Have you ever thought how much your vanity and pride put you in the opposites? Blessed are the poor in spirit means not to identify with oneself. Maurice Nicoll p325

This Impression will focus on non-identifying as a means of isolating from life.

Maurice Nicoll states that “there are three great Work practices that aid us in isolating from life: Self-remembering, non-identifying, and non-considering (making accounts against others.)” Commentaries, p746

Maurice says it this way: “all esotericism teaches that in order to go up you have to go down, and no one understands what this means.” p480

“Before something higher can find space in me, something else which has up to now taken precedence must go.” Annie Lou Staveley p244

Maurice describes “real, practical, hard work—against negative emotions, by non-identifying with them, not consenting to them, not believing them, separating the feeling of ‘I’ from them.” p1080 “Where you are identified with yourself, there you cannot be passive to yourself.” Commentaries, p285

“If you are full of yourself you are rich in spirit, but if you begin to observe yourself through what the Work teaches about identifying you will become poor in spirit—that is, you will not identify with yourself so much. What will the result be? You will find what for you is bliss. You will find an enormous relief, a strange kind of happiness in no longer having to keep up the idea of yourself with which you were formerly so identified. Now here you have a quite direct practical method of changing your level of Being.” Commentaries, p727

“Is there anything more tedious than to listen to a person who is always justifying himself about something that everyone knows he did wrongly? So we have all these wonderful things, for example, like the Sermon on the Mount, that has to do with the poor in spirit.” Commentaries, p1392

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, amongst other things, it says: 
“Blessed are the poor in spirit” (those who do not identify) 
“Blessed are the meek” (those who are not resentful) 
“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness (not self-righteousness) 
Commentaries, p1645

“What I want you to understand is that there is something being said here about what the Work calls the formation of the Work-triad by means of which Personality is made passive. By means of what the Work opens our eyes to, we see what all these and other statements in the Gospels, which seem so difficult to understand, mean. They are not an end in themselves. They are not about just “being good.” They are instructions about how to make Personality passive enough so that Essence can grow and Real I can enter.” Commentaries, p1646

“The first Beatitude—“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”—means to say that those who are rich in spirit, who are filled with the “spiritual kingdom of man”, have no room for the “kingdom of heaven”. Revelation presupposes emptiness—space put at its disposal—in order to manifest itself.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p79.

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From Logion 27:
If you do not fast from the cosmos,
you will never grasp Reality.

Logion 42
Yeshua says…
Come into being as you pass away.

Logion 54
Yeshua says…
You poor are blessed,
for the realm of heaven is already yours.

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More Impressions exploring the Beatitudes.

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Page numbers for Annie Lou Staveley refer to The Plan is Good, (Two Rivers Press: 2023)

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.