiable, all natural.

When we begin to awaken a little

But when we begin to awaken a little--that is, to be more free from personality --we have moments of seeing this machine to which we are attached, and under whose power we are. We see we are in prison. We may even begin to be afraid of this smooth, powerful, self-acting machine, this Frankenstein-monster that insists on controlling us, which life has gradually created in us without our knowledge. And then we begin to understand what work on ourselves means and what our task is, and what we must struggle with for the rest of our life.

Continual work on oneself in life by means of observation

This externally-created thing in us, this personality fashioned by outer life, this machine, whatever form it takes, is the dragon that is to be overcome, in the language of mythology. In the Fourth Way, which lies in life, you cannot go into a monastery or sit in a cave in the desert to free yourself from personality. Making personality passive is, in this Way that we are studying, continual work on oneself in life, by means of observation, by not identifying with oneself, by inner separation and so on. The whole work is about this.

Learning to take photographs of ourselves as a whole

Let me quote something that was recorded many years ago by Mr. Ouspensky, about the struggle with personality. It had been explained that a we must gradually learn to take photographs of ourselves as a whole, and not merely observe single details. We must begin to see ourselves altogether, in all centers, at any particular moment.

"Instead of the person you had supposed ourselves to be, you will see quite another person. This 'other' person is yourself and at the same time not yourself."

Learning to know the real from the invented

"In this Work you must learn to know the real from the invented and later to separate them. And to begin self-observation and self-study it is necessary to divide oneself into a real and an invented side. That is, you must realize that you indeed consist of two people. All this takes time. But so long as you take yourself as one person you will never move from where you are.

Your work on yourself starts from the moment you begin to feel two people in yourself

Your work on yourself starts from the moment you begin to feel two people in yourself. One is passive and the most it can do is to register or observe what is happening to it. The other, which calls itself 'I', is active, and speaks of itself in the first person, is in reality only an invented unreal person. Let us call this invented person in us A."

You real self is not your invented self

"When you understand your helplessness in the face of A, your attitude towards yourself and towards A in you ceases to be either indifferent or unconcerned. Self-observation becomes observation of A. You understand that you are not A, that A is nothing but the mask you wear, the part that you unconsciously play and which unfortunately you cannot stop playing, a part which rules you, and makes you do and say a thousand stupid things, a thousand things which you would never do or say yourself. If you are sincere with yourself, you feel that you are in the power of A and at the same time you feel that you are not A."

"You begin to be afraid of A, you begin to feel that A is your enemy. No matter what you would like to do, everything is altered and intercepted by A. A is your enemy. A's desires, tastes, sympathies, thoughts, opinions, are either opposed to your own views, feels and moods, or they have nothing in common with them. And at the same time, A is your master. You are the slave, you have no will of your own. You have no means of expressing your desires because whatever you would like to do or say is done for you by A."

The invented self must become servant

"When you have reached this level of self-observation you must understand that your whole aim is to free yourself from A. And since you cannot in fact free yourself from A because A is yourself, you must therefore master A and make A do, not what the A of the given moment wants, but what you yourself want to do. From being the master, A must become the servant."

"The first stage of work on oneself consists in separating oneself from A mentally, and then later in being separated from A in actual fact, in keeping apart from A. But the fact must be born in mind that the whole attention must be concentrated upon A, for you are unable to explain what you yourself really are. But you can explain A to itself, and wth this you must begin, remembering at the same time that you are not A."

Dividing yourself into an observing side and an observed side

Let us notice that in the above quotation it is emphasized that you cannot change as long as you take yourself as one. But when you divide yourself into an observing side and an observed side, the step towards possible change has been taken. That is, you must become Observing 'I' and Personality.

Everything that you can observe in yourself you must take as A to begin with -- that is, as personality. Now people suppose that only one things acts in us, and as long as people take themselves as one, they cannot think otherwise, so they find the idea of self-observation difficult. "What should we observe?" they ask. "Everything" -- to begin with. "But," they will say, "Whatever I can observe is surely myself?" The answer is: "No and yes, in the sense of the Work."

All you observe you must take at first as personality in you

All you observe you must take at first as personality in you. This personality in you governs you and the part which can observe it is helpless in face of it at first. The order of things is wrong. The command is in the wrong place. The inner cannot control the outer.

What should command is subject, and what should be subject commands. The inner part which observes sees the outer part calling itself "I" and so acting in its name and can do nothing at first. Notice here that part which observes is always deeper than the part observed – i.e the inner can observe the outer but not vice versa.

The inner or observing side is helpless at first

Now, although the inner or observing side is helpless at first, it becomes strengthened by the ideas of the work which feed it. The inner can only become stronger by the Work. Life cannot feed it. We then begin to wish to get free from personality, from A, from the machine we are in the power of.

The neutralizing force of the the Work

The neutralizing force of life keeps the personality active: the neutralizing force of the Work nourishes the inner observing side. We, in short, begin to understand that our whole aim is to free ourselves from A, from personality. "And," to quote again, "since you cannot in fact free yourself from A because it is yourself, you must therefore master A and make A do, not with what the A of the given moment wants, but what you yourself want to do. From being master, A must become servant.”

Week 10 Self Observation

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Week 11: Inner Division and Inability to Do

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Let's work with this simple question to take with us into the week:

"Have you reached the stage of realizing that there is an active side in you that takes charge of you at every moment and a passive side that can only look on and is quite helpless in the face of this active side?"
"You cannot do. It does in you -- that is, the machines "does." This is what is meant by the saying that you must reach the stage, through long and often painful inner observation, of realizing that there are two selves in you, one active and the other passive. The passive self -- once it has come into conscious existence -- can do nothing at first. You can only notice what the active self in you "does" and for a long time you must submit to it, however much you, the passive self, would like things to be different."

Please note: we will continue this phase of the study for 4 more weeks so that we can finish up the work on Internal Considering and External Considering.

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Eleven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 282-284.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: IX - On Being Passive (3)

When work on yourself begins

Work on yourself starts from the moment you begin to feel two selves in yourself. One is passive and the most it can do is to register and observe what is happening to it at the hands of the other. The other, which calls itself "I", is active. It speaks of itself in the first person. It regards itself as being the real self.

Let us notice that it is said that your work starts from the moment you begin to feel two selves in yourself, one passive and the other active. Now how many, do you suppose, reach this stage?

An important question

Let me ask each of you this question:

"Have you reached this stage distinctly, so that you constantly realize that there is an active side in you that will keep on taking charge of you at every moment, and a passive side that can only look on and be conscious that this is so, and is quite helpless in the face of this active side?"

An important inner division

If you can answer with certainty that you have reached this stage, then it is a matter for congratulation because it means that a real and very important inner division has taken place in you, necessary for all further stages of the Work. For it is exactly this passive side, that has become separated from the active side, than can grow. Our evolution in the Work sense is an evolution from the passive and not the active side of ourselves.

But it is just because this inner division into an active and passive side is so difficult to attain, and takes so long a time and is attended by so many initial failures, that personal work halts or moves in a circle.

Do you realie your mechanicalness?

As this is such an important matter and so difficult to grasp, let me put the question in another way: "Do you realize your mechanicalness, and do you continually realize it?" What does it mean "to realize one's mechanicalness?" It means that you begin to realize that you are a machine that reacts to external influences.

It does not act but reacts. All that you have taken as individual and conscious action is mechanical. In other words, to realize what mechanicalness is, is to realize that you cannot behave differently from the way you do behave.

The illusion of freedom

Now everyone thinks they are free and can act as they like or choose Everyone think that he or she can say either this or that by choice or do either this or that by choice. The Work teaches that this is an illusion. It says that it is the first great illusion that must be dispelled in practical work on ourselves. You cannot do. In order to do, you must be free to do. In order to do, you must first be. And to be you must become a unity. Then you are free.

But you as you are are not free, although you so fondly image you are. Whatever you do is dictated to you by your machine -- that is, by the kind of machine that has been built up in you by circumstances, education, imitation, phantasy, negative states, attitudes, opinions, and so on. This is one of the fundamental principles in the psychological teaching of this work.

You cannot do

You cannot do. It does in you -- that is, the machines "does." This is what is meant by the saying that you must reach the stage, through long and often painful inner observation, of realizing that there are two selves in you, one active and the other passive. The passive self -- once it has come into conscious existence -- can do nothing at first. You can only notice what the active self in you "does" and for a long time you must submit to it, however much you, the passive self, would like things to be different.

Becoming passive to onself

Becoming passive to oneself is the first stage of the Work. It requires great inner activity of attention. The question of control of personality arises later (not here). Before any question of control arises, you must study what it means to become passive to yourself, what it means not to identify with yourself at every moment -- otherwise you will all the time be identified with yourself. This includes the whole of yourself -- everything you can observe in process of time -- not merely what you personally think is bad, but everything.

Self-observation must be uncritical

That is why it is so often said that self-observation must be uncritical. If it is critical then you will only observe one part and never think of observing another part -- which may actually be connected. The passive self has not yet the strength to change anything in the active self -- that is, to control that self.

Unfortunately, people start off, right from the beginning, trying to control, trying to do. This is impossible, unless the right point of control is established. The right point of control comes from the gradual strengthening of the passive self.

***

We are in prison

It is often said in this Work that we are in prison. The original talks were often about "prison" -- and about "escape from prison." But to escape, we must first realize that we are in prison and see where our prison lies. I will quote something once said on this point:

"If you are in prison and at any time want to have a chance to escape, then you must first of all realize that you are in prison. If you imagine that you are free, then how can you even begin to think about escaping from prison? You will regard the idea as nonsense. So long as you fail to realize you are in prison, so long will you think you are free."

"You will regard the idea as nonsense. So long as you fail to realize you are in prison, so long will you think you are freee. Then you have no chance whatsoeer. No one can help you. If liberation is possible, it is the first requisite that you feel you are in prison and begin to study the prison you are in, and the means of escape. And you can can only gain freedom as the result of long work and effort -- and by this is meant conscious effort, directed towards a definite aim."

You must have help

"But in order to escape from prison, you must have help. You must be told what to do and told again and again, by those who have escaped and who in turn have transmitted their knowledge to others who have realized they are in prison and have themselves begun to escape."

The starting point of real change

In what is said in the above quotation, you must understand that no physical prison is meant nor does it mean merely that the body is the prison. What is meant is a psychological prison that must be escaped from. Everyone is in the prison of themselves. If you could really stand behind yourself -- that is, stand behind every side and every manifestation of yourself -- whether you think it good or bad -- then you would be able to see the prison you live in.

But in order to do this, you must become passive to yourself. You must see all your rections, whether you regard them as good or bad, passively. You must see all the opinions you express, whether you regard them as good or bad, passively. You must see your attitudes. And when you have reached this stage, by long self-observation, then you are really divided into two selves -- one active and the other passive.

The passive self stands inside or behind the active self. The passive self at this stage is powerless but although you are powerless in the face of the active self, you are now conscious of that self. You see your prison. This is the starting point of real change.

A concluding question

So I ask you again the question asked before:

"Have you reached the stage of realizing that there is an active side in you that takes charge of you at every moment and a passive side that can only look on and is quite helpless in the face of this active side?"

The less you identify with yourself, the more will you become passive to yourself

Week 11 Self Observation

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Week 12: Not Identifying with Ourselves

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Some questions from this week's reading:

What are some of the many things we are fastened to that prevent us from passing to a new level of being?
If we all are wearing an enormous number of coats, what are some of the coats we need to strip away?
Have we begin to realize our own nothingness as a practical experience?
What narrow gate and eye of the needle are we passing through now?
When we show our touchiness by being depressed, angry, or negative, can we identify a picture of ourselves that we are fastened to as the source of our inner disharmony and negative state?
Are we observing everything passively, and putting everything into the light of consciousness without criticism.
Do we sense any "inner reversal" taking place within us, where the inner controls the outer and not the outer the inner?
What keeps us from remembering ourselves and coming back to ourselves when we are scattered and dispersed?

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Twelve Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 284-288.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: X - On Being Passive (4)

On Identifying with Oneself

Part I: If you have to pass from one room into another room, it will be impossible to do so if you are fastened to something in the first room. Suppose you are stuck to your arm-chair. It will be impossible to move, except with the arm-chair attached to you. And if the door is narrow, you will be unable to get through.

And we must imagine that we are fastened to many things that prevent us from passing to a new level of being.

We wear an enormous number of coats

I remember, on one occasion, that Mr. Ouspensky spoke of us wearing an enormous number of coats. He said that it was necessary to strip off these coats one by one. Otherwise we were too bulky to pass through the door.

People who believe in themselves, in their virtue and merit, and so on, are bulky in a psychological sense. So they cannot pass through the "narrow gate" -- or through "the eye of the needle". They are camels. A camel is a big and obstinate creature. Of course, a person who is psychologically a camel is meant.

The rich man

In the Gospels, those who are very much identified with themselves are called rich. They have a firm idea of their own worth. They think that they know, they are certain they can do and are sure that right and wrong are clear to them. Such people are very much identified with themselves. This is the rich man of the Gospels of whom Christ said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the case given in the Gospels, the rich man felt he possessed goodness and had obtained much merit in everything he had done. He was identified with himself. So all that he did went into the wrong part of himself. Because of this, Christ said to him: "Go, sell all that you have." The rich man was sorry, for he had "great possessions" -- that is, he was identified with himself and his value.

The Pharisee and the Publican

Yet he was not so much identified with himself as the Pharisee who prayed, saying, "God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get," while the publican prayed: "God be merciful to me a sinner." The Pharisee is an example of identification with oneself.

Let us clearly understand that you may be very good in life and do your duty and follow all you are taught faithfully and meet danger with heroism and yet be the rich man of the Gospels. This means that you are identified with yourself in all that you do and are satisfied with yourself.

Realizing our own nothingness

Now you know that there is a phrase in the Work which says that until we reach the stage of realizing our own nothingness we cannot change. To begin to realize one's own nothingness as a practical experience is to begin to cease to be a "rich man". In other words, it is to begin to cease identifying with oneself.

Where you are identified, there you cannot be passive

Part II -- Let us now speak of identifying with oneself from different sides. Let us begin by saying that where you are identified with yourself, there you cannot be passive to yourself. To be identified with yourself means that you are fastened to something in yourself which to take as yourself.

Suppose you are fastened to the idea that you are a truthful person. This means that you are fastened to this picture of yourself. You picture yourself, to yourself, as being always truthful. So wherever you are, as it were, you take with you this picture. You have no existence apart from this picture.

You are this picture. It accompanies you everywhere, no matter even if you are not telling the truth. This makes no difference to the picture that you have of yourself and to which you are firmly glued. If for a moment circumstances make you feel you are not being quite truthful on some occasion, then at once you will begin to justify yourself and explain and argue and so on until you feel again quite comfortable inside, and at peace with this picture which dominates you.

Identifying with pictures of yourself

This is being identified with yourself. It is an example belonging to the class of identifying with pictures of yourself. Of course, pictures are legion. But everyone has special pictures of himself or herself with which he or she identifies.

One of the sources of our inner disharmony and of our negative states lies in pictures. When a picture is, as it were, touched, we show our touchiness either by being depressed or by being angry, or, in short, negative.

When we carry a great many pictures about, we are very identified with ourselves. And the more we are identified with ourselves, the more liable we are to be upset, discouraged, disappointed, and so on. Of course, it is not only pictures that make a person liable to be upset. But pictures form a very definite source of instability in ourselves.

Pictures of ourselves belong to False Personality

Pictures are formed out of vanity and imagination -- that is, they belong to the False Personality, which is Imaginary "I". And with everything belonging to the False Personality we are especially identified.

If we could really see by direct insight that we are not at all as we imaged, then the power of False Personality would be weakened. On one side we would lose, but actually we would gain far more than we would lose. But we always defend ourselves, even when we know better.

Only self-observation can help

This is because those two giants called pride and vanity will not allow us to yield -- at least to others. And for this reason, only self-observation can help. You yourself, by seeing yourself, can yield to yourself. So a division must be made in oneself between the observing and the observed sides.

And, at first, everything must be observed passively, and placed in the light of consciousness without criticism. If you have a picture of yourself as always being truthful, then you must observe over a long period how often you lie.

Only this inner realization will destroy the power of the picture with which you have been identified and to which you have been a slave.

Taking ourselves as one

Part III -- "So long as you take yourself as one self you will never move from where you are." Yes, but why? Because you are then completely identified with yourself. Your work only begins when you feel two selves in yourself. One is passive and this is the self who observes: the other is active and this is the self who is observed.

A reversal

This active self calls itself "I". The passive self is the begining of the path to real "I". But it is for a long time weak and can do nothing. But as the feeling of "I" is drawn out of the active self, so does the passive self become strengthened until the time comes when the passive self becomes active and the active self passive. That is, a reversal takes place and the inner controls the outer, not the outer the inner.

Identification with ourselves

Let us understand this more clearly. So long as we take ourselves as one we cannot become different. Do you see why? We cannot change, because we are identified with ourselves and take everything in ourselves as ourself.

Our thoughts, opinions, moods, feelings, sensations, and, in fact, everything, we take as "I". We say "I" to them all. You will remember what the Work says about identifying. I will quote a few things:

"Identification is so common a quality that for the purposes of observation it is difficult to separate it from everything else. We are always in a state of identification and for this reason we cannot remember ourselves . . ."

"'Identifying' is one of our most terrible foes. It is necessary to see and to study identifying to its very roots in oneself. Identifying is the chief obstacle to self-remembering. If we identify with everything, we are unable to remember ourselves. In order to remember ourself it is necessary not to identify. But in order not to identify, we must first of all not be identified with ourself."

"We must remember that there are two in us, one that can only observe at first and another that takes charge of us at every moment and speaks in our name and calls itself "I". We must try not to identify with this other self who controls us, and feel that we are different from this self and that there is another in us. But unless this separation is made and continually made, we remain one self and nothing can change in us."

We identify with everything

You will see that the Work teaches that our state is such that we identify with everything. For example, we identify with our knowledge. On person has one kind of knowledge, such as knowledge of the world, another has knowledge of science, a third knowledge of cooking, a fourth knowledge of business, a fifth knowledge of books, and so on.

Identifying with knowledge

But in each case, a person will identify with his or her knowledge. You know how people having similar knowledge quarrel and how, in the so-called learned world, all sorts of extraordinary jealousies exist based on identifying. Doctors, for instance, always disagree. And they are always identified with their knowledge. Cooks also do not agree, nor do literary people, nor soldiers, nor parsons, nor mothers, and so on, and so on.

Perhaps you remember in childhood when you first began to identify with knowledge and how pleased you felt when you were told something that others did not know and felt a kind of power. Identifying gives a sense of power. It was not, of course, the knowledge you were interested in, but the fact that you could "show off."

Identifying with the intellectual center

Now let us take the subject of identifying with the Intellectual Center. Here exists among other things attitudes, opinions, and thoughts. Do you know, or rather, have you observed, that you identify with your opinions? This is another form of identifying with oneself.

Identifying with opinions

Of course, an opinion is not you, but quite distinct. But if you are identified, the feeling of "I" becomes fastened to it. Perhaps you feel you do not have opinions. In any case, we all have thoughts. Can you say "I" to your thoughts? or rather, do you say "I" to them invariably? Certainly, if you believe that everything in your inner world is "I" then you cannot help doing so. But you might as well say that everything in the external world is yourself.

Identifying with thoughts

Often very depressing and complex thoughts come. If one identifies with them they exert their full power. Then one is identified with one's thoughts. But it is quite possible not to identify with one's thoughts. It helps one a great deal in work on oneself, and in every way.

It is impossible to stop thoughts. You can try this, but merely as an exercise in self-observation. But one can learn not to identify with thoughts, and one must begin by observing them. Some thoughts are very interesting to observe, tangled, complex, heavy thoughts that it is very dangerous to identify with.

If you do not identify with something in yourself, you begin to be free from its power. Next time we will speak more of identifying with oneself in regard to the Intellectual Center and later in regard to the other centers

Week 12 Self Observation

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Week 13: Not Identifying With Our Thoughts

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Some questions from this week's reading about working on the Intellectual Center by becoming passive to our thoughts:

Can I see the work of the different three different centers in myself as three people in myself?
Do I see that nearly all the thoughts that casually come into my mind are useless or worse?
What are the shapes and colors of the thoughts that I am attracted to?
Is this Work giving a center of gravity to your thinking?

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Thirteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 288-291.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: XII - On Being Passive (5)

Not identifying with ourselves

We continue today to speak on the subject of non-identifying with oneself. I remind you again that people take this thing called oneself for granted, and also take it not only as one thing but allow it to say "I" to everything it does or thinks or feels.

We spoke last time of identifying with oneself from the standpoint of centers and began with the Intellectual Center. When you are first taught about self-observation, you are told to try to observe the work of the different centers so as to see the three people in you corresponding to them.

The activities of the Intellectual Center are very many. Last time something was said about opinions and thoughts which belong to the Intellectual Center. We usually identify ourselves completely with our opinions, which are borrowed from others, from he papers, etc.

Identifying with our thoughts

Then we spoke of identifying with our thoughts. Our thoughts are not visible to other people. But they are quite definite things, composed of definite substances. We can be more, or less, conscious of our thoughts. Now when you observe a thought, you are not identified with it.

What does that mean? It means that unless you observe the Intellectual Center and what is going on in it you tend to take its activities for granted. You will believe your thoughts or take them for granted. You identify with them. You give them the quality of truth and either say: "I think" or, more internally, you take the thoughts as you. Then they have power over you and exert their influence upon you.

Becoming our thoughts

An unpleasant thought, a dreary, heavy thought, a suspicious thought, a pessimistic thought, an evil thought, and so on -- all these thoughts become you: and so you are them, through identifying with them.

But you are not your thoughts. Any thought can enter the mind. All sorts of hopeless, bad, useless, stupid, formless and imbecile thoughts can enter your mind. And if you "I" to them all, where will you be? You will say "yes" to them all. You will consent to them. You will, in short, be identified with them, because all the time you will be saying "I" to them and believing that "I" is thinking them and that they are your thoughts.

Nearly all my casual thoughts are useless or worse

But, as I said, any thoughts can enter the mind, just as any people can come into your house. Very few of our thoughts are worth following and in order to begin to think rightly, nearly all the thoughts that casually come into the mind have to be rejected as useless or worse.

A person may indeed have very dangerous thoughts, especially when we accept them as if they were our own. We are so naive as to believe that all thoughts coming into our mind are our own and that we ourselves thought them. And so we say "I" to them, not knowing any better. But if we begin to understand that we must observe our thoughts, we will soon have quite a different viewpoint.

Our thoughts are not our own

I remember that many years ago when Mrs. Nicoll and I left the Institute in France and went to Scotland to my grandfather's house, I spent many months looking through the theological books in my grandfather's library, written by various Scotch divines. They were all, of course, purely formatory. They were all about matters of doctrine and about the letter of the law and they indulged in all sorts of hair-splitting arguments.

But one of them struck me. The writer said that people must remember that the devil sent many thoughts into our minds and that we must never think that they are our own thoughts. He explained this idea at some length and even often emphasized the phrase: "Our thoughts are not our own."

Here was a man beginning to understand something psychological and reading him was like a breath of living air, amongst all those dead and terrible volumes, in which there was no trace of understanding, and nothing was said on the psychological level, and everything was taken on the literal level -- on the level of stone.

We are not responsible for our thoughts but responsible for our thinking

This writer said that we are not responsible for our thoughts but responsible for our thinking. You can think a thought, or not. A thought enters the mind and seeks to attract you. If it does, you begin to "think it" -- that is think from it. You begin to enlarge this thought, by paying attention to it and thinking from it, until it grows in all directions, and forms, as it were, a little tree of thought in you, that bears fruit, and seeds other similar thoughts. This is clear enough in the as of suspicious thoughts.

A thought and thinking are not the same

You understand that a thought and thinking are not the same. Let us suppose that the thought enters you mind that Mr. X is lying. This is only a thought. You probably say to yourself: "I must think about that." But if you believe the thought at once you identify with it. Your thought has now transformed Mr. X into a liar.

What thoughts we identify with change things very much. For instance, some people habitually identify with a gloomy, tortuous, mistrustful class of thoughts. They like thoughts of this shape and color. So they accept such thoughts and reject others.

What are the shapes and colors of the thoughts I am attracted to?

These thoughts alter things for them, like dark glasses. Now they are identified with these thoughts so that they cannot see them. They are these thoughts so they cannot observe them and see they are certain kinds of thoughts and that all sorts of other thoughts exist, with quite different shapes and colors.

We can have any kind of thoughts. Any thoughts can come into us. In the Gospels it is pointed out that it is not what comes into us that defiles us, but what comes out of us. Any sort of thought can enter the mind, but whether you identify with it and act from it -- or rather re-act -- is another question. If you identify with a thought you say "I" to it and you believe it. So you will think from it or act from it. How you think and how you act is what comes out of you. The thought that enters the mind is what goes into us. What you think and do from this thought is what comes out of you.

Thinking and acting from our thoughts

A thought that is a lie, a wrong thought, wrongly joined together, a false thought, a depressing thought, a thought that takes hold of one thing and ignores everything else, or that kind of thought that can only deny and contradict, etc. -- if you identify with such thoughts, you will think and act from them. Your mind will be a mess.

The ideas of this Work are to build the mind up in the right order so that everything can be related aright. In the center of the mind stands the Ray of Creation -- that is, the Scale of Being. From the highest to the lowest, all things fall into their places. But unless the mind is changed by the Work, it continues to think that all its thoughts are real and true.

The mind is like a tent lying in a heap on the ground

The mind is then like a tent lying in a heap on the ground without a central upright pole. All its parts are touching each other wrongly. They are not stretched out. By means of the training of the Work and learning to think from what it teaches, we begin to be able to distinguish between right and wrong thinking.

We begin o learn how to think on the right scale, and how not to mix scales, and so on. All this helps us not to identify with all our thoughts. It gives a center of gravity to our thinking.

The Work is to make us think aright

The Work is to make us think aright. That is why it is so important to try to take in what this Work teaches. You know that in learning, say, Chemistry, or, if you like, a foreign language, it is very important to listen to what is taught you, and to arrange it in your mind, and think about what is being taught you.

Many people never think of what they are being taught. But in the Work, it is necessary. Why is it necessary? Because it builds up a new system of thought and of thinking in your minds. Actually, it makes your minds begin to work in the right way -- so that they can really begin to think.

A thought and thinking a thought are not the same

Now let me emphasize that a thought, and thinking a thought, are not the same. A thought may enter your mind but you may or may not think it. And even if you think it, you need not necessarily identify with it. But there are many different kinds of thoughts, higher and lower, big and little, that enter the mind, and this belongs to later teaching.

What is necessary to realize at present is that thoughts are of every possible kind and that they are not yours, but that you can make them yours by identifying with them. And if you do so then they can pull you in any direction.

There is a science of thought. This Work, with all its ideas and teaching, and instructions, has to do with a right science of thought and thinking. For that reason, all of you who have heard the Work for some years should know what it means to find fault with your thoughts and with your thinking, and should be able to see wrong thoughts and inadequate thoughts, lying thoughts, and so on.

Thinking from this Work

The first change demanded in this Word, as in the Gospels, is change of mind. But for "change of mind" to take place, you must begin to think from this Work and what it teaches. Then later, perhaps, you can begin to act from the Work.

But first of all a new way of thinking is necessary. Now in this paper we are speaking of what the Work teaches. It says that any thoughts can enter your minds, and they are not your thoughts. It says you can think them or not. And it says you can identify with them or not. When you hear this, as part of the teaching of the Work, and apply it by observing yourself in Intellectual Center, you will see that it is quite true. When you realize this, you will be thinking in a new way about yourself.

Becoming passive to our thoughts

If you can realize practically -- that is, by experience -- you can be passive to your thoughts by non-identifying with them, you have already reached a definite stage of work on the Intellectual Center. But if you take yourself as one you will never get to this point.

You will remain stuck in the illusion that all your thoughts as well as all your feelings and moods are you or rather "I myself." You will have no insight into the enormous inner world of height and depth containing thousands of inhabitants, good and bad, that you take for granted as one person, which you regard as yourself, and in the customary state of sleep say "I" to at every moment. Everything that takes place in yourself you will call "I".

Working on the intellectual center

So you will never move from the position you are in, because you take yourself as one, and so you will never understand what it means to become passiveto yourself.

In the above paper, we have been speaking of practical work that leads to becoming passive to thoughts. This belongs to intimate work on the Intellectual Center. This is the subject of the paper. The paper is about long practical work on non-identifying with thoughts

Week 13 Self Observation

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Week 14: Not Identifying With Our Emotional States

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Some exercises from this week's reading about working on the Emotional Center by not identifying with our emotional states:

Try for a time to like what you dislike and dislike what you like. For this week, make it a point to stop talking about what you like or dislike. For a short time, at intervals, practice being consciously passive to one's mechanical likes and dislikes. for a short time, at intervals. (Notice Nicoll's caveat, that Work is always against what is mechanical in us, and that if mechanically we do not have enough likes and dislikes, then we should cultivate more liking and disliking).
Practice becoming passive to associations. Can we take someone close to us, and "behold" them as if for the first time? Can we see them for a moment without associations, starting from the "poor" side of realizing that we do not know and have never known?

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Fourteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 292-297.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: XII - On Being Passive (6)

Becoming passive to the Emotional Center

Last time we spoke of the necessity in the Work that we should be able to find fault with our thoughts and not identify with them. Tonight we speak of the necessity of finding fault with our emotions. The activities of the Emotional Center are far more difficult to become passive to than the activities of the Intellectual Center.

We can think differently more easily than we can feel differently. It is quite possible to come passive to many thoughts that one has been accustomed to follow and identify with, but it is not the same in regard to the sphere of the emotions and feelings.

The reason is that we are identified with our feelings far more than with our thoughts. Our feelings, our emotions, our moods, grip us.

Notice yourself when you are vexed

Notice yourself, when you are vexed. Is it easy to non-identify with this usual daily emotional state? You may smile and say cheerful things and pretend you are all right, but inside you are held as if in a vice. Although one side of you may not want to be vexed, yet some other side insists on being so.

Or let us say that something belonging to the self-importance, to the vanity is touched -- is it easy to cease being identified with it? Is it not easy to be offended?

Emotions are quick and rarely looked at

One reason is that the emotions are very quick. They work with a very "quick" energy, far quicker energy that that used in ordinary thoughts. Another reasons is that we rarely look at our emotions. We do not observe them because we take them for granted.

Our emotional life is a very poor thing. But we do not notice how poor and unpleasant and mean it is. If we did, we would begin to dislike it. We would begin to dislike our usual emotional states -- even begin to hate them.

We are not really conscious of our usual daily emotions

But it takes some considerable time before we reach this stage of consciousness. It is scarcely too much to say that we are not really conscious of our usual daily emotions, which are practically always negative, mean, jealous, and paltry -- or, in short, unpleasant.

Our love of unpleasant emotions is extraordinary and we like very much not only to communicate our unpleasant emotions to others and infect them but to hear about unpleasant things, scandal, and so on.

We cannot see our emotions

We do not know what we are doing. We do it all in sleep. We cannot see our emotions because we are so identified with them. If we could see plainly our usual emotions we would be horrified. But fortunately we are not able to see them, simply because we could not endure it. It would drive us mad to see the quality of our emotional life.

We all have noble pictures of ourselves. And the Work never allows us to see what we cannot bear. its action is very slow, very gradual, very gentle. But we an see the results of our emotions and this is the starting point. We an see that we hurt people, for example.

Bur even if we realize this, it may take us years of self-observation before we realize that we have unpleasant, treacherous or nasty emotions, which cause others to be hurt, and that it is our fault.

The difficulty of awakening

You must understand that awakening is a very long process and a painful one. Awakening means becoming more and more conscious of oneself -- of what one is really like. In the emotional sphere this is very difficult. How often do people imagine that they have done their best for others, when, in actual fact, they have done nothing but express their most unpleasant, most stinging and harmful, and often nastiest emotions, of which they should really be ashamed.

In fact, expressing unpleasant emotions is what in life is so often called "being sincere" or "trying to help", and so on. People actually think it is a kindness to say all sorts of unpleasant and wretched things to one another and they imagine that if they smile sweetly they are exercising charity and goodwill. This is the trouble in regard to our emotional states.

We are not charitable nor have we goodwill, and one of the first things is to realize this to the very bottom and hate it. We love ourselves in everything. We love everything that gratifies our vanity and so we do not love our neighbors unless they flatter us and we feel that we dispense their lives.

And even though we may have better "I's" in us that can understand other people more and even care for them, even if they do not flatter us, yet the smaller, meaner "I"s belonging to the self-love, the self-interest, the self-conceit, usually prove to be far stronger -- save perhaps after a long interval of time of self-observation, or when they are rendered quiescent by the exhaustion of sever illness, which renders the personality passive.

On the point of death people wish only that others should forgive them. That is because they are no longer in small "I"s. But this humiliation can graduallytake place by the action of the Work-- that is, through increasing consciousness of what one really is like--by means of long and patient self-observation and all the inner pain of realizing that life cannot be as it was in our imagination.

The illusion of doing and knowing

Now let us sketch the person who is full of vanity, self-merit, self-admiration, self-love, self-estimation, self-worthiness, self-conceit, self-importance, self-esteem, self-excitement, and so on. That person is very identified with himself or herself. This person is rich -- "the rich man" (or the rich woman).

Such people have no idea that they cannot do. This idea would startle them. They also have no notion that they do not know. They are sure they know best.

They feel depressed only when their vanity meets with a check, or no doubt they feel furious. But they cannot see themselves. They may be very kind so long as they are gratified with thanks and praise. They help the poor, they give money to those in distress, provided they get proper recognition and feel they are properly treated. Such people may be very useful in mechanical life, but in the Work, which is under a reverse sign from life, they may find themselves at a loss.

The Work grows out of our "poorness", not our "richness"

I remember many years ago that some people of this kind who were in the Work decided to get together and make the Work "really go." They felt that it was all too slow and that they could rapidly make it a great success and they no doubt pictured themselves sitting on the platform at some great meeting at the Albert Hall or some such place bowing to thousands of people.

They felt that out of their "richness" -- I am speaking psychologically -- they could enlarge the Work. But it is out of our "poorness" that the Work grows. It is not from the rich personality that the Work grows in us but from the starved and real essence.

The Work reverses everything

This is why the Work reverses everything, and makes the active passive and the passive active. Do any of you really imagine that if this Work were a great success in life and were broadcast night and day it could retain any inner secret force and meaning? I advise you to think out this for yourselves.

For my part, I realized very early that this Work could never be a success in life and that it could never be written about openly, save indirectly. And you think deeply you will see why this must be so -- this is, if you think from the idea of active and passive signs, in regard to personality and essence.

Becoming passive to likes and dislikes

Now let us take the question of become passive to likes and dislikes. This is part of the Work on Emotional Center, in regard to the general teaching of becoming passive to the active "oneself" that takes change of things and controls us. Try to observe your likes and dislikes and how you waste yourselves in silly likes and dislikes.

There is an exercise in the Work to this effect: "Try for a time to like what you dislike and dislike what you like." There is a similar exercise in regard to the Intellectual center which I should have mentioned before -- namely, "Try to observe what opinions you side with and speak in favor of the other side."

Our emotional habits

Being identified with one's mechanical liking and disliking holds a person down to emotional habits. it so often happens that you find that what you dislike you can easily like and vice versa. Our mechanical likes and dislikes are based on very little. They change every moment. Yet we attach so much importance to them.

And often in the Work you find that people you disliked you begin to like. This is a sign that you are changing. But you cannot change if you identify with every one of your momentary likes and dislikes.

One thing can help here -- namely, not always talking endlessly of your likes and dislikes, and making a fuss about them. Sometimes people's sole form of conversation is about what they like and they do not like. As if they really imagine it is important! No form of talk is more egotistical or exhausting.

The Work is always against what is mechanical in you

To practice for a short time, at intervals, being consciously passive to one's mechanical likes and dislikes is very useful, but not always, particularly in those who mechanically are too timid to say what they want. Speaking in general, Work is always against what is mechanical in you. If mechanically you have not enough likes and dislikes you should have more, not vice versa.

Being passive to associations

Let us now speak of one side of being passive to likes and dislikes. Let us speak of being passive to associations. You know that the work says that we see everything from associations. You may have feelings or being in a familiar place and of being in an unfamiliar place at the same time, but these feelings are not in the same part of us.

To our small "I"s living in mechanical divisions of centers, things may seem familiar by mere association which when seen from more conscious "I"s become unfamiliar. Thus we sometimes "behold" one another -- as for the first time. We see for a moment without associations.

When impressions fall on essence

Impressions then fall beyond the machinery of mechanical personality. Then everything is strange, unfamiliar and vivid. Impressions then fall on essence. We get used to things owing to associations so we no longer see each other or indeed anything, but only our associations with which we completely identify. We take another person by our associations. We identify with these associations and so think we see and know the person.

Now it is quite possible to observe associations at work with which we identify, and so get misled. It is quite possible to observe associations about others especially if one begins to realize one does not know them. For instance, people take it for granted that they know each others. This is illusion.

We do not really know

We are nearly invisible to one another. But if you think you "know" you will not be able to "see" without mechanical associations. This means that you must start from the realization that you do not know other people, however familiar to you they are.

And so also with everything. We do not really know. But we are sure we know. Start from the idea that you do not know and have never known. Start, that is, from ignorance. This is the "poor" side. And this give new life because you begin to get new impressions, new viewpoints, new understanding.

If impressions fall on essence you see in a new way. Now a "rich" person, very identified with himself or herself, cannot expect to see things without associations or to get any new impressions falling on essence which is the growing point of a person. That person will live always in associations -- in the past.

Also an opinionated person, a man or woman openly or secretly in love with themselves, and certain of themselves and their virtue, and standpoint, such a man or woman, wholly identified with themselves, will not be able to divide themselves into two. That is, they will not be able to shift their position but must always remain where they are and so what they are in the Scale of Being. Where and what are the same in this scale. That is, the level of being whereyou are, is also what you are.

If you begin to see yourself passively you begin to see the level of being you are chained down to by the active, self-acting side of you -- the side that calls itself "I" and which, in my case, expects to be "Maurice Nicoll." This side, in everyone, usurps the throne and sits on it.

We have no real master on the throne of our inner world

There are endless legends, parables and myths, referring to this wrong psychological situation of humanity. One has some difficulty in believing that such a thing actually happens to everyone and that everyone has a wrong Ruler on the throne, and that is happened long ago to oneself.

One at least thinks one is master in one's house. This is precisely not the case. You have no real master on the throne of your inner world -- that is, in your own psychology. You must understand that if we see everything from past associations we will not be able to see anything in a different way. We may imagine we see another person but it will be from our associations.

We keep one another in the prison of our associations

In this way, we keep one another in the prison of our associations about one another. We have already formed our own opinions about others. So we do not allow others to exist beyond what we think of them by associations. This is a great tragedy.

To let people go, as it were, let them be different, depends on our letting them go. That is, it depends upon our not trying to keep them to what we imagine they are by our mechanical associations. All mothers and fathers have this difficulty with children. But it applies to all sorts of others relationships in life.

Try to see another person without associations

Remember that we see one another by our associations, once we become "familiar", as it is called, with each other. What we do not understand is that seeing a person by one's own associations with him or her has nothing to do with what the person really is. Try to see another person without associations. That is the beginning of something new.

And it so often happens that people have got quite wrong associations with others and never even catch a real glimpse of them. I personally have found in this Work that I "know" others less and less. Certainly I would never say: "I know this person -- I have know this person all my life." That is exactly saying, in so many words, that you know nothing save your few associations with the person.

***

Vanity and Pride

One of the most difficult things in this Work is to go on steadily with it when one's vanity has been hit at. This shows merely how much we do things from vanity, without realizing it. All the explosive, bristling, quarreling touchiness of life is due to the two emotional giants, Vanity and Pride.

Can you stick to a thing when you have been told you are not good at it? Your vanity may be offended, but your pride may help. Anyhow, if you can, then you may be fairly sure that you are not acting from personality entirely but perhaps from something genuine, and deeper, and so more real.

Yet it may only be pride, turned outward, which comes to the rescue of offended vanity. At the same time one can stick to this Work through pride turned inwards, and eventually find genuine reasons which have nothing to do with superficial feelings, but spring from a real valuation of the Work itself. This is to reach emotion beyond self-emotion.

Personality has scarcely any right to exist in this place

You must remember that in a fully developed school of this Work, your Vanity would be hit almost every day, and that many would leave in indignation. At the institute in France we were told on entering that "personality has scarcely any right to exist in this place." But we merely heard the phrase. We did not realize what it meant -- save later.

Speaking on a far higher scale, let us recall how many people left Christ because "they wee offended in him." This means they were identified emotionally with the vanity of their own worth. To be so is really a nuisance. You will find out why I say this, if you do not know it already.

But there is a deeper side to all this -- that is, where the Work really brings you up against yourself. Here lies the point where people forget to work and simply feel lost. Here is the place where it is possible to long not to be so identified emotionally with what one is. It is like being stuck to an illusion that you cannot get away from and that can no longer galvanize you.

You must, however, begin to realize that you have been "stuck to" an illusion that you have called "I" and that beyond the illusion you can begin to have real things -- that is, the same things, but differently.

Now let us take another aspect of being identified emotionally, which illustrates one of the many difficulties of becoming passive to oneself -- to this person called A, to this active Frankenstein-monster that one has been led to make, and which now stalks about in one's little world and takes change of one, and speaks as if it were "I" and keeps on singing all sorts of things grandiloquent and boastful as well as pious and timid.

The machine we are fastened to

This monster, this machine, that you are fastened to -- what do you think of it? Do you like it? Everyone is attached to his or her machine. Remember the Work teaches that everyone is a machine but that machines are of different kinds -- some are loud like Bren guns, or chattering like typewriters, and some are as silent as the electric meter in the hall outside.

Now people compare themselves with others. That is, machines compare themselves with machines and identify through comparison with themselves. If you are a noisy machine you perhaps feel you are superior to a quiet machine And if you are a quiet machine you thank God you are not a noisy machine, and so on.

Identifying emotionally with oneself

This is one source of identifying emotionally with oneself -- that is, it is one source of liking oneself. In the Gospels it is said that we must come to hate ourselves. This work uses different language but has the same deep meaning. The work says that we must become passive to ourselves. But it is very painful to go against the usual way one has reacted to life.

You feel you are losing so much. Yet you are losing nothing real and after a time you begin to feel new forms of living passing into you. You come back to the same scenes, but you are different, It is the same outer world but you take it quite differently. It is the same kind of thing, the same kind of events, but you are related to them quite differently. It is even the same people, but you see and feel them quite differently.

In passing from one level of being, and experience, to a new level, there is a gap that is painful. It is like leaving something familiar. If you hold on the Work, after a long time you find that you can more experience everything fully, but at a different level -- that is, in a new way

Week 14 Self Observation

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Week 15: Not Identifying with our Mental Associations

Fourth Way Wisdom Work — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Some exercises from this week's reading about working on the Intellectual Center and noticing involuntary associations, voluntary associations, and associations of a "higher order:"

Nicoll give one inner work exercise as "pinning down" and getting specific about our habitual associations by observing some typical chain of association or thoughts that we wish to change, and becoming passive to it.
Nicoll also talks about associations of a "higher order" formed in moments when we are working on ourselves and "self-remember" -- when we see both into ourselves and into the object. "The results of this higher psychic activity form associations of their own class." He calls this the "transformation of impressions" where impressions are "consciously perceived" and "connected with their right centers." Can we find moments of this "higher order association" this week?

Weekly Lectionary Reading

Gospel of Thomas

Also, each week our inner contemplative practice will be the Lord Have Mercy exercise with commentary by Joseph Azize and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Inner Work Practice

Week Fifteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

The following reading is taken from Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Vol. 1, 1996 Edition: Samuel Weiser Inc., pp. 298-302.

NOTE: This week’s reading is edited to reflect more inclusive language.

Internal Considering and External Considering: XIII - On Being Passive (7)

Associations

The mind should become accustomed to think of the ideas of the Work. We can only think from our ideas. If you think always with your usual ideas, your thoughts will always follow the same circles. You will go round and round in your minds. As a rule this is our usual state.

When did you last have a thought that led anywhere? The ideas of the Work are to change the mind. They are very powerful. To think from an idea of this Work—such as that we are asleep on this earth and that is the real reason why everything is in the mess it is in —to think from such a powerful idea is to think in a new way. This means that new connections and associations are made in the mind and the psychic energy begins to traverse new paths. This is always a good experience.

Making new connections

This making of new connections opens up the mind and gives new force. To think always in the same way is, as has often been said, like walking up and down a lawn always in exactly the same narrow track. The result is that the grass is worn out just in these places. But owing to the tremendous mechanical pull that we are subject to on this far-down planet, habits of thought form very quickly and persist throughout life.

That is why it is so difficult to become passive to typical associative ways of thinking, especially since we take them for granted as being true. Truth is, for us, our habits of mind. Nothing is surely more evident than the fact that people become so identified with their ways of thinking that nothing can alter them. But this does not apply only to other people. It applies to ourselves. We do not realize that we have habits of mind, as the Work calls them, just as we have habits of feeling, habits of movement, and habits of appetite.

Habits exist in all centers because centers become overlaid with a network of associations, like railways running across country. If we could start with a new machine things would be different. But we start with a dirty and worn machine. Yet, even though this is so, by not identifying with typical habits of mind and feeling (to begin with), very much that is worth while can be achieved.

Let us take another illustration. The physical instrument of thought is the brain. The brain contains something like 14,000,000,000 distinct nerve-cells, each with about 100 branches or connections, with other nerve-cells. Let us picture this on a very reduced scale, as a mere diagram.

Habitual paths in the brain

This small diagram shows a nervous or psychic impulse entering the field under observation at A and passing through nerve-cells (1) to nerve-cell (2) and then to (3) via one path only, shown in thick lines +++++++. But you will notice that this impulse entering at A might take many other paths. And if you remember that there are some 14,000,000,000 brain-cells, each with 100 arms or branches or connections, then you will realize in how many ways a thing can be taken —that is, along how many different paths an impulse can travel theoretically. But owing to habit impulses find habitual tracks and so produce the same results.

We live, think and feel by associations

Try to visualize the infinite number of possible paths an impression might take. But actually the matter is like the lawn upon which we walk always along a few well-worn paths. That is, we live by associations. We think by associations and we feel by associations. And certainly we move by associations, and this is just as well, speaking in general, but as we so often move wrongly, some of these associations must ultimately be broken down. But we speak here only of associative thoughts and associative feelings or emotions—that is, mechanical thinking and mechanical liking and disliking, mechanical negative emotions and so on.

We live in the basement of ourselves

Speaking from a rather different angle, the Work says that we live in the basement of ourselves. The basement means the mechanical divisions of centers. The basement of the Intellectual Center is the formatory part—that is, the moving part of Intellectual Center. The basement of the Emotional Center is the moving or mechanical part of it. In these parts we live almost entirely by mechanical associations.

We get up, yawn, eat breakfast, make our usual remarks, express our usual opinions, use our usual phrases, make our usual jokes, exhibit our usual likes and dislikes and so on. In this sense we live in the basement and also, in much the same sense, we live by association. If anything is missing, or if anything is unusual, we are astonished and probably make a fuss. But provided we recognize everything at a mere glance, provided everything is routine, and familiar, we are satisfied. This is our mechanical life. We should all be well aware of it by self-observation.

Realizing our mechanicalness

And if we feel no desire to be different then there is no reason why we should. But we may reach that point of awakening, or that point of self-consciousness, where we realize our mechanicalness and begin first to be rather surprised, and then perhaps to feel discomfort, and finally to feel dislike of ourselves. It is, of course, useless merely to feel dislike of oneself in a vague way. Many do. Many alternate between a feeling of their own worth and a feeling of despair. But that leads nowhere. It is merely the swing of the pendulum.

Pinning down what we dislike

What we dislike must be pinned down. For example, in regard to work on the Intellectual Center from the side of associative thinking, one must observe some typical chain of associations or thoughts that one wishes to change and become passive to it. That means, one must not say 'I to it, nor believe it is 'I' thinking it, but that it is the machine of associations thinking it.

It is thinking it, not I. To non-identify, you must take all feeling of 'I' out of a thing. But as you know, for a very long time we take every psychic happening in us, that is, every thought and feeling, as 'I'—as oneself— as me. And this attitude to our inner psychic world is as foolish as a corresponding attitude to the external world by our senses.

I do not take the table as me, as I. Nor need I take my thoughts in that way. Now we spoke of "living in the basement" — that is, in associations belonging to the mechanical parts of centers. Tonight I wish to speak of three categories of associations that are possible for us, according to the Work teaching — namely, associations produced involuntarily, associations produced voluntarily, and associations of a higher order, that are established in us by connection with the ideas of the Work. Let us take these three categories one by one.

Associations produced involuntarily

The main part of our associations are produced involuntarily. These are associations that simply happen by circumstances — such as, that as a child one was eating a pear and a nasty worm crawled out of it. "Pear", its taste, smell, shape, etc. become connected with "nasty worm", simply because the two things happened together. So an association is laid down between these two things, one pleasant and the other unpleasant. If the same experience happens again, it is probable that one will never like pears very much—and that will be due entirely to a path of associations laid down involuntarily in the machine.

The object "pear" will ring up the object "worm" automatically. Or the secretary on hearing of the word "pear" will at once add the word "worm". Or more strictly, the sight of a pear will start a roll turning that will automatically start another roll turning on which the memory of "worm" is recorded. The point is that it is all mechanical — a bit of mechanism — and that it was formed involuntarily. I will only add here that a great many illnesses are due to involuntary associations that become habitual.

Associations produced voluntarily

Now to come to the next class of associations, called voluntary. To this class belong the associations formed in the machine by training of all kinds. These associations are not involuntarily laid down but are laid down voluntarily, although they may be mixed up with involuntary associations. A person who is taught to read and write has a special and very complex set of associations laid down in them voluntarily, partly by the will of another, and partly by their own will. A person who is taught to ride or skate has again voluntary associations connected with moving Center. A person who becomes a mathematician has similarly very complex voluntary associations formed in their mind over a long period, that they have deliberately acquired.

Briefly speaking, all education is to lay down associations that are voluntarily formed, but these are not necessarily so formed. They may be partly laid down unconsciously —that is, involuntarily formed. But if we labor at learning something and use our directed attention, then voluntarily formed associations are laid down in us.

Associations of a higher order

The third class of associations is formed, briefly speaking, in moments of self-remembering and work on oneself. When we see both into ourselves and into the object, or see ourselves and the other person simultaneously, then the results of this higher psychic activity form associations of their own class.

Now in giving this brief outline I have used the terms "involuntary and voluntary associations". Strictly speaking, I should have said "associations formed by involuntarily perceived impressions and associations formed by voluntarily perceived impressions."

A note from Ouspensky about associations

I shall now quote from a conversation which took place many years ago. Mr. Ouspensky is speaking of what he was taught:

"The modern man never acts of his own accord, but only manifests actions stimulated by external stimuli. The modern man does not think, but something thinks for him; he does not act, but something acts through him; he does not create, but something is created through him; he does not achieve, but something is achieved through him.

In a newly-born child, the three diverse parts or centers of the general human psyche may be compared to a system of blank gramophone rolls upon which begin to be recorded, from the day of its appearance into the world, the external significance of objects and the subjective understanding of their inner significance, or the sense of the results of all actions taking place in the outer world, as well as in the inner world already forming in him; all this is recorded in accordance with the correspondence between the nature of these actions and the nature of those distinct systems which form themselves in man.

All kinds of these recorded results of environing actions remain unchanged on each of these 'depository-rolls' for life, in the same sequence and in the same correlation with the impressions previously recorded, in which they are perceived. All the impressions recorded in these three relatively independent parts, composing man's general psyche, later produce, in the period of responsible age, all kinds of associations in diverse combinations.

That which is called 'reason' in man, as well as in all other external forms of life, is nothing more than the concentration of the results of impressions of different quality formerly perceived; and the stimulation and repetition of these provokes different kinds of associations in the being.

The recorded impressions have three sources of origin and are subject to three different law-abiding influences. One category of associations is formed by impressions perceived involuntarily and coming directly from the outer world as well as springing from man's inner world, as a result of certain previous, constant and automatically repeated associations. The second category is formed by voluntarily perceived impressions either springing from the external world or crystallizing in man's inner world by means of deliberate active thinking and verifications of reality. The third category originates from the process known as the transformation of impressions, where impressions of all kinds whether arising without or within, are consciously perceived and related with similar impressions, already recorded, and connected with their right centers."

Week 15 Self Observation

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Fourth Way Wisdom Work : Fourth Way Wisdom Work: Self-Observation

About the Course

Week 1: The Slow Work

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week One Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Introductory Note to Commentaries on Work Ideas

On Additional Means of Self-Observation: Commentary I

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Week 2: Our Many Selves

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Two Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

On Additional Means of Self-Observation: Commentary II

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Week 3: Working Today

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Three Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

On Work On Oneself: Commentary III

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Week 4: Singing Our Inner Secret Song

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Four Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary I

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Week 5: External Considering

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Five Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary II

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Week 6: Like and Dislike

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Six Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary III

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Week 7: First Conscious Shock

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Seven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: Commentary V

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Week 8: Making Accounts

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Eight Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: VI

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Week 9: On Being Passive

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Nine Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: VII- On Being Passive

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Week 9: On Being Passive

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice and Movements Exercise

Week Nine Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: VII - On Being Passive

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Week 10: Taking Mental Photographs of Ourselves

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Ten Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: VIII - On Being Passive (2)

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Week 11: Inner Division and Inability to Do

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Eleven Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: IX - On Being Passive (3)

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Week 12: Not Identifying with Ourselves

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Twelve Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: X - On Being Passive (4)

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Week 13: Not Identifying With Our Thoughts

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Thirteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: XII - On Being Passive (5)

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Week 14: Not Identifying With Our Emotional States

Notes from Bob Sabath: Inner Practice Exercises

Week Fourteen Reading from Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries

Internal Considering and External Considering: XII - On Being Passive (6)

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Week 15: Not Identifying with our Mental Associations

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice and Movements Exercise

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises

Notes from Bob Sabath:
Inner Practice Exercises