The Work says that, as we are mechanically, force is drained from us. Yes—continually, by worrying, by anxiety, by getting negative, and, in fact, by every variety of identifying. So the Work teaches at the start: “One must remember oneself.” Why? Because if anyone remembers themselves, it stops this terrible draining of force that takes place through continual identifying—yes—even identifying with having lost a halfpenny, and crawling under beds, lifting carpets, in order to find this halfpenny and worrying about it all day and night. Do you regard this as an exaggeration? I assure you that all of us are just like this.
We make, through this customary identifying and so lack of Self-Remembering—we make, I say, the most trivial and silly things of enormous importance and therefore suffer most patently from this great illness, this disease of sleeping humankind, which the Work diagnoses as Identifying. Mr. Gurdjieff called it the most terrible illness on this planet.
Maurice Nicoll, “Notes on Work on Oneself” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 1222)
For your reflection: Where today did you feel your energy leaking through worry, anxiety, or irritation? What would it have felt like to remember yourself in that moment?
