No Right To Be Negative

After a time, when you can be alone with yourself and at the same time alone with this Work and its meanings, you begin to realize that you have no right to be negative and that you have no excuse for it. You see you have got to find some way out. You may not be able to prevent negative states from starting but you may be able to stop them. This is one meaning of what is called work on oneself. This can be called living more consciously. It can also be called walking instead of lying down flat.

Gurdjieff once said: "In this Work we have good leather to sell for people who wish to walk, but people must make their shoes out of this leather for themselves." Now we can do a thing from the wrong and do the same thing from the right 'I'. To walk, to live more consciously, it is necessary to understand this. Anything done from internal considering or negative states is useless. It does not belong to what we seek to form in ourselves in making this Second Body.

Maurice Nicoll, “A Note on Internal Considering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 2, p. 751)