It helps you to remember yourself if you realize that your life is a circle and what you do consciously now changes both the past and the future, and what you do mechanically changes nothing. Instead of wishing to find fault, wish to understand. Try reversing the blame really and see the same fault in yourself. Every time you remember something in the Work in regard to what you are identifying with and negative about at the moment is a form of Self- Remembering. It lifts you a little above your life-induced moods which you so easily believe in. Every time you say: “This is not I,” when brooding and negative and grousing, adds a little to awakening.
To remember early in the morning that you are doing this Work and to notice your mood and thought and not identify with them can change the whole day. Try to take the events the day hands out to you as just exactly what you are given to work on. There are hundreds of ways of remembering yourself—that is, of preventing yourself from falling flat in the mud of life. All these different ways of daily Self-Remembering which put us in the presence of the Work set in motion octaves that, when we live mechanically, and asleep in life, do not proceed. New hydrogens—that is, energies—are produced.
Maurice Nicoll, “Self-Remembering and the Work Triad” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 5, p. 1648)
For your reflection: When the day hands you its first difficulty, can you receive it as exactly what you are given to work on rather than something to resist or blame?
