We do not see the pictures that govern us and interfere with everything. Only being conscious can alter mechanicalness. The destruction of pictures is not possible unless something else has begun to form itself behind them that we can hold on to. This comes from long and conscious self-observation which on one side is debunking oneself or ‘seeing through’ oneself into something rather odd and strange lying behind. I fancy pictures may change a little according to one’s age, but their power remains.
Now people often say, and sometimes emphatically, “Well, granted I have pictures of myself, what ought I to be?” This is certainly a question that shews a wrong approach. If you can begin to see a picture, if you become conscious of it, if you begin to dislike it, if you try to get away from it, to separate from its hypnotic power, if you begin to see you are not at all like that picture but invented, then the change that results will be exactly what you need. You will fit into what has always been waiting for you, and what you went out of long ago as a child.
Maurice Nicoll, “Pictures and Imagination” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol.2 , p. 461)
For your reflection: As you go through this day, can you catch even one familiar self-image at work—and gently step back, sensing that something truer is waiting behind it?
