The Work says many things about what you must not do. It says, for example, that you must try to struggle against being identified, try to struggle with mechanicalness, with mechanical and wrong talking, with every kind of internal considering, with every kind of self-justifying, with all the different pictures of yourself, with your special forms of imagination, with mechanical disliking, with all varieties ofyour self-pity and self-esteem, with your jealousy, with your hatreds, with your vanity, your inner falseness, with your lying, with your self- conceit, with your attitudes, prejudices, and so on. And it expressly speaks of struggling with your negative emotions taken as a whole.
Sometimes you meet a person in the Work who is very eager and wishes to know exactly what to do. It is especially people who only have external attention and no internal attention who ask this. As you know, the Work begins with internal attention. Self-observation is internal attention. A person must begin to see for themselves what they are like and what goes on in them— for example, they must begin to see through internal attention their own negative emotions instead of only seeing other people’s with their external attention. You must see what it means to identify with your negative emotions and what it means not to identify with them. Once you see this, you have got a key to the Work on the practical side in your hands.
Maurice Nicoll, “Note on Negative Emotions” in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 1, p. 161)
For your reflection: Today, when irritation, self-pity, or judgment appears, can you catch yourself identifying—and gently step back from it?
