Real Self-Remembering is to try to remember something that you are not, if you will allow this paradox for the moment to pass without argument. All real Self-Remembering begins with something to do with this Work. For example, it is said that when you remember yourself, you must try to remember your aim. Your aim must always be connected with something that concerns the ideas of this Work. You have only to say we have Real “I” above us to understand that this act, so to speak, of separating from False Personality, deliberately at some moment every day, is designed to make it possible for us to come in contact with the first traces of Real “I” which is already there and which is our real goal.
Whenever we remember ourselves in the mechanical sense by remembering our miseries and suffering, we are like Lot’s wife. Our heads are turned round the wrong way and we look back into the past. Negative Self-Remembering has to be separated from eventually. It is very easy to feel that one is no good, that one understands nothing, that one is not making any progress. It is very easy to yield to these “I”s that say “if only this”, “if only that”. All real Self-Remembering is simply forgetting yourself, your ordinary self, your ordinary negative “I”s, your ordinary forms of internal considering, and all the rest of it, and feeling certain that some further state of yourself exists above all this personal uproar that takes place all day long in each one of you, with which you keep on identifying.
Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Self-Remembering” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 898)
Working Note: For Today’s Inner Effort
Orientation: Turn away from the usual sense of yourself.
What to Notice:
Remembering yourself through past suffering.
“I”s that say you are failing, not progressing.
Inner considering about your state.
Returning again and again to the same personal story.
The pull to identify with these thoughts.
Work Effort for Today:
When negative self-thoughts arise, do not follow them.
Drop the thought and sense yourself here.
Remember your aim without words.
Hold a quiet separation from the usual “I”.
Remember: Forget the ordinary self; something higher may be touched.
