Emotional Perception of the Work

One must get to know about the ideas of the Work and register them. What I am talking about is the next state—i.e. when these ideas must become emotionally perceived through application of them to yourself, first of all to your thinking and then to your Being. When it is said that this Work is to make you think in a new way it means that the ideas of the Work must begin to change your way of thinking, and you cannot expect this to happen until you have registered the ideas by hearing them many times 50 that you will know them in your memory.

The next stage is that you must apply these ideas to yourself through self-observation. Self-observation connects the ideas of the Work to yourself. If you do not practice self-observation the ideas of this Work will remain outside you as mere matters of memory. But all the ideas of this Work are spermatic —that is, they are very potent and can generate in you not only a new way of looking at things but a new way of feeling about things.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on the Application of the Work-Ideas to Oneself" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 3, p. 793)