"Instead of the man he had supposed himself to be he will see quite another man. This 'other' man is himself and at the same time not himself. It is he as other people know him, as he imagines himself and as he appears in his actions, words, and so on; but not altogether such as he actually is. For a man himself knows that there is a great deal that is unreal, invented, and artificial in this other man whom other people know and whom he knows himself. You must learn to divide the real from the invented. And to begin self-observation and self-study it is necessary to divide oneself. A man must realize that he indeed consists of two men.
"One is the man he calls 'I' and whom others call 'Ouspensky,' 'Zakharov' or 'Petrov.' The other is the real he, the real I, which appears in his life only for very short moments and which can become firm and permanent only after a very lengthy period of work.
"So long as a man takes himself as one person he will never move from where he is. His work on himself starts from the moment when he begins to feel two men in himself. One is passive and the most it can do is to register or observe what is happening to it. The other, which calls itself 'I,' is active, and speaks of itself in the first person, is in reality only 'Ouspensky,' 'Petrov' or 'Zakharov.'
"This is the first realization that a man can have. Having begun to think correctly he very soon sees that he is completely in the power of his 'Ouspensky,' 'Petrov,' or 'Zakharov.' No matter what he plans or what he intends to do or say, it is not 'he,' not 'I,' that will carry it out, do or say it, but his 'Ouspensky' 'Petrov,' or 'Zakharov,' and of course they will do or say it, not in the way 'I' would have done or said it, but in their own way with their own shade of meaning, and often this shade of meaning completely changes what 'I' wanted to do.
"From this point of view there is a very definite danger arising from the very first moment of self-observation. It is 'I' who begins self-observation, but it is immediately taken up and continued by 'Ouspensky,' 'Zakharov,' or 'Petrov.' But 'Ouspensky' 'Zakharov,' or 'Petrov' from the very first steps introduces a slight alteration into this self-observation, an alteration which seems to be quite unimportant but which in reality fundamentally alters the whole thing.
"Let us suppose, for example, that a man called Ivanov hears the description of this method of self-observation. He is told that a man must divide himself, 'he' or 'I' on one side and 'Ouspensky,' 'Tetrov,' or 'Zakharov' on the other side. And he divides himself literally as he hears it. 'This is I,' he says, 'and that is "Ouspensky," "Petrov," or "Zakharov."' He will never say 'Ivanov.' He finds that unpleasant, so he will inevitably use somebody else's surname or Christian name. Moreover he calls 'I' what he likes in himself or at any rate what he considers to be strong, while he calls 'Ouspensky,' 'Petrov,' or 'Zakharov' what he does not like or what he considers to be weak. On this basis he begins to reason in many ways about himself, quite wrongly of course from the very beginning, since he has already deceived himself in the most important point and has taken not his real self, that is, he has taken, not Ivanov, but the imaginary 'Ouspensky,' 'Petrov' or 'Zakharov.'
"It is difficult even to imagine how often a man dislikes to use his own name in speaking of himself in the third person. He tries to avoid it in every possible way. He calls himself by another name, as in the instance just mentioned; he devises an artificial name for himself, a name by which nobody ever has or ever will call him, or he calls himself simply 'he,' and so on. In this connection people who are accustomed in their mental conversations to call themselves by their Christian name, or surname or by pet names are no exception. When it comes to self-observation they prefer to call themselves 'Ouspensky' or to say 'Ouspensky in me,' as though there could be an 'Ouspensky' in them. There is quite enough of 'Ouspensky' for Ouspensky himself.
"But when a man understands his helplessness in the face of 'Ouspensky' his attitude towards himself and towards 'Ouspensky' in him ceases to be either indifferent or unconcerned.
"Self-observation becomes observation of 'Ouspensky.' A man understands that he is not 'Ouspensky,' that 'Ouspensky' is nothing but the mask he wears, the part that he unconsciously plays and which unfortunately he cannot stop playing, a part which rules him and makes him do and say thousands of stupid things, thousands of things which he would never do or say himself.
"If he is sincere with himself he feels that he is in the power of 'Ouspensky' and at the same time he feels that he is not 'Ouspensky.'
There's something about narrating your actions, feelings, hesitations, impulses, etc. that really snaps you out of the immediate identification of just 'going with the flow'. It's easy enough to look back at yourself with a critical mind - even that often isn't pretty - but there's something about doing it in realtime that puts things in particularly stark relief. You're essentially placing yourself within a story, and you quickly realize how mediocre the story is, and what a non-entity the main character is - you - and how far away your actions are from what you would LIKE them to be, or what illusions you have about yourself. But the good thing is that we all have some understanding of what a good story is and what a good protagonist can be, otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell that we're in a bad story with a mediocre protagonist. And through practice we can come to do some things that we can actually feel good about narrating.
