Birdlip, January 9 1943
SELF-OBSERVATION
“ . . .But a man must think very deeply what it says and perceive internally what it means, because it has an outer and an inner meaning. If you say: “I always think of others”, then observe it. It is probably a buffer. You do not notice perhaps that you say things, or you write things, which, if you received you would not tolerate for a moment. This is one very interesting form of self-observation and it includes observing “inner talking”. In yourself everyone is helpless. You can, as it were, drag a person into the cave of yourself and do what you like with her or him. You maybe be polite naturally, but in the Work, which is all about purifying or organising the inner life, it is not enough. It is how you behave internally and invisibly to one another that really counts. This is very difficult to understand you may think you know this already. But to understand –even begin to understand it—takes many years of work. When the inner corresponds with the outer and when the outer obeys the inner, then a man possesses a “second body”. As we are, our outer life does not correspond with the inner life and our outer life controls our inner. The inner grows by seeing the good of something. . . . ”
~ Maurice Nicoll. Psychological Commentaries on the
Teaching of Gurdjieff& Ouspensky Vol.1
Reading and writing is a fine example of how we behave internally to ourselves and one another, reading and writing is such an internal process and probably explains why words have such great power.
