The Road to Real I: Accepting Inner Contradictions

To reach freedom you must first become Number 4 Man or Number 4 Woman. What can this mean ? Well, you must be able to see things with different centers and not only from some narrow, acquired attitude, so that where you saw only one thing formerly and judged it violently from your notions of good and bad, you see many things.

As regards yourself, you no longer see yourself as good and others who do not agree as bad. You no longer see and value yourself, as you once did, but see yourself from many sides and accept your contradictions.

You can see your mechanical reactions as not you and feel yourself as distinct from them—as if they were going on below you. All this brings you closer and closer to your real self, your Real I, which is in the center of your being and contains no opposites and can hear Higher Centers.

Maurice Nicoll, “Number 4 Man in Recurrence" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1247)