Psychological Commen taries

on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

Maurice Nicoll

Volume 4

Io1W E IS E R Boo K S

l!J Boston, MA/York Beach, ME

This edition published in 1996 by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

p. O. Box 612

York Beach, ME 03910-0612

07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Copyright © 1980 Isobel Salole

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red WheellWeiser. Reviewers may quote brief passages. First published in hardcover in 1952 by Vincent Stuart, Ltd., London. Reissued in 1975 by Watkins, Lrd., London. First paper edition published in 1984 by Shambhala Publications, Boston.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nicoll, Maurice, 1884-1953.

[Psychological commentaries on the teaching ofG. I. Gurdjieff and P. D.

Ouspensky)

Psychological commentaries on the teaching of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky I Maurice Nicoll.

p. cm.

Vols. 1-5 originally published: Psychological commentaries on the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. London: Robinson & Watkins, 1952. Vol. 6 originally published: Index to the Psychologial commentaries on the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky by Maurice Nicoll. Washington, D. C. : GurdjieffSociery of Washington D. C., 1987.

1. Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch, 1872-1949. 2. Uspenskil, P. D. (Petr DemIanovich), 1878-1947,3. Fourth Way (Occultism)

I. Index to the Psychological commentaries on the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky by Maurice Nicoll. II. Title.

BP605.G9N531996

197--dc20 96-16548

Volume 4: ISBN 0-87728-902-6

6 Volume Set: ISBN 0-87728-910-7 MV

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992(RI997).

23.10.48 30•10.48

6.11.48 14.11.48 20.11.48 27.11.48

4.12.48 11.12.48

18.12.48 25.12.48 31.12.48

CONTENTS

Great Amwell House, 1948

Negative Emotions and the Illusion of Unity Negative and Positive Emotions Commentary on Suffering ...

Different Qualities of Consciousness

Number 4 Man in Recurrence

Commentary on Self-Remembering

Further Note on Self-Remembering

Internal and External Attention and Placing of

Consciousness

What is this Work about? Note at Christmas-time 1948

Life as Events and our Mechanical Reactions by Identify-ing with them ...

PAGE 1235 1236 1239 1242

1245 1248 1249

1251 1253 1255

Great Amwell House, 1949
8. 1.49 The Work-teaching about Man as a Self-developing
Organism 1259
15· 1.49 A Note on False Personality 1261
22. 1.49 Commentary on Attitudes ... 1263
29· 1·49 Commentary on Real I 1266
5· 2·49 Another Note on Understanding 1268
8. 2.49 The Ray of Creation 1270
12. 2·49 Further Commentary on Different 'I's in Oneself 1272
19· 2·49 Commentary on Scale 1275
5· 3·49 Commentary on the Influences Under Which we
can Live ... 1277
19· 3·49 What it means to Work on Oneself 1279
26. 3.49 Self-Remembering and Self-Observation 1282
2·4·49 A Note on Interest and Time 1284
9· 4·49 Commentary on Negative Emotions 1287
23· 4·49 Law of Accident and Law of Fate ... 1290
30. 4·49 Transformation of Being 1292
14· 5.49 On Making Force in the Work for Yourself 1294
21. 5.49 Level of Being 1297
28. 5.49 The Work-conception of Man as a Self-developing
Organism 1299
2. 6,49 On Changing one's Level of Being ... 1302
11. 6.49 Further Note on Effort 1304
18. 6.49 The External World and the Internal World 1307
25· 6.49 Some Notes on Practical Work 1309 2. 7.49

9· 7·49 16. 7.49

23· 7·49 30. 7·49 17· 9.49 24· 9·49

1.10·49 8.10·49 15.10.49 22.10·49 29.10.49

5.11.49 12.11.49 19.11.49

3.12.49 10.12·49 18.12·49 24.12.49 31. 12·49

PAGE

This Work is about Change of Yourself-not Change

of your Life

Two Ways of Meeting Events Self-Observation

Balanced Man

Relationship with the Internal World Work on False Personality ...

On Devaluation in the Work Observation of Certain 'I's ...

On Observing Internal Considering

Further Note on Observing Internal Considering Self- Remembering

Further Ideas about Self-Remembering Pictures of Oneself ...

The Work-Idea of Sin

Practical Application of the Work-Ideas to your

Life now

On Seeing People Less Personally Work on Mechanical Associations On Practical Work ...

On Goodwill

Self-Awareness and Self-Observation

1311 1314 1316 1319 1321 1323 1325 1326 1328 1331 1333 1335 1338 1340

1342 1344 1345 1347 1349 1351

Great Amwell House, 1950
7· 1.50 The Idea of Violence in the Work ... 1354
14· 1.50 On Applying the Work to Oneself ... 1356
21. 1.50 Three Forces ... 1358
28. 1.50 On Changing your Feeling of I 1360
4· 2.50 A, E, and C Influences 1363
II. 2.50 The Infection of Negative Emotions 1365
18. 2.50 Observation of one's Phantasies 1367
25· 2.50 Chief Feature 1370
4· 3.50 On Thinking for Oneself 1373
II. 3.50 Psycho- Transformism 1375
17· 3.50 Reversal 1378
25· 3.50 The Second Education 1380
I. 4.50 The Selection of Thoughts 1382
8. 4.50 On the Formation of a Psychological Body 1384
15· 4.50 The Ray of Creation 1386
22. 4.50 On Willing what you Have to Do .. ' 1389
29· 4.50 What we have to Observe in Ourselves 1391
6. 5.50 Entropy 1393
20. 5.50 Note on Self-Observation 1395 27· 5·50 3. 6.50 17. 6.50

24. 6.50 I. 7.50

8. 7.50

15· 7·50 22. 7.50 29· 7.50

5.8.50 12. 8.50 28. 8.50 2. 9.50

9· 9.50 23· 9·50

4.11.5° 11.11.5° 18.11.50 25.11.5°

2.12·5° 9.12.5° 16.12·5° 25.12.5° 3°·12·5°

6. 1.51
27· 1.51
3· 2.51
9· 2.51
17· 2.51
24· 2.51
3· 3.51
10. 3.51
17· 3.51 Comments on a Review of "In Search of the Miraculous" ...

On Trying to See without Negative Associations On "Knowing" and Observing how we Behave Mechanically

Knowledge and Being

The Middle Compartment in the Three-storey Factory ...

The Difference between Mechanical and Conscious

Effort

The Idea of Balanced Man in the Work ... The Position of Man in the Ray of Creation Positive Emotions

A New Way of Thinking Certain Sayings of the Work On Taking in Impressions ...

A, Band C Influences that Act on Man on this

Planet ...

The Hypnotism of Life

On Making Personality Passive On the Idea of Happiness ... Judgment in the Work

On the Selection of Thoughts

The Work-Idea of Mechanicalness Work on Being

Further Note on Work on Being

The Importance of Memory in the Work ... Contact with Higher Centres

The Sphere of Being

Great Amwell House, 1951

PAGE

1397 1399

1406 1408 1410 1412 1414 1416 1418

1420 1422 1424 1426 1429 1430 1431 1434 1435 1436 1438 1440

Different 'I's in Being 1442

Work on Identifying 1444

Further Work on Identifying 1445

(Absence of Resentment and the Practice of Considerateness)

The Necessity of living the Work ... 1447

(Work on wrong imagination)

The Body as the Ultimate Degree of Oneself... 1449 Further Note on the Body as the Ultimate Degree

of Ourselves 1450

Where are you Internally? ... 1453

Y oure Place in your Psychological World ... 1455

Good Householder .. , 1456

31. 3.51

7· 4.51 13· 4.51 21. 4.51 28. 4.51

5· 5.51

12. 5.51

19· 5.51 26. 5.51

2. 6.51 16. 6,51 14. 8.51 18. 8,51 25. 8.51

I. 9.51 8. 9.51 IS· 9.51 21. 9.51 29· 9.51

6.10.51 13.10.51

The Beginning of Separation from the Feeling of I

in the Body

Note on Second Force A Note on Buffers

The Necessity of Having a Point in the Work The Arrangement of Truth in the Mind '" Essence and Personality

Note on the state of Emotional Centre when we are asleep in the Work-sense

The necessity of Forming an Intermediary between Higher and Lower Centres

Beauty and the Puer Aeternus

The Difference between Internal and External

Considering Self- Remembering

Note on Horse, Carriage and Driver Note on More Interior Thinking (part I)

Note on More Interior Thinking (parts 2 and 3) On Testing the Work in Oneself .. ,

On Making a Retort

Friction between Old and New in Oneself Internal and External Denial

Notes on Will, Being and Structure Will and Delight

Emotions that Shut ... Remembering and Willing the Work

PAGE

1459 1462 1465 1466 1469 1471

1473

1475 1477

1479 1481 1482 1483 1484 1486 1489 1490 1492 1494 1496 1498 1501

Amwell, 23.10.48 NEGATIVE EMOTIONS AND THE ILLUSION OF UNITY

WORK-IDEA

Man is not one but many. Man is not a unity but a multiplicity.

COMMENTARY

There are very many clever, self-harming 'I's in everyone, which work on the margin of consciousness, so that one does not see what they are doing. For example, many of these clever, self-harming 'I's use their arts to stimulate people to make inner accounts continually -they act in a very silent, subtle way, and if a person is not increasing the area of consciousness by observing himself, he will be unaware that after a time he is filled up with plenty of materials for some explosion. He must understand that an explosion of negative emotions is the result of making, half-consciously, inner accounts over some time. It is not the apparent immediate irritation that causes them. That merely fires off the accumulation of them. One can see that allowing oneself to be charged like an accumulator with material for inner accounts must lead to their discharge, either outwardly, in scenes, such as shouts, tears, or slamming doors, or in cold venom, or any of the various exhibitions that negative states give rise to at the present level of humanity, which is part of our self-study. Are we not very curious objects to study? If one can retain sufficient consciousness not to identify wholly with a negative state, is it not really extraordinary to notice all that goes on in oneself and what a deadly fascination it has, even though one can see it is an ugly and lying set of 'I's that are at work? And is it not extraordinary also that you may clearly see that the object of the negative state and the 'I's producing it is to destroy your happiness, to make you miserable and ill-and yet you feel it drawing you into its power? Yes-this power of negative states is indeed a mystery. It is one of the things that shews us how ignorant we are of what lies in us. The attraction of what you know will make you miserable and unhappy cannot be explained easily. It certainly cannot be explained at all if you take yourself as one, as a unity. That is one of the major illusions that prevent us from awakening. It is so obvious-and yet we find it so difficult to realize as a practical fact-as a continual inner experience. I have often wondered about the obviousness of the ways in which we are hypnotized. It is almost as if the two Magicians concerned in keeping us asleep on this earth to serve nature did not bother to conceal the mechanism of tricks, having realized what suggestible imbeciles and fools we are and how instantly we fall under the spell of anything they say, even if we have seen how the trick is done. Just say to someone: "How wonderful you are." Ah-well-in a way, etc. But how pleased we are.

I~35

Now because we take ourselves as one, we ascribe our negative emotions to ourselves and everything else. If you take yourself as one you will attribute everything that goes on in you to yourself-every thought, idea, mood, memory, feeling, depression, sensation, and so on-in short, all your psychic life. You Will attribute your evil thoughts to yourself and you will attribute your good thoughts to yourself. In consequence, you will be identified with everything that goes on in yourself. This is a deeply wrong idea to have of oneself. It is a life-idea of oneself. Actually, it is a terrible idea, that causes endless unnecessary and useless suffering. Let us pursue some of the consequences of this illusion of unity further-we are speaking of a man in life who ascribes everything to himself and who is assured that he is one-a single person, a unity, a Real I, and that all he says, all he vows, all he promises, is true and will be kept firmly. This is a curious idea, once one begins to observe oneself and make a new memory of all one has vowed, promised, etc. In order to grow, a man must first divide himself into two parts-an observing and an observed side. Of course, he cannot do this. Why? Because he is convinced he is in charge of his life and everything he thinks, does, and feels. Why cannot he give up this idea and get another sense of himself, another idea of himself? Because he cannot get over this illusion that he is one, in consequence of which he attributes, ascribes, everything to himself.

Now let us see what this means and why this Work teaches you something that nothing else does. You have a negative emotion and ascribe it to yourself in your conceit of being one. In that case you say 'I' to it-and you cannot shift'!'. You say "I am negative." That is, you have not divided yourself into two-into an observing side and an observed side. But, if you have, you say: "I observe a negative emotion in me." You do not say'!' to it. If you say'!' to it you cannot resist its power.

Amwell,30•IO·48

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE EMOTIONS

WORK-IDEA

In order to get in touch with Higher Centres it is necessary to destroy all negative emotions. Negative emotions shut the door, as it were, to these Higher Centres.

COMMENTARY

If we knew what we lost by continually enjoying negative emotions we should be horrified. And indeed, we indulge so frequently in negative emotions, obvious or less obvious, cruder or subtler, open or

1236

concealed, that when the Work teaches us that we must destroy them, it is almost comparable to saying that we must kill our Emotional Centre as it is. But as this is impossible we are told that we must purify the emotions. Understand that purification of the emotions in the Work-sense entails the observation of and separation from negative emotions. It is part of the necessary daily work on oneself-that is, the first line of work. It is not something you do for a day or so (and then imagine you know all about that) but something you have to do all your life-at least until right crystallization can occur. As we are, if there were a sudden, powerful influx of the intense high-voltage forces from Higher Centres, the result would be a crystallization of our state of being just as it is now. This would be a hopeless situation. Imagine yourself, as you are, fixed like a photographic film or plate when put in the hypo-fixing bath. Nothing could be changed. The interplay between Higher Centres and their transforming forces and our present state is therefore very wonderfully and mercifully adjusted. A man is not allowed to perceive inwardly and understand more than he can bear usefully. He is, as it were, gradually led to see, after a time, a little more about his state, his level of being, and why he should not behave or talk as he does in his mechanical state. If he could be transformed into a new being by the high-voltages of Higher Centres, then the whole plot and plan of creating Man as a self-developing organism would be rendered null-nihil-nothing. Here comes in the source of much negative thinking-namely, why, if there is a God or a Conscious Circle of Humanity, are we not helped straightway? Come, let us be patient with our tiny minds that get everything wrong. The reason why we cannot be changed into marvellous beings is that we have to earn it. Here is a person full of negative emotions. He complains about everything and turns every event into a source of being negative. He argues:

"If there is a God, why does he not make everything lovely and satisfactory to me?" What is the answer? This person has got to work on himself. Why? Because he was created a self-developing organism and the events oflife were given to him to develop himself. If God or anyone else transformed him into a Conscious Man, a dazzling being, the whole meaning of life on this planet would have to be altered. In fact, the whole of the Ray of Creation and all its increasing laws would have to be annihilated.

Now understand we are born as self-developing organisms as an experiment from the laboratory of the Sun. The Work says that if this recent experiment is a failure, Man will be swept away, made very small, like ants or bees, and another experiment in a self-developing organism made on Earth. In this connection-this deep source of negative emotion-there is the usual remark: "If there is a God, why does he let things happen like war, etc.?" What is the Work-answer? The Work-answer is that Man's level of being attracts his life. Wars, cruelty, horrors, occur because Man is at the level of being that attracts such things.

1237

Now listen carefully. It is Man and his level of being that is the cause of all such things and as long as Man does not try to awaken and develop himself, such things will continue inevitab?J. I mean, Man will attract them. We are made as self-developing organisms-that is, we can work on ourselves and we can change our being-individual?J. If we all changed, wars would cease. Study your being. You will find that it is governed by negative emotions in the long run. As long as that is the case, you cannot receive help from a higher level-that is, from Higher Centres. If we are created as self-developing organisms and make no attempt to use this freedom, why blame "God" for not interfering? How could you be a self-developing organism if all the time you were interfered with? Do you see, therefore, that in the purification of the Emotional Centre, which is necessary for contact with Higher Centres-which represent in us the Conscious Circle of Humanity and seek continually to help us, if we could only listen-we must get a right form of thinking, a right mental idea, and so a right attitude as to why things are as they are on this Earth. Gurdjieff, when once asked if wars could be stopped, said: "Yes. But Man must change himself so that certain vibrations do not make him violent. Wars are not caused by Man. The sources are extra-terrestrial-such as two planets crossing each other and causing a tension, a certain vibration. Mechanical mankind translates this vibration into violent emotions and so war results. If Man became more conscious, he might, instead, receive energy in the form of increased consciousness from these vibrations."

Now, to return briefly to the title of this note-namely, "Negative and Positive Emotions". All positive emotions come from Higher Centres-and that is why we have to work on negative emotions. Their quality is such that they have no opposites in them. That is, they are Third Force, or, as the Gospels say, "Holy Spirit". They are "Yes and No"-not "Yes or No". No one can create, call forth, make, a positive emotion. So Mr. Ouspensky said: "Positive emotions come as rewards." That is, if you have privately, solitarily, and in the loneliness not of your negative self but your own spirit, decided, made a decision, to work on you yourself as regards some source of negative emotion-if you, all alone, in this solitary place in yourself, full of the integrity of your most Real I, have decided, made a decision, not to identify or feed a particular negative emotion-if, in short, you have shut the door and entered into yourself (as it is said in Matthew: "enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret") then, "your Father, which seeth in secret, will reward you" (Matt. vi.6). What is the reward? You will taste positive emotion for a brief moment-something blessed-that is, filled with such bliss that nothing of human love-hate emotions can be compared with it. What we regard as positive emotions, feeling fine, feeling fit, and on top of the world, self-admiration, etc., can turn in a moment into negative emotion. Such emotions, such pleasant emotions,

1238

are not positive emotions; these never change into their opposites but visit us and then withdraw.

But unless we work-really value this work on negative states, struggle not to believe them, clear the Augaean Stables of the dung of negative states, erect the God in ourselves, the individual spirit, to fight as Hercules, who cleaned the Stables with the River of Truth, then indeed we are cut off from all inner help and all the deep background that Higher Centres can begin to give, once we build up and make the intermediary receptive instrument. False Personality will prevent this. All humanity could be helped-if they made this receptive intermediary apparatus in their minds and hearts. Yes-but this would, amongst other things, make False Personality and all its spurious values so passive, so weak, that its influence would be negligible. Let me remind you that when my wife and I went to Gurdjieff's Institute in France we were told: "Personality here has scarcely any right to exist." Well, reflect on all this for yourselves.

Amwell, 6.11.48

COMMENTARY ON SUFFERING

WORK-IDEAS

Gurdjieff said:

(I) "This Work is Esoteric Christianity."

(2) "People imagine they have something to sacrifice. There is only one thing they have to sacrifice and that is their suffering."

(3) "A man in this Work must eventually begin to know what Conscious Suffering is compared with Mechanical Suffering."

COMMENTARY

Everyone suffers. Cheerful people assure you they never suffer.

They are always bright, healthy, and so on. Yet they suffer, in spite of this rather tiresome picture of themselves. Everyone suffers mechanically. What is mechanical suffering? It is something quite different from conscious suffering. It is something so intricate, so devious, so apparently contradictory, so various, so subtle, so historically longstanding-in short, a habit-that we do not observe it. We do not see its continual, inner, private, petrifying action, like that steady drip of calcium-charged water that builds up those strange pillars in deep caves between floor and roof. The Work teaches that we all, inevitably, have mechanical suffering and that this is the only thing we have to offer as sacrifice. In order to change, one must sacrifice something. Understand clearly and ask yourself-ifit ever does occur to you to askyourseif a question, which means that you will have actually to think for your-

Hl3g

self of the answer-I say, ask yourself this question: "Can I possibly imagine that I can change if I do not give up, sacrifice, something?" This means simply that you cannot change if you wish to continue to be the same person. To change is to become different. If I want to go to London, I must give up being at Amwell.

Now notice carefully what we have to give up. The sacrifice the Work seeks is that of our habitual, mechanical suffering. Of course, people will at this point justify themselves and say they have no such suffering, or that what suffering they have is logical and reasonable. Oh, this self-justifying that you all go in for. But notice especially where this teaching, which belongs to the Fourth Way, begins in regard to what you have to give up. Not with your sins in any ordinary sense, but with what the Work regards as a great, even perhaps the greatest sin-namely, being identified with "Mechanical Suffering". A man, a woman, the Work teaches, must sacrifice their suffering. Mechanical suffering leads nowhere. A man, a woman, cannot awaken if they retain this dreadful weight, their mechanical suffering, and nourish it, by a continual process of justifying it. In the Work-sense there is no justice on this planet where everything happens in the only way it can happen. How can there be justice in a world of sleeping people-of people who are not yet conscious-of people who are governed by their negative emotions and finally by hate? Now how, when you begin to see your own mechanicalness in your behaviour, can you blame others who were equally so? Were not those who you think caused your suffering mechanical people? Remember that in such a case you can only forgive, which in the Gospels means, dazzlingly, "cancel" the debt. Yes, but this is possible according to your level of being. A low level of being forgives no one. It only sees its own merit. That surely is a key to how to reach a higher level of being. When, through selfobservation and work on yourself, you see more and more clearly that you are as bad as anyone else, then you ascend the Ladder of Being which ends in Divine Being-which forgives all-a thing we cannot remotely understand as we are at present with our store of negative emotion. Why? Because we are all low down in this total Scale of Being, which means we include very little in our consciousness of what we are like ourselves, projecting on to others all we cannot accept as being in ourselves, so we are very brittle to insult. But as Consciousness increases we include more and more as being in ourselves, with an increasing lack of conceit, until we cannot be insulted. Nor, then, do we judge. How can I, if I realize I am worse than you, judge you? At present, of course, we pretend we do not judge-a quite different matter, a matter of being full of meritorious virtues and so of swelling up the False Personality which imitates every virtue inartistically and so causes much weariness and boredom to others, like a bad play. How many bad plays walk the streets of London, male and female. I fancy I am saying something similar to a remark made by Mr. Ouspensky when he was first teaching. He called attention to the fact that

1240

most people whom we meet in the street, in the club, at tea, at dinner, are dead, and died often years ago. Now a man, a woman, with Magnetic Centre, who seeks to find something more than life does not so easily die. But life alone makes us dead very soon. We die lifemillionaires, working day and night for fifty years, say-yes, but we died perhaps years ago. This is a matter we all have to reflect on. The Work does not invite us until we reach a certain life-value called "Good Householder". This is the first education-the formation of a good educated life-personality. But there is a second education and always has been. This is for those who do not believe that life can be explained in terms of itself. It is for those Good Householders, those educated and responsible people, who do not really believe in life and yet carry on their duties. And those Good Householders who believe still further that there is and must be something else and seek for itthat is, those Good Householders, whose being is characterized by the possession of Magnetic Centre-will understand how this Work offers the second education for men and women who have fulfilled the conditions necessary for attaining the level of Good Householder.

*

*

*

Let us come now to the idea of conscious suffering as distinct from mechanical suffering. Gurdjieff said: "This Work is Esoteric Christianity." He meant that this Work lies hidden in the New Testament. Let us take an example. The Work teaches that mechanical suffering is useless-it leads to nothing-but that conscious suffering leads to inner development. Can we find aIiy parallels in the New Testament? I would say that in the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, we find ample-in fact, copious verification. But let us take a clear example from Paul. He has written a letter to his group at Corinth cursing them for not working on themselves. He explains that to feel one has not been working-that is, that one has been fast asleep in life and its vexatious daily troubles and therefore identified with the events entering from outside via the senses-this is to suffer in another way. He calls this "godly suffering". I will quote the passage:

"For though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not regret it, though I did regret; for I see that that epistle made you sorry, though but for a season. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry but that ye were made sorry after a godly sort, that ye might suffer loss by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance unto salvation, a repentance which bringeth no regret: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. For behold, this self-same thing, that ye were made sorry after a godly sort, what earnest care it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves ... " (II Cor. vii.Bvr r)

Now this rather outworn terminology masks the real meaning.

What Paul is saying is that to suffer because you have behaved mechanically can

1241

lead to something. And so he says that the suffering of the world leads to death-that is, mechanical suffering. From this brief example one can see what Gurdjieff meant in saying that this Work is Esoteric Christianity. Esoteric means simply inner-not obvious. People easily read the New Testament without seeing what is meant. The Work, once you begin to understand what it is saying, opens your mind to innumerable things said in the New Testament. Now reflect on this remark: "The sorrow of the world worketh death." Do you see that in these words is the same idea as "mechanical suffering is useless for self-development and puts us to sleep-that is, death? A man, a woman, must sacrifice their mechanical suffering". What then replaces it? What replaces it is suffering because you are suffering. That is, you must replace the luxury of mechanical suffering by suffering because you still love mechanical suffering.

In one of the Gnostic Books-the Acts of John-which are not included in the ordinary New Testament, there is a passage which runs in this way. It is connected with the Sacred Dance that Christ performed with his disciples:

"If thou hadst known how to suffer, thou wouldest have been able not to suffer. Learn thou to suffer, and thou shalt be able not to suffer."

Amwell, 14. I I .48

NOTES ON DIFFERENT Q.UALITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

WORK-IDEA

The Work teaches that we.have four states of consciousness, two of which we know and two of which we do not know.

COMMENTARY

The person who thinks only of himself or herself is most asleep in the Work. When we are identified with the False Personality we are most asleep. To be awake is to have no False Personality. Even those of you who have had moments, however brief, of being relatively free from False Personality know already that there is a definite new state of oneself possible in this respect. We have to declare to ourselves each definite experience and privately register its validity--otherwise the Work has no structure within us. You will make the Work a very weak boneless thing in yourself if you do not realize and stand for a single part of what it teaches through your own practical experience and hold on to its veracity. You will be what Gurdjieff called a weak person. Now a man can be given the state of being free from False

1242

Personality in times of stress, war, illness. Then he knows or should know there is another state of himself available. He has seen it for himself. By knowing this, by affirming it to himself deeply, he verifies the Work. So he makes the Work real to himself and so it becomes real in him-that is, helps him, transmits force to him. It begins to calm him, widen him, a very important early result. But if a man is always arguing to himself about words used in the Work, or, worse still, never really thinks about it, how can it connect with him? As Gurdjieff said: "Do not listen to the words-try to hear internally the meaning."

One reason why we do not establish the Work in ourselves is because we only think of ourselves-yes, all the time. This is Internal Considering. False Personality is only concerned with itself and is always fascinated with how it is treated. We are most asleep when identified with it. You can see why. All emotions turn into False Personality. Now to think of the Work means stepping out of False Personality. But the False Personality hates the Work, because the Work will eventually destroy it. Every act of Self-Remembering weakens the False Personality. At the third level of consciousness False Personality cannot breathe-cannot exist. It lives in the second level of consciousness-the so-called Waking State.

So we are told that at our level of consciousness we cannot change.

We are driven by life-by flattery, by lovely false smiles, by paint and polish, by inventing ourselves and all the rest. It is excessively tedious to enumerate once more all that belongs to False Personality and its endless manifestations. Even the quietest little lady, living with her dog, is just as full of False Personality as is a magnificent example of a man always well-dressed, whose portrait is in every paper. Yes-but what are you behind all your spit and polish? It is this deeper level to which the Work directs attention.

Now in the so-called Waking State, in which we live-that is, in this second state of consciousness-all sorts of lies pass as truths. Yet we were born with the capacity to live in the third state of consciousness, where lies are impossible-becoming so obvious-and no one can deceive another. So, in this short note, let us hear again what Gurdjieff said about those states of consciousness possible to Man, understanding clearly that a higher level of consciousness is characterized by the fact that one is conscious of more, so that one is more awake and so not so easily deceived. To be more conscious, to be more awake, means that you have more light, and so perceive more, mentally and emotionally. Notice in what follows that Gurdjieff said we were born with the right to live in the third state of consciousness. Man can know four states of consciousness. The first is called Sleep with Dreams, the second the so-called Waking State, the third the State of Self-Remembering, and the fourth Objective Consciousness. It is only the two higher states that can communicate with the two Higher Centres from which come Positive Emotions.

Let us now quote Gurdjieff's words about the states of consciousness:

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"The two higher states of consciousness are inaccessible to Man, and although he may have flashes of these states, he is unable to understand them from the point of view of those states in which it is usual for him to be. The two usual, that is, the lowest states of consciousness, are first, sleep, that is a passive state in which Man spends a third, and very often half his life, and then the state in which men spend the other part of their lives, in which they walk the streets, write books, talk on large subjects, take part in politics, kill one another, which they regard as active, and call' clear consciousness' or the 'waking state of consciousness' .

"The third state of consciousness is 'Self-Remembering' or SelfConsciousness, or Self-Awareness. It is usual to consider that we have this state of consciousness, or that we can have it if we want it. Our science and philosophy have overlooked the fact that we do not possess this state of consciousness and that we cannot create it in ourselves by desire or decision alone.

"The fourth state of consciousness is called the Objective State of Consciousness. In this state a man can see things as they are. Flashes of this state of consciousness also occur in Man. In the religions of all nations, there are indications of the possibility of a state of consciousness of this kind which is called 'Enlightenment' and various other names, but which cannot be described in words. But the only Right Way to Objective Consciousness is through the development of Self-Consciousness.

"If an ordinary man is artificially brought into a state of Objective Consciousness and afterwards brought back to his normal state, he will remember nothing, and he will think that for a time he had lost consciousness. But in the state of self-consciousness a man can have flashes of Objective Consciousness and remember them. The Fourth State of Consciousness in Man means an altogether different state of being, and it is the result of inner growth and of long and difficult work on oneself.

"But the Third State of Consciousness constitutes the natural right of Man as he is, and if a man does not possess it, it is only because of the wrong conditions of his life. At present this Third State occurs in Man only in the form of very rare flashes and it can be made more or less permanent in him only by means of special training.

"For most people, even for the educated and thinking people, the chief obstacle in the way of acquiring 'self-consciousness' consists in the fact that they think that they possess it-that they can 'do', have 'will', and a permanent and unchangeable 'I'. It is evident that a man will not be interested if you tell him that he can acquire by long and difficult work something that in his opinion he already has. On the contrary he will think either that you are mad or that you want to deceive him with a view to personal gain.

"The two higher states of consciousness are connected with the functioning of the two 'Higher Centres' in Man."

(cf. In Search of the Miraculous. P. D. Ouspensky [Routledge, Kegan Paul Ltd.], pp. 141-142.)

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Amwell, 20.I I.48

NUMBER 4 MAN IN RECURRENCE

WORK-IDEA

(I) A man must be a Number 4 Man before he can become a Conscious Man.

(2) Everything repeats: everything recurs.

COMMENTARY

A Number 4 Man in the Work is called a Balanced Man. Life does not produce him. It is only through work on himself that he can reach the state of Number 4 Man. Ifhe dies as Number 4 Man, in recurrence, he will have to do it all over again-but, as Mr. Ouspensky taught, it will be easier for him and it will all begin earlier, so that he will have more time.

We are taught that there are seven categories of Man. Number I, Number 2 and Number 3 are mechanical. Each is characterized by having its centre of gravity only in one of the three centres-that is, Number 1 Man's psychology is that belonging to Instinctive-Moving Centre, Number 2 Man's psychology belongs to Emotional Centre, and Number 3 Man's psychology to Intellectual Centre. These three sorts of people form the Circle of Mechanical Humanity. They are all incomplete. They can never understand each other. To reach his full possible conscious development, <l man must first "balance his centres" -that is, become Balanced Man. He must be able to employ all his centres, not only one. This is a very important-no, a tremendousidea. Here, for example, is a man who is always counting, adding up, or recording, and making everything as exact as possible. He gains his sense of himself from his careful exactness. He is not much interested in nature or art or reading or, in fact, anything else. We have, therefore, a picture of a man who is one-sided, whose real life is confined to the activities of a small part of his centres. Psychologically his problem is to inhabit other centres=-other rooms-in the big threestorey building that is himself. Understand that it is not that one centre is lower or worse than another. All are necessary-top, middle and lower storey. Each contains marvellous machines, marvellous radios. Now a one-sided man can become easily ill psychologically because he is so unbalanced in the Work-sense. He wears himself out by living in' so small a part. To ordinary understanding a man who always says and does the same thing is regarded as steady and reliable, and so a Balanced Man. But in a situation foreign to him, he will find himself distressed and incapable. Or he cannot think about ideas to which he is not accustomed. In short, underneath his facade, he is rather helpless, once life changes a little. As long as life remains much the same, he appears reliable and balanced. Yes, life balances him, as it does most

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of us. Life gives us a mechanical balance. But this does not mean we have any real conscious balance in ourselves. If we could use all centres in the three-storey house equally and used each one for the right situation, then we would become flexible to life. It is in this flexibility that the idea of balance lies and so of Number 4 Man. Regard a man crossing a tight-rope. Is he rigid, always the same? On the contrary, he is continually altering his position and indeed this ordinarily is called balancing. So Balanced Man, in the Work-sense, or Number 4 Man, if you were to meet him, might seem strange and contradictory to your view of a balanced man as a rigid man always the same, who always behaves in the same way and always repeats the same things, and so, from your way of thinking, is a reliable man. Do you see what is meant? Do you see how the Work uses its words in a special manner, which does not correspond with their ordinary usage?

Our Aim is to Become Number 4 Man

Now, in making a Work-aim, try to observe what functions need development in you. You cannot approach balance if centres are undeveloped. Undeveloped centres, undeveloped parts of centres, like uninhabited rooms in yourself are, so to speak, blank spaces in you. What functions do you notice that you lack? Can you express your thoughts? Can you formulate, for instance? Are you very ignorant? Well, try to do something about it. It is not what you can do, ordinarily speaking, but what you cannot do that requires to be developed. Can you use your hands? Well, if not, you must learn to do so. Do you understand anything about art? Well, begin to try. Have you read anything? Well, start. There is no manifestation in culture that is not the expression of the activity of one centre or another. To think one can develop and grow in understanding without knowing something of what can be known-is not this rather a silly idea-this expecting something for nothing? Suppose everyone were annihilated save you? Could you hand much on to another new creation of mankind? Could you descend as a teacher among them? Mr. Ouspensky once said to me: "In the Fourth Way you must know something of everything known."

An unused function, which signifies an unused part of a centre, remains outside one's consciousness. Since the Work aims at increasing consciousness, a narrow, small, one-sided man or woman, living, so to speak, in one small room of their large three-storey being, will not be able to develop. They will live and die undeveloped, even if they have made a million by small transactions. And since they have changed nothing in themselves, their lives will recur as before. Not only so, but each recurrence may be on a worse level.

At what Level does a Man cease to Recur?

To escape recurrence, a man must reach the level of Number 5 Man-that is, the outer circle of the Conscious Circle of Humanity.

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The Conscious Circle of Humanity is composed of Number 5, Number 6 and Number 7 Man, who need not recur. But to reach this freedom a man must first become Number 4 Man. What can this mean? Well, he must be able to see things with different centres and not only from some narrow, acquired attitude, so that where he saw only one thing formerly and judged it violently from his notions of good and bad, he sees many things. As regards himself, he no longer sees himself as good and others who do not agree as bad. He no longer sees and values himself, as he once did, but sees himself from many sides and accepts his contradictions. He no longer takes his being for granted but has become conscious of so many things in his being which were in darkness to him before and which he blamed others for, that he no longer judges from one harsh intractable angle nor is he continually putting people, even those he loves, in prison. Everything broadens and becomes much wider, clearer, and so less and less violent in him. Harmony, balance, begins to replace the tensions of the opposites that existed before. Life then becomes his teacher because the conscious assimilation of impressions on the broader consciousness has replaced the mechanical reactions to them that formerly governed him. He is objective to himself. He can see his mechanical reactions as not him and feel himself as distinct from them-as if they were going on below him. All this brings him closer and closer to his real self, his Real I, which is in the centre of his being and contains no opposites and can hear Higher Centres. So the Work teaches: "Observe yourselves uncritically and become more and more conscious of what is in your being and so become more and more objective to yourselves." As you know already, this will gradually dissolve the Imaginary 'J', the False 'J', the False Personality, that one has hitherto taken as oneself-in my case, Nicoll -and has nothing to do with the true centre of gravity of yourself called Real I. Yet even if this process of inner development through increase of consciousness and seeing together both sides of the pendulum of opposites has brought a man approximately to the category of Number 4 Man, yet he will recur at death and birth. He will return to his part of Time-to his personal Time-line and re-traverse it-but, differently. He will be born again in the same year-for Time is unseen, living Space, a living dimension-but he will remember earlier, if he has practised Self-Remembering. So it is said: "If you become conscious now of something about yourself and accept it, you will remember it earlier next time." That is, every moment of realization now, in self-work, not only affects the future but can alter the past, so, re-traversing one's bit of Time, one is warned by oneself last time.

In discussing the idea of recurrence, in connection with the conception of a six-dimensional world, composed first of the three visible dimensions of Space and the (to us) invisible fourth dimension of the world that we experience as Time, Mr. Ouspensky said that the possibility of change begins only with the possibility of remembering yourself now. He said: "In this sense the idea of recurrence is not necessary."

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At that time, when I heard this, I thought that the idea of the repetition, the recurrence, of everything, would make one's Self-Remembering stronger-and I no longer think it but know it. From daily experience in the daily recurrence in which you all are now, you know that if you repeat a thing it will repeat and master you eventually, so that you cannot change it. Mr. Ouspensky talked at that time about how so many things prove we have lived before-that our lives are results of recurrences. Take the sudden genius exhibited in small children-say, for music. About Number 4 Man he said, in answer to a question as to whether Number 4 Man recurs as Number 4 Man: "No. Only Number 5 Man can recur as Number 5. Number 4 Man has to make himself again, only it will be easier or earlier." He added: "A Conscious Man need not recur-that is, return to the same place in Time. He may re-incarnate-s-that is, go back and be born in another part of historical Time where he can prevent things from going as they did."

Amwell, 27.11.48

COMMENTARY ON SELF-REMEMBERING

WORK-IDEA

We must remember ourselves. There are different forms of Self-Remembering.

COMMENTARY

One question asked concerning the main discipline of this Worknamely, that we should remember ourselves-is "Which self should I remember?" Now if a man remembers his Observing I, he will observe himself: he will observe he is trying to remember himselfand this will prevent him. It is not the same thing as remembering himself. If he remembers his business self, he will begin to become occupied with his business and perhaps ring up someone. The business self feels it can do, just as the observing self feels it can observe. If he remembers his social self it will be the same thing. It will ride off with him, but take him nowhere. Special exercises, making the mind a blank, and so on, will probably have the same result. So when we are told to remember ourselves and ask: "Which self?" what answer can we expect after a time almost with certainty? We can expect the answer: "The self that knows its own nothingness." Yes, this would be a full form of Self-Remembering. The result of work is gradually to make us see we cannot do. You say: "Of course I can do." The Work speaks of "doing" differently from the life-idea of doing. For instance, in the Work-sense, to change oneself is to do. Why? Because to "do" in the lite-sense is simply to react mechanically, although

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people ascribe to themselves this "reacting to life" as conscious doing and cannot see the idea. Mechanical reactions change no one. People excitedly think they are doing. But to change the action of life on you by inner work on impressions is certainly to begin to do. If you can begin with daily smallest things you may see what is meant. Ifwe say that one meaning of Self-Remembering is to remember the Work at some moment of life when life would, say, make you negative, then here we have a practical idea of Self-Remembering. But a person who does not even bring the Work into intimate personal existence cannot, of course, connect with it and its power. He imagines always being calm and even lovely, but when he steps on the tack or she loses her mink, they somehow behave as usual and the Work is blown sky-high. Of course, it is not the Work that is blown sky-high, but their miserable little beings. Have you ever noticed a very small marmoset being, dressed in mink?

FURTHER NOTE ON SELF-REMEMBERING

WORK-IDEA

Man is born to remember himself, but being brought up among sleeping people he forgets himself.

COMMENTARY

We spoke last time again of Self-Remembering and which self to remember. Sometimes a valuable part of oneself gets lost. One could say it has fallen asleep. On the other hand one might say that it has been neglected and that one has lost contact with it. This can happen when one has not worked for some time or reflected on and remembered the ideas of the Work. It is just at such times that a valuable part of oneself gets lost. One wakes up again later, but does not notice that a self, an'!', or small group of'l's, is missing. Every bit of truth one has gained of this Work by hearing it with the mind and experiencing it by the practical application of it to oneself must be kept together, otherwise things will get lost. Time is a dimension-of psychological distance. One must keep hold of one's personal work. Truth is, in esoteric symbolism, silver. All the truth you have experienced in this Work must be kept together in the Intellectual and the Emotional Centres and in the distinct and different memories connected with these two centres. You remember the parable about the woman who lost her piece of silver:

"What woman, having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a lamp, and sweep the house, and seek diligently until she find it?" (Luke xv.B)

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Her house is herself, her own being, and the silver some truth, something she had understood and then lost. In many ancient writings on esoteric psychology, we are told that things must not be allowed to get quite cold. Transformation of being is a process which cannot be held up too long any more than the hatching out of an egg.

Now to speak again about the act of Self-Remembering. It is the most important thing in the Work and the least attempted. Ifwe could receive life on the Work we would begin to awake from the state of sleep that we and all humanity live in, calling it consciousness, or mistaking it for consciousness. If Man became really conscious, everything would change. This Work is about becoming more conscious. Yesbut what does that mean? It means to reach the level of another kind of consciousness, called Self-Remembering, Self-Awareness, and SelfConsciousness. We cannot reflect on this enough, nor be reminded of it enough. To reach this level we must have a lift, an elevator. The Work and the way it thinks is the lift. By means of our own thoughts, which are those of sleeping people imagining they are fully conscious, we cannot reach the thoughts that belong to people who stand in the light of Self-Remembering and view the meaning of existence from that level. But this Work, coming from conscious men, belongs to the thought at that high level and this we seek to imitate. This weakens the power of external life over us, because it weakens the mechanical thinking induced by sensual life and its apparent reality. The mind has to be re-fashioned. Now if incoming life, which enters us as impressions via the senses, could be made to fall on the Work, its energy would be transformed. This idea is given by the diagram of the First Conscious Shock.

Now, ordinarily, we do not receive life on the Work, but direct.

First, this is because we have not built up the system of thinking called the Work in ourselves, and so we receive life on our acquired, mechanical psychology, which we mistake for ourselves. Second, it is because we can for a long time see no difference between life and Work, even after years of trying to practise non-identifying. We read the newspapers and feel shocked. The Work says that Man at his present level of consciousness cannot do. We feel shocked and depressed that Man cannot do-cannot stop quarrels and wars, etc. If we received life on the Work we would not feel shocked and depressed, and so life would not make us negative. But since we do not remember ourselves and so transform the effects of life, we get negative. In fact, we are driven by life, by what happens, and have nothing internal with which to resist. So we are machines, as the Work teaches, driven by life and its events. In other words, we do not exist-yet we were created to exist -to be-to have being apart from machinery. This is our task-s-to create ourselves. Now people-humanity-living in the second socalled waking state of consciousness can never understand one another. This, esoterically, is called the Circle of Babel or Confusion of Tongues. It does not mean merely literal tongues-languages. Only people who

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reach the Third State of Consciousness can begin to understand one another, A Number r-Man cannot even understand another Number I Man any more than Number 2 and 3 Men can understand people of their respective types. So the Work says: "Man cannot do"-that is, unless he awakens. Imagine what it would mean if all of us realized we were not properly conscious and were like sleeping people trying to reach a common issue--each identified with his own dreams. Now the Conscious Circle of Humanity begins with those who have reached the Third State of Consciousness-through long work on themselves. Here, they get help from Higher Centres-they find another way of understanding their apparently insoluble life-problems. This is an interesting idea. If life could be solved, then this Work could not exist. This Work is to make life possible in the sense that, as it says, you cannot understand life save in terms of something else. This something else is the Work. Therefore if the Work could fall on the Work internally we would awake.

Amwell, II.I2.48

NOTE ON INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL ATTENTION AND PLACING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

WORK-IDEA

One must practise putting consciousness into different parts of the body.

COMMENTARY

In the struggle that everyone in the Work has to maintain daily with negative emotions, observation of what causes them is useful. I make this understatement purposely, because it is extremely difficult to observe their causes. As you know, we are told at first simply to observe and not to analyse. To try to find causes is to analyse. We are told not to analyse what we observe in ourselves, but to observe, to notice, to be conscious of, to be aware of our inner states. This is based on the teaching that to make a thing conscious begins to change it. As regards the Intellectual Centre, we observe, notice, become conscious and aware of, the kinds of thought going on in that centre and where we are identified with them. In the case of the Emotional Centre, we observe the taste of the emotions and whether we are identified or not. In the case of the Moving Centre, we observe tensions of muscles, strained posture and expressions, frownings, clenchings, hurryings, slap-dashings, slammings, all of which not only waste force but influence other centres. For instance, if a person always scowls, then that may be one cause of his negative states. Its representation in muscular terms induces the corresponding emotion. Every emotion

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has a corresponding representation in Moving Centre. You will have observed that the unpleasant emotions-hate, jealousy, suspicion, envy, etc.-are represented by contracted facial muscles and flexed limbs and that they are not becoming. Pleasant emotions relax muscles, joy extends the limbs, and not only so, but all the inner workings of the body, internal secretions, and so on. Negative emotions contract and close: pleasant emotions relax and open. Now usually the emotion causes the expression but the expression can cause the emotion-that is, the Moving Centre can influence the emotional state as well as vice versa. Some people have very bad Moving Centres in this respect. They have, so to speak, superior or bored expressions, or sulky ones, or stiff, awkward postures. The point is that for them to change it is necessary to start with altering their stance, their posture, the awkwardness of their bodies, their habitual facial expressions.

We are taught to practise relaxation. In some situations it is the only thing we can practise-just to relax and not think. Begin with the small muscles of the face. Yes-but to relax the muscles of the face it is necessary to become conscious that they are tightened or contracted. A muscle can tighten without visibly contracting. It can be in a state of heightened tone which is unnecessary and wastes force. When a person is said to be "keyed up" or some similar phrase, if you examine him, you may find all his reflexes over-brisk, which may mean over-tone in the muscles which are being kept on the stretch unnecessarily and so are wasting force. I will not argue about this point.

When Gurdjieffwas in England, either at Harley Street, or Warwick Gardens, he shewed briefly on the blackboard---drawing the three centres, Intellectual, Emotional and Moving-that why people remain in the prison of themselves, and so cannot find a different life of selfchange, was because of habits in all their centres. He indicated that it was difficult to change habits of thought and habits of emotions, but it was easier to change habits of movement-that is, Moving Centre habits. That is why he taught his exercises which give new movements. At the same time, in relation to what he taught Mr. Ouspensky, he also emphasized that the Work itself was to change the mind and feeling of oneself-that is, it was primarily directed to the psychological side of a man or woman-to how they thought and felt, and it was said that unless work on the Intellectual Centre and Emotional Centre accompanied work on the Moving Centre, results could not be expected. In short, a changed mind is more powerful than a changed Moving Centre. And as regards the higher degrees of mental and emotional understanding, the Moving Centre cannot teach them. In fact, only they could, when awakened, teach the Moving Centre, which ends in perfect realization, from what we can see in the Indian examples.

To return: as we are, directed attention practised, say, for five minutes, by putting consciousness into every part of the body, beginning with the face-muscles, will give definite results at any moment when it is done in order to prevent some difficult period of being identified.

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Directing one's attention to the Intellectual or Emotional Centre demands internal attention. Internal attention begins with self-observation. Putting consciousness into the muscle-tension of the body is both internal and external attention. Begin by trying, say, to put your consciousness into your right thumb-then shift it to your left.

Amwell, I8.I2.48

WHAT IS TillS WORK ABOUT?

Recently someone asked: "What is this Work about?" This person had been in the Work some time and the situation presented itself to his or her mind in that formulation-i.e. why should we work on ourselves? Why should we observe ourselves? Why should we separate from negative emotions, from internal considering, and all the rest of it? This question presents itself at intervals to everyone who is in this Work. Why, any of you older or younger people in the Work, should you work on yourselves? You mayor may not be getting on very well in life, you mayor may not be happy in life, therefore why should you work on yourselves? This leads to the fundamental question: "What is this Work about?" Why does this Work exist in life and why has it always existed in different forms, in different disguises, religious and otherwise? Why should I try to observe and separate from negative emotions? Why shouldn't I talk scandal? Why shouldn't I tell a person what I really think of him? Why shouldn't I expend my negative emotions all day long on everyone whom I meet? Why should I have to do something else apart from behaving as I naturally would? Why should I have to try to change my behaviour towards life, towards people, towards circumstances and events? Why shouldn't I hate when I feel like hating? Why shouldn't I murder if I feel like murdering? Why shouldn't I always say just what I like and behave as I wish to behave?

Now this Work is about awakening from sleep. What is this sleep?

When you are in a passion you behave in a certain way. You may in this passion do untold harm by what you say and what you do. I would ask you, if you are in this passion and behave as you feel from this passion, are you awake or are you asleep? Are you hypnotized? You may afterwards realize you said wrong things or did wrong things and wonder why, but while you were under the hypnotism of this passion you thought that everything you said or did was right. When the passion is over you may feel that you may have said too much or done too much. I say, you may. This means that in ordinary life you realize to a certain extent that you were under hypnotism-you were asleep. What hypnotizes you and puts you to sleep is the passion. At the same time you at once justify this passion and how you behaved in it and

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say it was perfectly right. Yes, self-justifying means putting yourself in the right always. People of coarser psychology don't ever realize that. People of finer psychology feel a twinge of regret. But instantly they justify themselves-put themselves in the right-but very few people realize that they really cannot trust themselves to this moment of passion.

Now Man asleep is a man, a woman, who is always governed by various passions and moods. People say in this Work, when they first hear that we are all hypnotized, that they do not understand that they are hypnotized by their passions to begin with. They say they always know what they are doing. They do not realize that they are not free but governed by different kinds of passions. Playing on life to keep humanity asleep are various passions. As long as the passion works in you, you are asleep and in certain cases can even do murder under the influence of the passions that play on humanity. This is one example of what it means that mankind is kept asleep. This is the great source of propaganda. The whole point of the Work is to be dehypnotized. It is the dehypnotism of life-hypnotism. External life hypnotizes us by its events. War, for example, is a typical event. The study of life-hypnotisms is very interesting, especially when you apply it to yourself and see how you are hypnotized every moment. What one sincerely wishes to do from oneself is usually quite different from what one does from the bravura of life. All these things keep us asleep. But what keeps us asleep most of all are our domestic quarrels, our domestic difficulties, our thinking that others are conscious. As a rule a hypnotized man marries a hypnotized woman and then their married life consists in overcoming their self-hypnotism, usually, if they are not in the Work, with bad results. A man expects a woman to be like that, and a woman expects a man to be like that. The greatest hypnotism in life is that you think you will find your goal in life. Christ was tempted by goals in life:

"The tempter came and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: And on their hands they shall bear thee up, lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again the devil taketh him into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." (Matt. iV.3-IO)

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How many of you without knowing it have made power and possessions your goals? That is for the first training in life, when you find that these goals do not furnish you with any internal.happiness. Now all this belongs to Man asleep.

If you are in the Work, you ought to begin to understand that your goals are not giving you peace. You have to realize that you won't get peace, you have to realize that what you are striving after is exactly for your Personality, for your first education. The Work is a second education in which you become aware that what you are striving after is not what will give you internal peace. You have got to come down to yourself to find out what kind of person you are. I always think the Temptation of Christ was the overcoming of the first education.

NOTE AT CHRISTMAS-TIME 1948

Throughout known history various attempts have been made to awaken Man to the mystery of his existence. So strong, however, is the external man, the man formed by contact with external life via the senses-in short, the acquired Personality-that these attempts eventually become useless and must give way to other attempts always with the same aim. Man asleep takes for granted both his own existence and the existence of the Universe. This keeps him in bondage to the external world, to Nature and its laws. Such a man, if he thinks at all, believes that Nature created itself somehow or other, in remote agesa strange idea if you come to reflect on it. Now as a result of this great power of hypnotism that external life exerts, Man's real essential part cannot develop. Essence, although not developed, and in so many ways childish, is the real man or woman and cannot grow as long as the part of Man turned outwards to life dominates them. As said, people take this mystery of their own existence and the Universe for granted. It is only when one begins to feel and ponder this mystery that it may become possible to awaken from sleep. This capacity is called Magnetic Centre. If a man feels mystery in all things, if he feels that nothing has been explained, if he can see that there are lifeinfluences in the world, such as the Financial Times, and distinct from them other influences, such as the Gospels, then he begins to feed, nourish, cause to grow, his inner essential side-that is, his Essence. Small children, as Essence, wonder. They are soon given answers that stop them. Then the hard coating of Personality forms itself. When a man dies his Personality breaks up and, if hard places are in it, with pain. Essence returns and is re-born. If there has been no growth of Essence, of the inner man, the life will be the same because, as you

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know, your being attracts your life. Change Essence, and your life cannot be the same. Remember this: your Personality is not you. What is really you lies behind it. For, behind all the manifestations of the Personality and especially the False Personality, which is what is least you, and is the cause of most useless suffering in the pain-factory of this world, there lies something that is really you. This is called Real I. Being born on this planet, we have to win this goal by selfobservation, by not identifying. It is not given. By shedding, by taking off, by stripping off the outer coats of yourself that you have taken as yourself, and starting with the False Personality that seeks to keep up nothing but a fiction of yourself, a distortion, often very expensive literally to keep going, and always a great expense psychologically, then you begin to move towards Real I. This inner journey is called the Work or the Way or simply Esotericism.

Amwell, 3I.I2.48

LIFE AS EVENTS AND OUR MECHANICAL REACTIONS BY IDENTIFYING WITH THEM

WORK-IDEA

A man, a woman, cannot change unless he or she begins to realize his or her mechanicalness. As long as men and women ascribe full consciousness to themselves and their actions, they will remain asleep and suffer from themselves uselessly.

COMMENTARY

Let us suppose that, having begun to realize that we react to events mechanically, we have then to begin to realize that we can react to events less mechanically and so more consciously. To a very vain and self-stuffed person this is not easy. Understand clearly that we cannot change the events but only our way of taking them. But if we have not practised self-observation, if we have not made a new place in our minds where we can, to a small extent, observe incoming impressions before reacting to them and observe how ordinarily we would react, this will be impossible. That is, we remain machines governed by life, which is a series of changing events that overpower us in a regular rotation. Men and women glued to life cannot distinguish themselves from life. They are life: life as the event is them. Life as a series of changing events comes in to us as impressions and causes us to react mechanically. We take this mechanical reaction as I, as oneself. We identify with every event, more, or less. The point of the Work is to create a conscious place or bar or customs-house where we can be

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conscious of the quality of incoming impressions and so detect a typical event, and what would be our mechanical reaction to it before we react mechanically to it. Here we can interfere with ourselves-safely. All this, as many of you have heard, belongs to the beginning of understanding and practising what is called the First Conscious Shock, the meaning of which in all its aspects is our profoundest study. Try to see what is meant in these commentaries when it is said that there is no such thing as abstract formless "life" but that life is a coloured thing, coloured and divided by different events. Life is discontinuous because it is events. For instance, you lose your money. That is an event. Your reaction to this possible event, ifit has not happened to you, will not be the same as when you hear that X has lost his money. In such a case X will be under the hypnotic power of the particular event called "losing your money". You will not feel all that it means until the event in the turn of the wheel of events called life picks on you. Yes, to hear of events happening to others is quite different from the events happening to you. What does it mean "an event happening to you"? It means that you, by a turn of the wheel, suddenly are in the midst of an event-say, a car-crash. That is quite different from reading about such an event. Do you see that here lies something very curious? It is like those twelve people called up to form a jury. "I will never be called up "--one says-and then you are. Can you catch this vision of life? Remember, you might be called up. By what? By authorities? No--by eoents. If you stub your toe on the carpet, there is no authority. It is one possible event, small but painful. For a moment you are caught by it and react mechanically to it. If you have enough money, you may have all your carpets changed and laid properly. Certainlybut then you will be caught by other events-for instance, by worry about your money. So we are caught-by one event after another.

When Man was created as a self-developing organism, all possible events that a man could experience were created also. Why? Well, otherwise he would have had no life-no events-nothing to do. Now, losing your luggage is a common thing, but it is an event possible to you. You no doubt think this is not lifo-it is merely a nuisance. No, you are wrong. This is exactly lifo. Just in the same way, if you expect to be well for the party to-morrow and wake up with a temperature, and you think it is a nuisance, but not life, I would say you have got the idea oflife wrongly. To be ill is a very common event. Yet people think it exceptional-that is, as it were, not life. Well, in that case we imagine that life is not all these exceptional events. But this exactly is life. O. once said: "People think war is exceptional-but it has always been."

Now the point of the Work in this respect is how you relate yourself to what is happening to you. What is happening to you is events-some particular event which millions of others are under. Do you see? You are sad. Well, something is happening to you-some event-and that is how you are taking it, reacting to it. But do you formulate the

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,vent? Why are you taking it and reacting to it in that way? You are doing so because mechanicallJ you always have done so and you never have tried to see the event and separate from your reaction to it. But also you do not yet see it is an event which millions of people are under at that moment. Events govern the world. The world is a series of events-yes, old, old, recurring events.

Now you cannot change the event-but you can alter yourself in regard to how you take it. Have you, after years in the Work-1 speak to older people-never noticed how every event hypnotizes you and sucks force from you? Do you not understand what it means to be passive to events so that you do not combine with them-whatever they be? Yes, a very difficult thing-but of enormous, incalculable value once you see what the Work is teaching about non-identifying. Now you know, on a billiard-table, how a ball can roll about and then fall into a pocket. Every event that comes to us in life is like a pocket into which we fall if we identify and neither observe nor remember ourselves. For example, a good pocket is "I have had a hard life". We fall into some typical event just as a billiard ball falls into a pocket and then, so to speak, it is off the table of consciousness. Even the smallest event acts as a pocket, such as losing one's collar stud. We may identify with some trivial event like this so that all day long we are in a temper, a sulky mood, so that all day long we are in a pocket of some kind. We have been, in that case, easily caught by life, which seeks to keep us asleep and have not grasped that the Work is to make us take events consciously and not mechanically. Some events are far more difficult than others to separate from in regard to their hypnotizing power. Yet, if this Work means anything, it is more powerful than life and its events, because otherwise our state would be truly pitiable. Those who have worked or have separated from the hypnotic power of life have preceded us and left behind them memorials of what they did-and also a certain power which, if we practise the Work and build up a new mind from the ideas of the Work, which seek to make us think in a new way, will be transmitted to us, even when faced with the most difficult events. But unless we remember ourselves-which is not to be hypnotized-this power cannot reach us.

Amwell, a.I.49

THE WORK-TEACIDNG ABOUT MAN AS A SELF-DEVELOPING ORGANISM

WORK-IDEA

The Work says: "Man is created a self-developing organism. He is incomplete by creation, but can complete himself."

COMMENTARY

If anyone wants to understand in brief what this Work is about, the above quotation from the Work-teaching will answer the question. Man is created incomplete and as an incomplete thing he tries to live his life, but he can complete himself, because he was born a self-developing organism. Before we go on, notice one thing here: "Man was born a self-developing organism"-notice the word self. You may attend lectures, demonstrations, exercises, and so on, but ultimately the emphasis lies in this word self. No other person can developyou-only you yourself can do so. Why is it that ail sorts of external disciplines and regimentations in life do not develop people internally? A mali joins the Army; he is disciplined externally; he obeys rules. Yet the man in his internal side does not develop. I may bow down religiously a hundred times a day, but this will not change me inwardly. The Work is not about this kind of thing. Why? Because all that kind of thing usually only increases the power of False Personality. Suppose I can fast longer than anyone of you ? Will this change me? No-I will probably -of course, modestly-mention it to everyone. Now this is to increase the False Personality. A man begins to change only when, through self-observation, he begins to apply to himself what the Work teaches him to do. No one else can do this for him. It is possible to teach a man this Work; it is not possible to make him work on himself. One may go about from one teacher to another all one's life and never have a thought of working on oneself-ofapplying the Work to oneself. Now once a person begins to work on himself, he begins to meet the Work internallY. The Work will then teach him internally, although for a long time he will need to be reminded of it externally. The object of this Work is to connect lower centres with Higher Centres. So we have to work on the mass of weeds and mud that lower centres have become covered with, in order to make it possible for them to hear and transmit the messages from Higher Centres. The two Higher Centres are fully developed and are transmitting all the time. But, owing to the state of our lower-that is, ordinary-centres, we are unaware of this, although perhaps at rare moments we realize that "inspiration" or a strange happiness is not an idle term. Any intense emotional state may connect momentarily with Higher Centres. Now we have to get one stark truth into our minds: that we are capable of states lower and

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higher than our ordinary states. This gives a firm ground for the understanding. You can give way to drugs, for example, which lead to lower states because then you are buying before you have made the money. You are not only borrowing from to-morrow, but from your whole Time-Body.

Now in this Work, as it was once taught, we learn that before we can have something we must earn the cash to pay for it. If you take drugs to get into certain states-which is possible-you will have to pay afterwards. In this Work we pay beforehand. How? By working on the Three Lines of Work-work on yourself, work in connection with others, and work for the Work itself. What is work on yourself? It is, in my case, work to make Dr. Nicoll passive. What is work with others? It is exactly the magic power of external considering. What is work for the Work itself? It is to see, to understand, what we are trying to do, what direction is being given, what will help the Work itself. Now some serve the Third Line of Work without being able to serve the First Line. Or again, some can serve the Second Line rather than the First and Third Lines. In any case, everyone in the Work can always serve one or the other. For instance, suppose you can serve the First Line-work on yourself privately-and it becomes stale, then think of how you might serve the Second Line-that is, not being hostile and negative to others in the Work.

Now let us take an example of the application of the Work-ideas to yourself. You are told, for instance, to observe and not identify with negative emotions. Such work on oneself belongs to the First Line of Work. But if you never really observe yourself, you are perhaps sure that you are never negative, and unless you see that YQU are negative you cannot begin to work on yourself. Remember that if you become negative, say, full of envy, hatred, malice, etc., it is always your fault, not the fault of the person who, say, said something unpleasant. When my wife and I went to the Institute in France we were told: "Remember here Personality has scarcely any right to exist." And the saying put up in the theatre that we built ourselves all through a harsh winter was:

"Always remember you are here having already understood the necessity of contending only with yourself. Thank everyone who affords you the opportunity."

IS.So

Amwell, 15.1.49

A NOTE ON FALSE PERSONALITY

WORK-IDEA

As long as you are identified with False Personality, no transformation of yourself can take place.

COMMENTARY

Everyone invents himself or herself. These self-invented people meet and talk and quarrel and marry each other. This invention of oneself is called False Personality. Its effect is to give the person a wrong feeling of I. The Work calls it Imaginary'!'. For the birth of Real I to take place, Imaginary'!' must be seen as imaginary. This can only come about by self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, in turn, can only be reached through self-observation. That is why the Work begins with the observation of oneself. The illusions about ourselves can be weakened only by seeing them. Others may see them, but you must see them. Now as long as the False Personality dominates us, the illusions and the forms of imagination we have about ourselves will hold us in their power. This will complicate everything in our lives and render us unhappy where it is quite unnecessary to be unhappy. We will see life through the False Personality. You have heard that this Work is tentatively called Psycho-Transformism. This title implies that some transformation is possible for Man. All esoteric psychology has this central idea. In fact, that is why it exists. It is always about how to attain this possible inner change or transformation. In some systems it is called re-birth or regeneration, which is the same thing. In this Work it is called sometimes the attainment of Real I. Now, since we are so much centred in the False Personality, from which we derive an imaginary feeling of I, or Imaginary'!', it is necessary, in order to begin to move towards Real I, to separate our consciousness from False Personality. This means that you must shift the centre of gravity of consciousness by becoming conscious of what you were not previously conscious of. This can only be done by observing the False Personality in oneself. This leads to a gradual displacement of the previous psychological centre of gravity of I. Remember, your feeling of I meets life. As a result it will not only begin to give you an altered view of yourself, but it will also begin to give you an altered view of life. You must understand that any change in yourself, in your feeling of what I is, will also transform the world for you-to the extent of your own transformation of the feeling of I.

Now let us try to understand this in easier terms. Not one of us, as we are mechanically in life, has his or her centre of gravity in Real I. We have it in False Personality, in Imaginary '1', in a fiction of ourselves that we have to keep going. So each of us has to do all sorts

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of things in order to keep up this imaginary self, the False Self, this self that is not really deeply us, in order that we, as it were, do not lose face-or, in fact, lose all sense of ourselves. Now if all of you here were suddenly taken right out of your pretences-in short, if you suddenly had False Personality made passive, non-active-you would nearly lose all sense of yourselves, or again, you might become pure fiends and beasts, as in war. But to return to the delicate matter of the observation of oneself in regard to the existence of False Personality-try to notice your affectations. Try to observe your insincerity, try to make conscious your artificial ways, your sweet false intonations. Try to notice (if your name is Mr. A), how Mr. A stalks about and pretends he knows everything and everybody and is so charming. And (if your name is Mrs. B or Miss B), try to notice how you have to serve Mrs. B, or Miss B, and buy things for them and talk as they wish and not as you wish. Finally, notice your manners. Are they real and simple, or purely insincere? Notice what offends you. Is it really genuine? Or is it a case of saying: "Don't you know that I am Mr. A-or that I am Mrs. B or Miss B?" Well, I cannot explain further. But let this remark here be made, and think and reflect on it. As long as you are practically nothing but False Personality-however distinguished you areyou have completely failed in regard to all you were created to benamely, a self-developing organism. The first step is to observe and make passive False Personality.

Now, if you can separate by observation of it from False Personality -which means that you can see it consciously and so are distinct from it (since what you are not conscious of in yourself will control you, because you are identified with it)-if you can separate from the False Personality, then you will change internally and the whole world and all life will change for you correspondingly. Why? Because an increase of consciousness has taken place. This Work is about increasing consciousness-firstly of you -of what you are. If you become more and more conscious of False Personality (that is, if Mr. A sees Mr. A more and more, and Mrs. B and Miss B see themselves and all they say and do, more and more), then the broader and deeper consciousness will release you from a negative and small-minded, egotistical bundle of personal reactions, full of self-fears and hopes, foolish ambitions, daily lying, unnecessary unhappiness, stupid judgments, false pride, imbecile vanity, and all the rest. In short, you will move away from this spurious person you have taken yourself as and served as a slave-that is, False Personality-and begin to approach the great test for Man and Woman as regards their inner sincerity and integrity and so purity in this sense -the test that if passed leads to the Real I that every man, every woman, was born with, but has forgotten, owing to falling asleep on this planet. For, the Work says, the Essence of Man, of Woman, comes down from a high level represented in the Ray of Creation by the Stars. The Work is about regaining the Consciousness that is one's right-that is, it is about awakening from Sleep. You have already

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heard that this Work and all real esoteric teaching starts with the idea that Man, born awake, falls asleep, and so the world is as it is-namely a world of sleeping people. Well, I advise you to examine and reflect on your own state of sleep. As long as you believe in your False Personality, you are fast asleep. So begin by trying to see what you take as I in yourself. Do you really think you have any real, permanent I in yourself, as you sit there? But the study of your False Personality is not quite that. You have to see it for yourself.

Amwell,22.I·49

COMMENTARY ON ATI'lTUDES

On one occasion I asked Gurdjieff, through an interpreter, whether it was necessary for everything to be overcome in oneself. He said:

"No" and seemed then to speak in an indirect way more of the necessity of creating new attitudes to things so that, so to speak, it was comparable to crossing from one side to the other, as when crossing the road. I understood him to mean that if we remain with our present attitudes we are on one side but if we change attitudes we can go to the other side of ourselves. So I gathered that an attitude is always one-sided. He indicated that this was only possible if you took photographs of yourself. I heard at different times later on that taking photographs of oneself was different from merely observing oneself at any particular moment. If your quality of self-observation is sincere and if it is not merely done out of a sense of being told to do it, these observations become linked, collect together, and form gradually a photograph of yourself over a considerable period of time. I think that Ouspensky called this a Time-Photograph or possibly one photograph of your Time-Body. When you have a photograph of yourself in this sense you see yourself as a certain kind of person over many years, perhaps back to childhood, governed by certain attitudes. This increase of consciousness shews the possibility of taking everything in another way, so it could be compared to crossing over to the other side of yourself from that side that has hitherto governed you by means of typical one-sided attitudes. Ouspensky once gave us an example of the following description. He said: "Try to notice what you object to in people, in politics, and so on, and try deliberately to think and talk from the opposite attitude." You must understand that if we have fixed, acquired attitudes we will judge from those attitudes, in a' mechanical, even automatic way, everything that happens. One should be able to read the papers without constantly saying "tut-tut" or feeling angry or depressed. Now, as mechanical people we study how to become more conSCIOUS. Amongst other things we have to try to become more

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conscious of our attitudes which have been laid down in us from early life from imitation of our elders or the romances of the period. Now, the difference between mechanical man and conscious man is that a mechanical man is in the prison of himself, and in this particular case he is imprisoned by his acquired mechanical attitudes, so that he can only see everything from one point of view, and a conscious man is one who is freed from these limiting one-sided attitudes. We understand that a conscious man can see things from different angles and, in fact, he can be conscious in the full swing of the opposites, so that neither one side nor the other side of the opposites governs him exclusively. You all know what it means to meet a man who has very strong and fixed attitudes, who rises to the top of life-that is, a man of limited one-sided being. He is called a strong man. He will judge, he will condemn, he will not forgive, a whole side of life which a conscious man will never think of judging, condemning, of so violently not forgiving. All this arises from a lack of consciousness of oneself. One does not realize that one is much the same as the people one is condemning and judging and not forgiving because one is not conscious that one does the same thing oneself. One has not observed it. So one can say such a man cannot cross the road and do things from the other side.

Now it is very difficult to observe an attitude in oneself by mere momentary self-observation, but, as was said, if these momentary observations are sincere they will unite by themselves into forming a timephotograph of oneself over a certain period, or even over one's whole life. You will then perceive that you have always been a certain kind of person, always judging from this angle, condemning and not forgiving from this angle, and you will then be able to see that it was all mechanical, and you never knew what you were doing, and it was all a part of your acquired psychology which hitherto you have taken as yourself and never challenged by your own power of observation, but took for granted.

I suppose it takes many years before a person begins to understand for himself or herself what the Work is really about. The Work is to free you from the absolutely erroneous ideas that you have about yourself, the absolutely wrong attitudes you have, wrong forms of imagination and all the rest of it, which contribute to form False Personality, which is your real enemy and causes you endless and useless suffering without your knowing anything about it. Some people, of course, of weak Being and weak knowledge, with no Magnetic Centre and who have never thought about life at all, about what they mean and what life means-I say these people cannot awaken from the deep sleep that they are in. They cannot awaken from False Personality in themselves, and if you are so foolish as to try to awaken them from their sleep you will only be hated by them. In the first place they will not even think that they have mechanical attitudes, they will believe in everything they say and they will regard themselves as conscious people living a

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conscious life. But people who are close up to the possibility of awakening will be able to hear a little of what the Work is saying to themi.e, that they are asleep and that they have to study the causes of their being asleep, and this begins, as you know, with observing the things that the Work teaches us to observe in ourselves.

To-day we are concentrating on the observation of attitudes which make people take up points of view in a mechanical way and try to live their lives in these points of view, which, if they could look more deeply into themselves, they would be able to see have nothing to do with what they really think. So try to notice when you are speaking from attitude. Impressions of the events happening in life fall, among many other things, on one's attitudes. Ouspensky said: "To change yourself, your attitudes must change." You know how difficult it is to talk sometimes to a man who has very strong, say, political or religious attitudes. Once you touch these attitudes the man or woman will cease, as it were, to be intelligent. You can see that they have never thought about these things which they speak of so readily from attitude and, no doubt, they feel that if they were to abandon these attitudes, they would cease to exist. Yet by having the sense of I, the sense of themselves, in these attitudes, they have a wrong centre of gravity; they are not in their right centre of gravity-i.e. in Real I, in what is real, but have their centre of gravity in what is not really themselves and so in something that is false-that is False Personality. In other words, they have their centre of gravity in something that is not themselves. Real I is not in the opposites but between the opposites. & Gurdjieff said: "Personality is what is not really you, but Essence is what is really you." Life causes us to form Personality and this is necessary as the first step in education. But unless you think, reflect, observe yourself, after a certain time-that is, after you have acquired a good responsible working Personality and so have learnt how to be a Good Householder-you will not be able to go on to the second stage of your own development. All this Work is connected with the second education of which the object is to make you think in a new way about all the things that you have hitherto mechanically taken for granted, including your acquired attitudes which, as I have said, arise chiefly from imitation of other people in early life, actual people, actors, or fiction people. Those who have acquired a certain sensitiveness to themselves through self-observation can distinguish when they are speaking from their own intelligence and when they are speaking from mechanical attitude. Of course, other people can distinguish this much earlier from the tone of voice. Ouspensky taught us a great deal about listening to intonation. When a person is speaking from mechanical attitude and thus leaves his intelligence, his voice becomes different and probably everyone will begin to yawn. Why? Because the person is not speaking from himself any more but from his acquired attitudes of which he is unaware. He is unaware unless he has got a certain sensitiveness to himself through observation.

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Now the Work teaches that our attitudes connect us by invisible threads with life. In this way life and its various events affect us. If you have no attitude, say, to politics, you will not be affected. As we are, we have attitudes towards this, that and the other-and do not realize it. So, by means of these threads, we are affected, influenced, made to identify. We have attitudes towards religion, sex, politics, science, society, sport, marriage, divorce, drink, gambling, and so on. But we do not know it. We simply talk "from attitude"-not from understanding. In short, we react blindly when attitude comes in. Yet we imagine we are behaving consciously and talking from our understanding and experience of life.

When a man talks from attitude he is easily offended or violent.

This is not the case ifhe talks from understanding. Attitudes, therefore, can be thought of as preventing a man or a woman from growing in understanding. That is why it is necessary in the Work to observe and so be able to separate from-that is, not identify with-acquired attitudes.

Amwell, 29.I.49

COMMENTARY ON REAL I

The only part of us that can get in touch with Real I is Essence.

Real I -Master-is fully developed. Essence is not. By way of allegory we can say that Real I remains always on the level on which it is, whereas Essence descends and eventually becomes surrounded by Personality. The only way to reach Real I is through Essence. You cannot reach Real I through Personality. Let me put it in this way. The possible return journey to Real I is only through development of Essence which can connect with Real I. It is necessary for some of you to understand this more clearly than you do at present. But I am quite aware that it is a very difficult subject to talk about. In any case it is impossible to understand it in a purely formatory way.

We have to understand something like this. We were created before we were born on this planet and we were created perfect-that is, with Real I. We were then sent down through descending levels and further descending levels, down to this Earth, and we were born with Essence. At a very early age Essence may be in touch with Real I because, as was said, only through Essence can you get in touch with Real I. G. once said: "Behind Essence lies Real I, and behind Real I lies God."

Now our problem appears to be, from what the Work teaches, that Essence, through which alone we can get in touch with Real I, is undeveloped. The plan is this: Essence cannot grow unless Personality is formed round it by life on this planet. This is the first and necessary

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step, because a man who does not develop up to the level of Good Householder, who never learns anything from life, who, in short, is nothing but a lunatic, or tramp, in the Work-sense, does not understand that he has not made the first step in his real development. In other words, he has not understood, does not see, what is the plot or plan connected with his birth on this Earth.

Let me repeat: Essence, through which we can get in touch with Real I, cannot deveiop by itself beyond a very small point unless first of all it is surrounded with a side acquired from this planet which is called Personality, which, in turn, if we begin to work against the aspect of it called False Personality, will feed undeveloped Essence. As Essence begins to grow in this strange way, so does the possibility of finding flashes of Real I become more apparent to those undergoing the process of this Work.

Let us put on the board horizontally: False Personality, Personality, Essence, Real I, God. This is what we have to think about. This is the problem of Esotericism, and this is why it is so difficult to understand quite what Esoteric Teaching is saying. You must have understood by now that the Work teaches by implication that we haveforgotten ourselves. That is why the Work starts with the idea that a man can remember himself. Think for yourself for a moment: if you are told that you must remember yourself, it must imply that you have forgotten yourself, and this must again imply that once upon a time you did remember yourself and have now forgotten yourself, and this is why everything is wrong with you and with other people in this life. The great teaching of the Work is that everyone has fallen asleep, everyone has forgotten himself or herself, and that is why everything goes in the only possible way that it can go. That is also why it is said that we have to awaken from sleep and so the Work speaks about the necessity of trying to remember ourselves and not live all our lives asleep, identified with things, persons, events, with every unpleasant situation and all the rest.

You may ask why, if we were created perfect, at a level higher than Earth, it is necessary to be made to descend at all. The answer is that a being created perfect has contributed nothing to its own development. It would be easily tempted. Man by descent and ascent thus becomes stronger "than the angels", as it is said somewhere.

Amwell, j.R.49

ANOTHER NOTE ON UNDERSTANDING

WORK-IDEA

This Work teaches that Understanding is the strongest force that we can create in ourselves.

COMMENTARY

If a man does good for the sake of a reward, he does not understand what he is doing. Again, to the man who was ploughing on the Sabbath Day, it was said that if he understood what he was doing, it was all right. Again, if a man takes it for granted that he is fully conscious and knows what he is saying and doing and can easily change himself if he wishes, he will never understand himself, or, indeed, anybody else. Now, although we may know a lot, we understand very little. To know and to understand are different things. To begin with, to know is a matter of one centre, but to understand is a matter of at least two centres. The formatory part of the Intellectual Centre can know a great deal. But it does not understand anything. If the Intellectual Centre and the Emotional Centre co-operate, then understanding begins. A person may know how to make a bomb and do so and blow up some people. But he has no understanding. How, then, can we get a glimmer of meaning as to what the Work indicates by understanding? Does it mean a seeing together of many things from many points of view and so quite distinct from one-sidedness? Certainly, it must have some such meaning, for is not the whole Work about changing a man or woman from a narrow, one-sided, undeveloped, negative, prejudiced person into a different being through self-study, new knowledge and special kinds of efforts ?

Let me take aim in connection with understanding. We have to make aim in the Work. We may think we know our aim. But do we understand our aim? That is quite another matter. It is only a finer inner perception that will help us to understand our aim in the long run. But we must begin by simply making an aim and trying to keep it. As we go on, however, we begin to see that our aim is connected with something else and that it would be better to work on this something else and finally on Chief Feature. Now truth is what connects you with something. If our knowledge and our being were equally developed, everything we know would be connected up rightly and so rightly valued, and so our understanding would be maximal. But, as we are, having very small understanding and also living in a world of diminishing understanding, everything is lying about in bits within us, quite unconnected or wrongly placed. As a consequence, we are not integrated into a unity. The Work is to integrate us. If we were integrated, understanding would replace our, at present, so unsatis-

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factory and dull, moody, inner life, which is so contradictory. Moments in which this inner work of connection is going on-because it will begin sooner or later in those whom the Work accepts-are full of very deep- satisfaction. Notice such moments. When they occur, the ordinary things that one usually attempts to get pseudo-satisfaction out of -such as vanity, which can be triumphant or knocked-outalmost disappear. One is emptied on one side and filled on the other.

To return to the man who does good for the sake of reward-he does not understand what good is based on, he thinks he can do--in this case, do good. Have we not all seen people who interfere with others in order to do good to them? Let us begin with ourselves, before we think we can do good and get a reward. Do good to yourself and you will actually get a reward-but of another kind. What does it mean to do good to oneself? One thing it means is to observe oneself and see what is acting and separate from negative 'I's. Another is not to identify with one's meritorious 'I's, with one's own idea of one's prowess and how much good one has done, and so on, through the whole gamut of the Work-teaching. What, then, will happen? You will understand a thousand and one things that you did not understand before and cannot explain to those who still act in a life-way and ascribe merit to themselves in everything they do. This release/rom oneself, this release from Imaginary 'I', from the pictures one has had of oneself, from False Personality, is the greatest good one can do to oneself, and it involves the whole of the Work, its ideas, its practical teaching. What, then, is the reward? As I said, the reward is a much deeper understanding of oneself, of life and of other people. What is this due to? It is due to a thousand and one new connections having been made in oneself. Does understanding, then, imply more freedom? Yes, it implies far greater freedom internal{y, for it means that where you moved about in a tiny part of your total psychology, you now move in a greater part and are more at ease. So fear begins to leave you. For, the more understanding, the less foolish fear. Continual anxiety, continual unnecessary fear, is a sign of lack of understanding, and so of lack of inner development.

But unless you connect with a force that can help you, it is difficult in life to change-if not impossible. Those from whom we have got this Work have worked and reached levels above our level. As has been said, they have left behind memorials about freeing ourselves from the hypnotic power acting on humanity-that is, from the hypnotic power of your mechanical side over any attempt to reach a different level of being. But this is only done through understanding more. For after a time you will begin to see that where you understood one thing, it now becomes a hundred different things. For understanding acts in this way. It is the result of new inner connectionsof seeing things in a new way---of realizing that the small apparatus of what you called "your understanding of life" was a very poor instrument. So understanding, in the Work-sense, is seeing more deeply,

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and to see more deeply means that you see from far more connections between centres than you did formerly. And so you cannot make bombs and blow people up. Why? Because understanding means that you understand the other person, who is the same as you-who is just like youfrightened, terrified, as perhaps you are. So understanding includes others, and not only yourself and your own interests. To understand another person-which is called External Considering-means new connections in yourself. It is standing under your self-will and interestsstanding under your False Personality. Yes-but in a real way, in a practical sense, in a Work-sense. He or she is as vulnerable to unhappy things said as you are. So we begin to do the Second Line of Work.

So I will end this Commentary with this idea-the idea of the Second Line of Work-work as regards one another. As this grows into our limited consciousness, so we include more. All understanding includes more-let us say, more than your own little selves. So some will ask: "Is what the Work means by understanding the same as increase of consciousness?" And the answer is: Of course, yes. But first you must by self-observation get rid of your phantasies and selfappreciation, etc.-which is the First Line of Work-and then begin to try to become conscious of other people's difficulties-and this is the Second Line of Work. Then, I assure you, the Work may itself begin to act on you internally and bless you by giving you more and even more understanding.

Amwell, 8.2.49

THE RAY OF CREATION

The Ray of Creation is based on the idea that everything is a part of something else. For example, the Earth is a part of the Planetary World which in turn is a part of the Solar System. One of the ideas that enters here is that the part is under more laws than the whole. Our Solar System is a part of our Galaxy and our Galaxy is a part of all possible Galaxies. Your little finger is a part of your hand and again part of your arm and eventually part of your body as a whole, but your little finger is under more laws than your whole body. It cannot act by itself, but only in conjunction with your hand and again in conjunction with your arm, and so on.

Now one of the fundamental ideas of esoteric teaching is that Man is (or should be) a small world or Microcosmos that is in some way a representation of the great world or Macrocosmos. We can see without much argument that the visible Macro-cosmos-namely, the visible Universe-is composed of parts within parts within parts and we can comprehend that it may form some vast unity beyond our understand-

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ing. From this point of view, it requires only a step in intelligence to realize that the Ray of Creation may represent lower and higher levels. We can realize that the Sun must in some way be at a higher level than the Earth or Moon, and so on. We can therefore grasp that if we take the Ray of Creation as a Scale of Being, the being of the Sun is greater than the being of the Earth or Moon, let us say. We all know that there are people who are greater than ourselves. Some of these people have appeared historically, Christ, Buddha, and many others. These Beings are considered relatively to us. If we are asked the question: "Is Conscious Man on Earth?" we therefore have to say that obviously there have been people more conscious on this Earth who have had an enormous effect on the development of culture. But since Beings at the level of the Sun originated the Side-Octave with the purpose of transmitting force through suffering to beyond the point Fa-Mi where there is a certain discontinuity or gap in vibrations, and where, so to speak, an amplifier is necessary, we can understand that Conscious Humanity does not necessarily live on this Earth physically but that their influences can reach this Earth. There have always been legends in the past of supermen coming down to the Earth and teaching people how to do agriculture and the arts, and so on. So if it is a question whether Conscious Man is on the Earth, I would say: Yes and No. A person may be influenced by the Conscious Circle of Humanity if he develops his being enough. He is then under C influences which as you know are sown on the Earth consciously but turn so quickly into distortions and become B influences.

Then finally in regard to the question: "Why does not Conscious Man help Humanity?" the laws of the game are that Man was made a self-developing organism and cannot be compelled because Essence will never grow by compulsion. The Circle of violent, mechanical Humanity seeks to produce effects by compulsion, police, but this is impossible for the Conscious Circle of Humanity, who keep sowing into the Earth various forms of Literature, Art and so on, to make it possible for Man to develop from his own perception and understanding.

Amwell, 12.2.49

FURTHER COMMENTARY ON DIFFERENT CPs IN ONESELF

WORK-IDEA

Man, or Woman, is not one. They are many. They have no Real, Permanent I, but many different, contradictory and shifting 'I's. But they imagine they are One.

COMMENTARY

On one occasion Madame Ouspensky, when teaching, said: "It is necessary to observe which 'I' in yourself you are going with." The same idea had been expressed many times before by Mr. Ouspensky. But it so happened-as it does to us all in the Work-that, hearing it from Madame Ouspensky, I suddenly saw that at that moment, listening to her, I was going with the wrong 'I's in myself There must, of course, have been something impersonal in her intonation-that is, without any quality of finding fault, of retaliation, of criticism-for it to penetrate me. I saw I was in very negative, fault-finding 'I'sready to pick holes in anything said by her. I had, of course, heard very much about 'I's in oneself, about good and bad 'I's, about negative 'I's, dangerous 'I's, and so on. But I fancy I had never heard before that these 'I's were real persons in me and that I was surrounded by extremely unpleasant 'I's that only wished to say unpleasant things and make difficulties. This extraordinary inner weakness of what we take as ourselves and place such overweening value on, and justify daily, came home to me. I became aware that Real I was not listening to her, but a lot of unpleasant, acquired 'I's were. I do not know how many of you realize yet what I am describing and how one's life is led for one by a lot of acquired 'I's that live like non-paying boarders in the House of our Being and are probably acquired from bad literature and bad thinking and feeling, from sleeping nurses, etc.

Now, to detect one's own artificiality, say, in a row, is interesting.

It is to notice one's False Personality, to begin with. People, or rather, the 'I's in people-hurl at each other cliches, such as "How dare you?" or "So that is what you really are?" or "Beast, reptile, brute," etc. Yes, but what they do not see is that they are nothing but machines. What is this spiritual-that is, inner-tragedy? It is simply that they mistake superficial, acquired 'I's in themselves for what they really are. The tragedy is that these 'I's acquired by education, by imitation, by reading, and so on, are not they themselves. How many times, in the midst of a life row, does not a person in the Work wonder what on earth he or she is doing and saying, and yet cannot stop doing and saying it? Now anyone of you can be surrounded by very bad 'I's,

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that are not really you, at any moment. If you are negative, if you are indulging in negative phantasies: "Oh, if only I had this or that, if only life were different for me, etc." then you will soon be in the power of these bad 'I's. Now they are really devils in the sense that their only object is to destroy all peace and happiness in you. This is the interesting point that people see with much difficulty, even after years in the Work. In this connection, I will speak of 'I's that wish this Work and '1'8 that hate it from the start, because they know it means their destruction.

Yes--the point is to realize this you as imaginary and see what this Work is about. If men or women, in the midst of a typical life row, begin to wonder what on earth they are doing or saying, they are, in terms of the Work-teachinb. beginning to awaken. Awaken from what? They are awakening from their mechanical reaction to life, awakening to the 'I's that are taking possession of them at the moment-in short, awakening to the idea that it is not they themselves that are doing and speaking, but something else that is not them. To return to this idea that we harbour in ourselves 'Ps that can destroy all happiness and peace-this idea is a singularly strange idea to anyone who remains in this Earth-illusion that he is one person, one unvarying individual, one permanent and real I. In this Work, we are told almost at first that we have to break up this Earth-born illusion that we are one and the same person all the time. We have to yield to the vanity and pride destroying us, realizing that there is really no such person as what you call I. No, there is no I, but many contradictory 'I's. A man, a woman, vows to keep vows. Yes, but how is this possible? Which'!' is it that vows? Now to understand that you all have in yourselves 'I's that wish evil to you is odd. But you can begin to see that this is a fact when you try to do this Work. Then 'Ts that know that they can no longer grip you, and maintain their evil hold over you, begin to exert all the power that belongs to the negative part of Emotional Centre-which, so to speak, opens on to a lower world than that on which we live. If you ask me: "What do you mean?" I answer: let the person be gripped by suspicion-what then? Does he descend into a lower world than this one on which we are born? Of course. We can all see what the Work teaches, that, although we are born very low down in the levels of Being represented by Galaxies, Suns, Planets, Earth and Moon, we are all capable of going lower than the level that belongs to us on this planet. That is, we all have an elementary idea that we can be worse than we are. And, as I said, suspicion can drag us down lower than the level which belongs to us. Remember that suspicion is not only an easy infection for women but it is also for men. Suspicion can only be corrected by the use of Intellectual Centre. But the grip of suspicious 'I's is terrible. So you see that you have in you deadly 'I's that seek to destroy you. Do you regard this as a strange idea? Well, if you do, you will appear to me as rather a silly child in this Work. Why? Because you have been sitting on the idea that you

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are one person all the time and have not seen that you are a Zoological Garden.

Now I open this letter: it begins like this: "I have been in the Work for over a year and I feel that I am making no headway." Here, of course, we are dealing with those negative 'I's that have hitherto controlled this man or this woman. They act nicely. They suggest that you send a letter to the effect: "Am I any good?" Or "Is it any good ?" or "I don't think I ... ", etc. Very clever, isn't it? But it is what you have to observe. How many collapse under this simply negative hypnotism-such as: "I don't think I am making any progress."

Now, let me tell you a very small secret. What, then, is your work on yourself? Not to go with these 'I's-not to believe them-not to identify with them-not to listen to them-not to argue with them. Perhaps you will see, some of you, where work on yourself lies in such a minor crisis. Why do these 'I's suggest such subtle things? Simply to keep their power over you. We are most easily discouraged, most easily depressed, all very weak inside. But this Work can give great strength by influx into you. But the 'I's that hate you hate your development. And do you yet understand that you have 'I's in you that wish only to destroy your happiness by making you negative? I say that these'l's that hate you and your possible inner development are not outside people, but are in you, just as the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Additional Note

Insult is difficult to meet. Notice how, when you are slightly insulted, what a tremendous uproar in your imagination it makes. You keep on imagining, not only what the insult was, but what you will do when you meet the insulter. In such a case, you may be completely horrified by the depth of hatred and desire for retaliation that arises from even a comparatively small insult. What does External Considering mean which can be your rescuer? External Considering means this: instead of thinking how other people are behaving to you, begin to think how you are behaving to other people.

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Amwell, I9.2.49

COMMENTARY ON SCALE

WORK-IDEA

"Things are on different scales."

COMMENTARY

It is necessary to understand that things are on different scales.

For instance, our personal grievances are on a different scale from the national difficulties of the country we live in. When war is declared, something happens on a different scale from our personal troubles. We live on the Earth, which is clearly on a different scale in size from our personal stature. If it blows up, we are physically blown up, as in an earthquake, such as that of Messina, where 100,000 human beings were killed in a moment without warning. An earthquake belongs to the scale of the Earth. A personal quarrel belongs to the scale of oneself -that is, the Man-Woman scale. In great matters, as earthquakes or famine, or war and its desolation, the scale of personal grievances as a rule ceases to have much power over us. In a forest-fire, or in a drought, wild animals cease to attack one another. In a hard winter, deer come down from the snows to get food from Man. A great common danger dissolves the scale of personal antagonism. This is interesting, for the world of humanity is full of personal and natural antagonisms. It means that only something bigger, greater, on another scale, can destroy the power that they exert. I said just now that this is interesting. So it follows that if you have no sense of anything higher, anything greater, than yourself, you will not be able to change.

Now the idea of what is called religion was to bring into the consciousness of a man or woman the constant sense of something greater than themselves in daily life-in short, to give a continual sense of greater scale. No doubt God is not interested in different religions, but only in their effect on this feeling of/. And, as you know, any religion can easily produce a feeling of merit and superiority which is, of course, the reverse of what it was invented for-for example, "Thank God, I am not as other men ... " But here we have an idea of very great consequences to our understanding of the Work. The Work says that unless a man can comprehend the idea of Greater Mind, he will be faced with endless difficulties in receiving it. It says a man, a woman, must have Magnetic Centre, which, briefly, is a sense or intuition of higher influences and of the impossibility of Nature's creating itself or of life's being explicable in terms of itself.

Now it is this feeling that the visible world-the minute part of total creation opened to our limited senses-is not the sum total of reality, that makes it possible to do this Work in a spirit of understanding. For those who say that visible nature created itself, it is im-

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possible to do this Work. Why? Because they have something upside down in their minds. Such are like people who, having a radio, take it to bits to find out where the music comes from. Are not invisible forces playing on the radio? And is not the radio made to receive them? Then how can you attempt to explain the radio in terms of itself? And so it is the same with the brain. Now you can explain the radio in terms of its parts. Also you can remove brains and study them under the microscope. But will you thereby find out why they exist? Can you explain anything in terms of itself? You can take a picture and analyse its paint, canvas, etc. Will this explain the picture? No. The radio instrument can only be explained in terms of the invisible-the wireless waves which are inaudible, invisible, intangible, but become intelligible to us via a machine that transforms for us what our very limited senses cannot pick up. And so it is with Higher Centres and our preparation of lower centres to hear what they say to us all the time.

All esotericism begins with the idea that there is something higher.

Exoteric systems, such as religions, say that this something higher is God, which people of sensory understanding take as something outside them, in the sky, so to speak. Esoteric systems say that this "something higher" is in you-not outside you in the visible world-but within you as a higher possible and existing level of yourself, not yet ·attained, but there already. So Christ said: "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." A man, a woman, following the exoteric path, thinks of a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a drought, a famine, as an external god acting unfavourably. But esotericism teaches that if you get negative and delight in all that, you descend in your level of understanding, and so move towards hell.

The Ray of Creation can give rise to many thoughts that belong to the development of a new way of thinking. The Work says that it is to make you think in a new way. It also says that if you continue to think as you always did, you cannot change-that is, you cannot undergo that possible change latent in Man by his creation as a selfdeveloping organism and which is his real meaning. All that I have just said requires careful thinking--otherwise it may go in at one ear and out at the other and leave no trace in your mind. There is one thing that can be said for certain-and that is that you have to make mental effort in this system called the Fourth Way. You cannot think in a new way unless you make an effort to do so. Now, amongst many other things, learning to think in terms of scale is to think in a new way. To do so puts the mind in right order. To start with oneself puts the mind in wrong order. For example, if you put the Work first, as something greater, and yourself after, then you will get help. Vice versa, you will get none. Why? Because things are the wrong way round in your mind.

Amwell, 5.3.49

COMMENTARY ON THE INFLUENCES UNDER WHICH WE CAN LIVE

WORK-IDEA

We can put ourselves under different influences.

COMMENTARY

When, owing to some chance remark, or owing to the way you are being treated, you feel the rise of resentment, a clamour then begins in you. This is an ordinary daily situation. The population of the Earth is about two thousand million-that is, two thousand million people are feeling resentment at the same time as you. Let us try to observe this situation as calmly as possible. What is this clamour, this inner talking, in us? It is different 'I's talking. If you do not yet understand practically that there are different 'I's in you and that we are not one but many, then such an occasion gives a good opportunity to see the connection of what the Work teaches with the nature of our being. It says that our psychological being is characterized by lack of unity. It is not one'!' but many conflicting 'I's. It is a disconnected many. It is legion. It is not one integrated unity as is our physical being. All the different parts of our physical bodies act in unison, as one organism. That is given us. But we have no corresponding unity given us as regards our psychological being. And that is what the Work can make. Now if you can hold yourself apart from taking sides with any of the voices that begin to talk when you are in a state of resentment you will be able to observe different 'I's at work. There are some extreme 'I's at work, who perhaps use pictures in place of words and make you have visions of strangling the enemy and burying him or her secretly, and so on. So swift is revenge that you cannot stop it. It rushes through you in a most boring way. But what you can do is not to mix your will with it-that is, not identify with it. Other 'I's are less extreme but more subtle. These 'I's suggest various clever devices to bring about the downfall of the enemy who insulted you. Well, have you observed these scheming 'I's? But reflect, you need not go with them -that is, you need not identify yourself with them, for if you do they have power over you. That is, you are under their influence. This is the whole point. When the Work says we can put ourselves under different influences, it actually means two things. One refers to A, Band C influences: the other refers to the influences of different 'I's in ourselves. You can, for example, put yourselves under the influences of the ideas of this Work, which comes from C influences-that is, conscious influences. Or you can put yourselves under life-influences -that is, A influences, the influences concerned with money, and position and power. But we speak here of putting ourselves under the

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influences of different 'I's in oneself. Now a person who is full of resentment, and believes in it, puts himself or herself under negative 'I's. The Work says that negative emotions have the power to go on and on by themselves. In fact, if you find by self-observation that some resentful feelings and resentful thoughts keep going on and on in you, then you can be sure that you are suffering from a negative emotiona dangerous illness. This will eat up everything good and healthy in you eventually, like typhus-fever, if you allow it to go on unchecked. It is much the same as a chronic sore, a suppurating abscess, for which, unfortunately, there is no penicillin. However, negative emotions give us a pleasant feeling because they give us a certain wrong sense of power. That is, they make it possible for us to destroy other people's happiness by a single remark-by one sting. Of course, that also destroys our own power of happiness-I mean, any real happiness. The happiness in wounding others is not happiness because it gives no inner peace. Now we all know the power of an unpleasant remark when people are being pleasant and enjoying themselves. One bitter remark smashes everything. And the person who makes it knows it will. All this belongs to the study of the power of negative ness when a person puts himself or herself under the influence of negative 'I's. Have you caught what is meant here? Have you observed how negative emotions can act in only one way--only to destroy-and how for that reason they can be attractive? The Work says Humanity is not governed by sex or by power but by negative emotions. By way of commentary 1 would say that it is because negative emotions can give such power of evil that people embrace them. But here a lot of individual thinking is necessary to unravel the various aspects of the question. Now, making inner accounts-that is, accumulating sources of bitterness and revenge-cannot possibly lead to anything save towards increasing negative states. But this is not what the Work teaches us to do, so we have to reflect in the light of the Work why it is undesirable, inexpedient, or, let me add, inconvenient, inappropriate, unsuitable, to make daily inner accounts of what people owe us. For this piles up the fuel for resentment and no one can reach a higher level of himself by such behaviour. If you hate others, you are not and cannot be in the light of the Work. That is, you cannot be under the influence of this Work. Why? Because you are under the influence of negative 'Ps, of the negative part of the Emotional Centre, from which no growth is possible except a growth of more and more evil and negative emotions. So, studying, as objectively as possible, a state of resentfulness in oneself, one can learn a great deal about different 'I's and their influences.

Now there is, amongst several others, a remedy. Externally consider -that is, put yourself in the position of the woman, the man, who treated you in such a way as to make you feel resentful. That is, try to see yourself as they see you. You, of course, are perfect. They apparently don't think so. If you do this, you may be surprised why they

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did not say more than they did. Above all, remember that two thousand million people are, at this moment, feeling resentment. This thought may rob you of any private deliciousness in the enjoyment of feeling negative and revengeful and feeling indeed a certain importance as a bearer of harmful and stinging remarks-and indeed it may make you feel that you are nothing but a very ordinary man or woman and so of no value in the Work.

Amwell, I9.3.49

WHAT IT MEANS TO WORK ON ONESELF

When a person is criticized by another person, it gives him a great shock. Of course, if the person criticized has observed what he is criticized about, which is the same thing as saying that he is conscious of the thing in himself already, it will not give him such a shock. I was speaking recently at a group here about how difficult it was for me when I was practising psychological medicine to criticize a patient. The patient, of course, would talk to me as a doctor from the point of view that no one understood him properly, that his wife did not treat him properly, that he had never had a right chance in life, and all the rest of it. This is the state of every man and every woman in life. Now when as a doctor I had to gather myself together inside and begin to say to the patient that it was quite possible that he was rather difficult and that it might not always be his wife's fault and so on, I was always quite clear that I had reached a point where it was extremely difficult to avoid touching the patient's self-esteem. It was difficult because the whole atmosphere changed at once. I was no longer a kind of sympathetic father or mother (usually mother) as I now became critical of the patient, so I became, perhaps, in his time-body, a critical father or schoolmaster or Sergeant-Major. The atmosphere changed because I was no longer going to agree with this purely unconscious estimate of himself as being more or less a perfect and misunderstood person. I was, indeed, fast becoming a kind of enemy-a person who did not take him at his own self-evaluation, a person who indeed even told him that I had doubts about him.

Now you know in life we have to be very careful in the ordinary intercourse of life never to say what we really think about another person. All this means that we are all very sensitive to any kind of criticism, and means that we estimate ourselves quite wrongly, and all carry some fiction of ourselves. The Work calls this fiction of oneself Imaginary 'I'. The person who is simply governed by Imaginary'!' cannot stand any kind of criticism that offends this imagination of himself or herself. The object of this Work is to deepen ourselves,

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because all that is valuable lies deep beneath our imagination of ourselves. If you cannot stand any kind of criticism-and who of you can stand this, I should like to ask you-then it means that you have no self-knowledge, that you have never applied the Work to yourself and that you have not begun to work on yourself, that you have never observed yourself sincerely and therefore that you are a person who is still fast asleep in life. Such a person does not yet understand what the Work is about. The object of self-observation is to make you more conscious of what you really are, of what you have in yourself and do not realize. But it is a remarkable fact that even after many years no one really observes himself. Self-observation is turning the other way round from life. It is not the ordinary external attention that we pay to outer things, when we look out through our five senses, but it is the employment of a new sense, an inner sense, called Observing I, which looks inwards at the kind of person one is. For example, if you are accused of anything, you will tend to justify yourself. You will not look inside-and this is exactly why one of the things that the Work teaches us is observation of self-justifying and not identifying with it. But suppose you have been in the Work in a real sense (and here you must remember that from my point of view you may have been in the Work for years and yet are not in the Work) you will know through your own consciousness of yourself, your own self-knowledge, that these accusations may be quite right-that is, these things are in you. You will then react quite differently from a mechanical man under criticism from others. You will know that the truth was spoken. Then the truth that you know about yourself will correspond with the truth that someone has spoken to you and the two will not cause you too much pain, because you will find something congruous between outer and Inner.

Now I receive letters in which people for the first time have begun to observe something in themselves. Usually they are very astonished and think they are faced with a major task in self-development. I would say it means that for the first time they have begun to see what they have to work on in themselves. They have brought home to themselves by observation what probably everyone else knew about them and criticized perhaps to their face and which only had the result of infuriating or depressing them.

We have to see what makes us negative and we have to accept the fact that we are made negative by certain things. From the work point of view, we now have to work just on this being negative, and not seek an outer cause. The fault is our own because, broadly speaking, if you are negative, it is your own fault. I know this is difficult, yet it is what the Work says. Someone said recently at a meeting, in trying to describe this enormous teaching and field of self-observation, that if he is served with a not properly cooked breakfast all his feeling of happiness vanishes. But that is not nearly enough. The Work is bigger, wider, than such a small thing. That is better than nothing in the way

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of observation, but it is very, very slight. This person must now try to observe how he or she is negative under such circumstances, because observing such a reaction is due to some attitude, to some picture, to something they expect and take for granted. A3 long as the situation remains, such people will be capable of not much development of being. They will be impeded by their small being, their small attitudes, their forms of expectancy, of what is due to them, and so will be very difficult kinds of people, probably exacting, without knowing that all the trouble lies in themselves for having such a small outlook on life and such over-exaggerated self-love. Just think how easily upset people are-I am not talking here about being criticized, which is a much more difficult thing. Are most people upset easily? They break a shoe-lace in the morning and instantly curse someone, their breakfast is not according to their taste, and they lose their temper, and the paper does not arrive in time and they get angry and go off and sit in trains fuming. Is not all this very small and absurd? Is it the Work and its size? Do you not think that this Work is about something bigger than all this? I remember saying once by way of commentary that if you want to know to what extent you have being, notice where you lose your temper or get negative, because that means that you have come to the end of your being. This is why Esotericism emphasizes patience so much, because the capacity for patiently enduring things and especially the capacity for enduring one another's unpleasant manifestations is a sign of the quality and development of being. The less you can stand, the smaller the being.

Now to return to this question of being criticized-I will agree with everyone here that being criticized is extremely difficult to meet. The slightest negative criticism, especially from your nearest and dearest, will spoil your day. This means that we simply hate to be put in the wrong and simply hate to think that there is anything wrong with us. Now a man who has enlarged his conseiousness through self-observation will not be so sensitive of criticism because he will already know practically that he is not perfect-a great step. You will have all heard that this Work teaches that the world is as it is because humanity is not properly conscious. In other words, men and women everywhere on this strange planet are in a strange state of sleep. The object of this Work is to try to waken us up and that means that we should become far more conscious, first of ourselves and then of other people, but first of all we must enlarge our consciousness of ourselves through selfobservation.

You lie, you behave badly, you say things that are poisonous, but you do not admit it to yourselves, although you are very critical of other people in this respect, but if you enlarge your consciousness through sincere self-observation, you will become less and less critical of others and, as the consciousness increases, less and less vulnerable to criticism. You will see that you lie too. But if you have never observed yourself rightly, you do not yet know what this Work is about

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and although in the actual practice of life you lie, you distort, you twist, you pretend, you talk malice, and all the rest, and do harm to others, yet such is this curious state of sleep that we live under in this world, you will not admit it into your consciousness and so if you are criticized about the same things you will justify yourself and swear that you would never do such things. This is the odd thing. On the other hand, if you observe yourself sincerely, you will become aware that: "Thou art the man", and from that moment your whole life will begin to change and you will be under the influences of the Work. You will already be moving towards becoming a conscious man instead of a man asleep who, from the standpoint of this work, is nothing but a failure in regard to any self-development. Try not to come under the influences of life, which are not for your benefit but which use you. You can serve nature or this Work. You must serve something. The only way to serve the Work is to do it. If you do the Work, you come under the influences of the Work and these only can change you.

Amwell, Easter, 26.3.49

SELF-REMEMBERING AND SELF-OBSERVATION

When a man remembers himself he seeks not to be identified with his Personality. He seeks another feeling and sense of himself He seeks to not know himself, as it were-to empty himself of himself. He makes himself passive. He wishes to receive something that has hitherto not been granted him. He seeks to lift himself above himself-above the noise of himself-above the inner clamour of negative emotions, grievances, fears, suspicious feelings, anxious thoughts, worries, money, professional and business excitements, above odd vanities and conceits, and false self-valuation and, I might add, false valuations of others. He seeks to distinguish something in himself that is not any of these things nor a thousand other similar things created by life in him. They are similar because they have all the same taste if you observe them over many years. Yes, things created by life have the same taste, as in a restaurant or on board ship the food tastes the same to the senses. They belong to the hypnotic machinery of life, which keeps us so easily fast asleep in fictions of ourselves-that is, in a state of not Self-Remembering-that one can only laugh at oneself, being, as one is, still under it. Yes, in spite of knowing we are asleep and even feeling it a little, we are caught and hypnotized right away in everything.

When born, we are in Essence. As we pass under the influences of life our centre of gravity passes into the Personality. Now at this season I ask you, what does the Personality wish for, especially the False Personality in yourself? It wants to be supreme, to be made most of,

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to be flattered. A good example of this is found in the temptations attributed to Christ. He was tempted about power. Notice, not about sex, but about power. What are you or could you be tempted by? Someone comes to you and says you can be a King or Queen of the World. Is this far more tempting than that you can have money or sex as you desire? This part has to die. The symbolic figure Christ dies (as such). Notice in what he was tempted and had to die to first of all. In the legend, which is psychological, he was taken by the devil to a high place and shewn all the Kingdoms of the World and told that if he worshipped the devil he would have power over them all. A curious temptation, you might say. If you do say that, then you have never observed False Personality and what it always wants. Take yourselfyou may think you do not want power. But you become, say, jealous. Why? Ask yourself sincerely. The answer is because you have not full power.

So, in Self-Remembering, one has to go through many stages of self-revelation induced by self-observation and the slow realization that one wants what one cannot have, if one wishes to reach a higher level of being and consciousness. That is the reason why the Work starts with self-observation. So try to understand, in the esoteric story about Christ, why he was tempted about power. Remember, he had to go through everything that you in this Work have to go through. Take it as legend or a wonderfully acted esoteric teaching, in literal, physical terms, of what you and I have to do to reach a new and possible level of ourselves, it makes little difference. Think how difficult it is to overcome False Personality, which makes pleasant relations impossible. Someone had to act the stages of inner psychological development. The Work simply says: "Personality must become passive for Essence to grow." And it is not the privilege of this Work to attribute the idea to itself. It would repudiate such an interpretation. It is a teaching that has always in the past existed. So when you try to remember yourselves, it may help not to identify with power-to separate from it. But who of you can possibly know, who have not observed yourselves, where your power-craving lies, that leads to all your unpleasant manifestations?

Also I would like to ask you what do you think, from your own experience in self-observation of yourselves, is meant in this allegory by the "Devil"? Have you seen in yourselves this thing "Devil"? Has it nothing to do with your vanity, which craves for power over wife, husband, to begin with, and over office, relations and finally over the world, whether the financial world or the political world or the social world, or let me add, the religious world? So the esoteric symbolic figure of yourseif-called Christ-has first to die to what? This is exactly what we have to understand.

Amwell, R.4.49

A NOTE ON INTEREST AND TIME

As a rule we always say we have no time. People say: "Yes, I will read that when I have time." What do people mean when they say they have no time? They say, for example, that they will think about this or that when they have time. You give people something to read and ask them to think about it. You meet them weeks later and they say that they are very sorry but they have had no time to read it. They may say that, what with one thing and another, they really have no time for anything. Of course, if you give them a list of all the horses that are going to run in the forthcoming flat-racing season, you will find that some of them at least have plenty of time to read the list carefully. From this we can say that time and interest are connected. I mean that, when people say they have no time, as often as not they mean that they have no interest. If you are really profoundly interested in something, you may find plenty of time for it. So time and interest are connected.

In speaking about A influences-that is, influences created in lifeon one occasion Mr. Ouspensky said: "What are people really interested in, in general?" He said: "Look carefully at what people do and then you will get an answer. Take, for example, the interest in sports, in football, in racing, and so on. An enormous number of people go to any length in order to see sporting events. They seem to have plenty of time for this. How? Because their interest lies there. They are only interested in such things." And he added: "How then can you expect people to listen to a teaching of this kind which comes from C influences, which lie outside life?"

Mr. Ouspensky, in talking about how humanity serves something lower than itself, represented in the Ray of Creation by the Moon, and of how people waste energies that belong to awakening, said that people prefer to be hypnotized by mass-collective forces. He pointed out that, taking a typical crowd of people at a bull-fight, who are screaming and shouting with excitement, or again a crowd at a cup-tie, or at a political demonstration, they are in such a state of collective excitement that each person is robbed of the force of consciousness that could contribute to Self-Remembering. He said: "It is something like this. Can you imagine masses of people gathered together into squares, like large fields such as you see from an aeroplane, each square inhabited by thousands and thousands of human beings packed closely together? Every one of those beings is fast asleep, perhaps shouting in some state of mass-excitement or staring at some horrible scene in a state of fascination, without being conscious really of what he is doing. From such large plaques, or masses of people, the Moon-that is, a state of existence beneath the Earth-receives great quantities of force. This force is being drained off from the human beings because

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they do not wish to use it, although it could enable them to become individuals. In such vast crowds no one is conscious of himself, except perhaps a few people. It is the same with cinemas, and so on. They all serve to keep Man asleep and drain force from him for all purposes that are not useful for Man himself, but useful for something else." In this connection he quoted the strange phrase in the Gospels: "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Mark iv.zy).

Now the quantity of energy that we have daily that can contribute to produce a state of relative Self-Remembering in ourselves is limited, and if we give it to mass-excitement certainly we have no chance of doing this Work or even of understanding what it means. For this reason the Work teaches that a man who wishes to develop himself, and wishes to undertake the inner journey towards the attainment of Real I, will not fall under collective or mass movements which are always taking place in different forms all the world over in order to prevent humanity as a whole from developing. So a man (or woman) who wishes to work, and who has already got a little understanding in himself of what this Work is about, must begin to prevent himself (or herself) from losing force towards typical events. This has been spoken of in many different ways for many years but we always have to be reminded of what we are doing and what work on ourselves means. Remember, you are the subject of this Work. You need not go to a football match to lose conscious force. You can lose force at the breakfast-table quite easily by identifying with some typical situation although, as I said recently, this typical situation coming from life is really a mass situation which millions of others are experiencing at that moment. At every moment life with its comparatively few typical events, in new and skilful combinations, will give you a certain "deal", to which it is very easy to succumb. Let us say someone rings up on the telephone and says something unpleasant. You come back to the breakfast-table frowning, upset, a changed person. Now what has happened to you? Tou have lost force to a typical life-event. And so it goes on all day. You lose force towards every typical event by identifying and at the end of the day you are robbed of all that conscious force which the Work says we must try to save and keep in ourselves by the two main practices of the Work-namely, by non-identifying and by Self-Remembering, which are so closely linked and are yet distinct.

Now there are some typical events that are extraordinarily difficult to prevent yourself from losing force to, unless after a time you see that these events are causing you to lose force, and relate to certain wrong things in yourself. The whole of our receptive apparatus for impressions with its network of associations prevents us for many many years from saving force in certain directions through non-identifying. I mean, there are some channels in everyone which, if stimulated by some outer event, drain force from you right away. These bad associative places in us must be stopped just as you stop a movement. This is to make

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inner stop in yourself. This phrase inner stop is a Work phrase of great density of meaning. Let us take an example. You have had a lot of negative associations with a certain person and before you came into this Work it may never have occurred to you that it was these negative associations with this person that caused you to lose force. I mean, the cause was in yourself. These associations may go very far into your past, so much so that you cannot alter them. It is exactly in connection with such vulnerable places in oneself that one must make what is called inner stop. Let us suppose that X is the person concerned about whom you have long-standing unchecked negative emotions, so much so that whenever X's name is mentioned you become negative. I advise you not to try to alter these associations because you cannot. But you can do one thing and that is to make inner stop about them so that when X's name is mentioned you stop inside yourself the fire that is going to ignite the train of associations. We must lose illusions about being able to manage things and dispose of reactions according to our conceit of ourselves. Only a blind fool thinks he can control himself under all circumstances. Therefore the practice of complete inner stop, which means also the ensuing practice of inner silence, is very useful. Remember, a single word can make a person explode with fury. Why? Because there is here a mechanical channel of associations that leads direct to a terrible discharge of negative emotions. Doing this Work is like fencing, or avoiding blows by skilful counter-movements. That is one meaning of slY. Doing this Work is knowing about where you are weak and trying to avoid the impact of life on these weak places as far as you can. Now a person who is not conscious of himself, and who is still a child in the millstream of life, is not a man who has begun to work on his life. This Work is to make one more and more conscious, and this involves getting out of this millstream by not reacting mechanically to every event of life. Otherwise life draws forth from you a violent reaction and so extracts from you exactly all that rare force that can go into Self-Remembering, which nourishes a growth of Essence.

Work on yourself will eventually-according to your inner attitude to the Work-begin to make you have force and so time for things for which you could not have force or time before. The more force you save from combining with typical life-events by pure mechanical reactions, the less you serve nature, and the more time you will have to do and to think and to understand what you hitherto have been prevented from doing and thinking and understanding, because of the mill-race. In other words, as the Work teaches, we have to separate ourselves from life and its events so that we are not eaten at every moment by life. At what moment to-day did you lose force by identifying with something utterly trivial or useless? If you tell me that you have not time for this Work I know that you are not working on yourself. Do you understand that if you remember yourself even to the small degree that is possible for everyone, your daily life will become

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utterly different? Remember, you do not have to practise identifying. That is your natural state, because you identify with everything, even with every thought that comes into your mind. This Work is about practising non-identifying, A person who does not understand anything of this will mistake the Work and not understand also that many things in this Work are done for purposes of seeing whether you will identify or not.

Amwell, 9.4.49

COMMENTARY ON NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

We speak to-day about different kinds of negative emotions. It has been said several times that the object of the Work is to awaken the Emotional Centre. It has also been said that because the Emotional Centre does not work properly it does not give real emotions. It has been overlaid by the imitation of negative emotions in others and by those arising from False Personality. Mr. Ouspensky said some years ago: "We do not know real emotions. Our Emotional Centre is fed with paper money, by novels, films, and so on." It is especially due to the Work that O. did in connection with the teaching received from G. that the negative part of the Emotional Centre has been so much emphasized to us. In other words, through his particular work on this part of the system, the study of negative emotions has been brought into the foreground. Now G. taught that the human machine is capable of very great experiences, far beyond those that we ordinarily know. If all centres were awake and doing their right work, we certainly would not know ourselves. As we are, we lead a thin and rather meaningless life from day to day, because our apparatus for living is in such a poor state. O. emphasized that one reason for this is that our Emotional Centre is in such a bad state. It is swamped by various kinds of negative emotions. For this reason it is interesting to pick out from ancient esoteric literature some of the things which were written about negative emotions and see what particular negative emotions were especially mentioned as requiring to be worked against, so that the Emotional Centre could become purified. You must understand first of all that the purifying of the Emotional Centre has to do with these negative emotions. One must not mix the idea of the purity of the Emotional Centre with purity as it is understood in a moral sense. People think that impure emotions always refer to sexual thoughts and that pure emotions consist in never having these thoughts. Now just before I quote some paragraphs from 0., I will say that one of the most impure emotions is envy. We will return to this shortly.

Mr. Ouspensky says (in Tertium Organum): "There is a division of

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emotion into pure and impure. We all know this, we all use these words, but understand little of what they mean. Truly, what does 'pure' or 'impure' mean with reference to feeling? . . . Only an analysis of emotions from the standpoint of knowledge can give the key to this .••• Impure emotion gives obscure, not pure knowledge, just as impure glass gives a confused image. Pure emotion gives a clear, pure image of that for the knowledge of which it is intended. This is the only possible decision of the question. The arrival at this conclusion saves us from the common mistake of moralists who divide arbitrarily all emotion into 'moral' and 'immoral'. But if we try for a moment to separate emotions from their usual moral frames, then we see that matters are considerably simpler, that there are no in their nature pure emotions, nor impure in their nature, but that each emotion will be pure or impure according to whether or not there are admixtures of other emotions in it. There can be a pure sensuality, the sensuality of the Song of Songs, which initiates into the sensation of cosmic life and gives the power to hear the beating pulse of nature. And there can be an impure sensuality mixed with other emotions good or bad from a moral standpoint but equally making muddy the fundamental feeling. There can be pure sympathy, and there can be sympathy mixed with calculation to receive something for one's sympathy. There can be pure love of knowledge, a thirst for knowledge for its own sake, and there can be an inclination to knowledge wherein considerations of utility or profit assume the chief importance." (p. 201. American Edit.)

All negative emotions are impure in the Work-sense. They distort.

All of us should know by now what it means to become negative. One knows by inner taste. You suddenly feel quite different. Why do you suddenly feel quite different? I refer of course to those who have some internal self-observation. Such people know that something has happened to them inside. What has happened to them? They have become negative quite suddenly. We were speaking about this recently, I think in the last paper, about a man rising from the breakfast-table, having received a telephone message and coming back to the table quite changed. The point is that even an unpleasant thought that you allow to have power over you can cause you in the pleasantest circumstances suddenly to turn negative if you identify with it. Everything, as it were, drops in you. Now if you are so unguarded within by the defences of the Work, if you are so much a function of life, if all your inner 'life depends on outer events and on how outside people treat you, then indeed you have no individuality. You have nothing in yourself that can maintain itself apart from external life and how it behaves towards you-nothing in you with which to resist life.

Now of course if you had Real I in you-that is, if you became conscious, and Real I became Master in you-what happened in external life would very little affect you, because your centre of gravity would be in yourself.

We know that when we are negative we see everything in a certain

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way, from a certain angle, as, say, from suspicion. We know how spell-binding it is, how we cannot believe what we vaguely remember we believed a short time ago, how everything has been turned suddenly the other way round. This witchcraft, this spell-binding power that belongs to negative emotions, cannot be checked right away. Begin with the slight negative emotions and begin to separate from themnot go with them. Since we have no real centre of gravity in ourselves and since our so-called conscious life is a manifestation of different shifting 'I's, we must realize how awake we must keep in order to work on the Emotional Centre, especially as there is a certain pleasure in being negative. If you were to take away all negative emotions from most people, they would not have any source of happiness left. The Work says we have to give up useless suffering-that is, our negative emotions. And have you given up any trace of them? Negative emotion causes us to suffer and yet we enjoy it.

Now it helps us to notice negative emotions if we make a list ofthem.

This you must do. I will mention only a few. I mentioned Envy. It is interesting to try to define what Envy is. Xenophon, speaking of Socrates, says that "considering what Envy was, he decided it to be a certain uneasiness, not such as arises however at the ill success of friends, nor such as is felt at the good success of enemies, but those only he said were envious who were annoyed at the good success of their friends." You will remember that recently we quoted Pindar's opinion of Envy, phthonos, as "the worst of all the basenesses that disfigure Man", the desire to depreciate excellence being the meanest part of his nature. Bacon in his Natural History says: "Envy emitteth some malign and poisonous spirit which taketh hold of the spirit of another, and is likewise of greater force when the cast of the eye is oblique", which agrees with the saying in Ecclesiasticus: "The envious man hath a wicked eye" (xiv.Bo o}. (It is interesting to note that the Latin origin of the word, "invidia", literally meant "a glance of ill-will".) Paul speaks of other negative emotions, such as enmities, strife,jealousies, wraths, etc., but his final adjuration to the Galatians is: "Let us not be vainglorious, provoking one another, envying one another" (v.26), Likewise in the Old Testament, in Proverbs, the greatest power is attributed to envy: "Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous, but who is able to stand before envy?" (xxvii.a}.

Amwell, 23.4.49

LAW OF ACCIDENT AND LAW OF FATE

One reason for the feeling of dislike for a person, which is perhaps our commonest feeling, is due to his mechanicalness. This especially applies to people who are in the Work. One feels that they are not working properly on themselves. But, quite apart from people in the Work, we dislike other people, for one reason, because they behave mechanically-that is, always saying the same things, behaving in the same way-and we do not realize that they dislike us for the same reason. That is to say, they also dislike us for our mechanicalness. Now the Work says we must realize our own mechanicalness and gradually not react mechanically to the mechanicalness of others. At the same time, as the Work teaches, we do not realize mechanicalness either in ourselves or in other people. We certainly imagine we could easily behave differently. We expect other people to behave differently and they also expect us to behave differently. But we do not realize that we or they cannot speak or act much differently. All this wrong attitude is based on the illusion that we ourselves and others are conscious people. That is, we regard other people, not as machines that cannot help what they say and do, but as people who can quite easily change their being and behave in a quite new way when expected to do so, and so do we regard our little selves. In short, we do not realize that we and all the rest of the world are machines driven from outside by life and that the whole world is asleep. To not be driven by life requires a special inner development.

To-day we speak briefly of the Law of Accident and the Law of Fate in this connection. When we are under the Law of Accident, as it is called in the Work, we are driven by meanings derived from external life such as rivalry, ambition, etc. We have no ideas about other, or inner, meanings possible to a person who begins to work on himself or herself. As long as you have no other meanings apart from the meanings that life provides you with at the moment, such as getting a better job, making more money, getting a rise in office, or more medals, and so on, you are being driven by that set of meanings derived from life. Now such a person is under the Law of Accident. For example, he can suddenly shoot himself if his life-derived meanings are violently cut off, say, if he loses all his money, or fails to get the job he was so desirous of. On what does such a person depend for hisfeeling of himself? Ask yourself how much the meaning of your existence depends on outer things, on position, merit, reputation, wealth-on meanings from life. All this is so important in regard to self-observation and the inner seeing of what you are that I will give you further examples. The question is: from what do you derive your meanings for your existence? From your club, from your connections? Here is an ambitious man who hopes to climb the ladder of social success. He

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made an unfortunate speech yesterday which is unfavourably criticized in the papers. What will be the result? He will be in despair. Or again, a woman spends all her money momentarily on a lovely dress and hopes to produce a sensation, and everyone ignores her. She feels at least depressed. Why? Because in both cases the two people derive their sense of themselves, the meaning of their existence, from what is outside themselves-i.e. from life. Just imagine if anyone of you were put in prison for using red petrol. Of course you would come out and try to bluff the whole thing off, but will you feel a loss of meaning? You will feel that your sense of merit, reputation, has been damaged and it may become evident that from henceforth you will not appear to be the same kind of person to your dear respectable friends who probably only wish to see you in trouble.

Now all this is to shew you, and many other examples can be given from your own self-observation from the view-point of the Work, from what you derive the meaning of yourself without your seeing it. And this is of course closely related to your ordinary feeling of I-i.e. Imaginary'!'. Now let me repeat that as long as you derive your feeling of yourself from Imaginary'!', which derives its force from external meaning of this kind, you will be under the Law of Accident. That means that anything can happen to you. Just when you are going to get that important job you might step on a landmine. What is this Work teaching us as regards meaning for our existences? This Work is teaching you about getting meaning from yourself. Once you enter this Work willingly-that is, once you begin to will this teaching -you begin to derive another order of meaning, inner and secret, and then you begin to pass under the Law of your Fate. Some of you will remember that Personality is under, say, 48 orders of laws, and the more internal part of you, the more real part, is under only 24 orders of laws. Of course, this is a general formulation, a brief description of something that is far more difficult and involved than simply these figures. We will therefore talk about these other sources of meaning which one does not derive from ordinary life. And this will mean that we will have to speak about inner development, with which esoteric teaching concerns itself.

Supposing that you have attained a certain power of self-observation in terms of the teaching of the Work and its ideas, and at a certain moment in space and time you realize that you are negative and also understand that by being negative there is something wrong in yourself quite apart from yourself. You then have another source of meaning. You begin to be responsible to yourself apart from the state of yourself and will not, say, go in such a state to make love. And immediately this stage is reached you begin to cease to be a machine driven by external life and become a person passing out of the Law of Accident into the Law of Fate.

If you begin to work on yourself quite apart from trying to work in regard to life, you will begin to make in yourself another self, another

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source of meaning. If you will follow these meanings, not only will your relationship to life become much improved but your relationship to yourself and this complicated thing, that hitherto you have taken as yourself and not thought about, will change. You will then come under what really belongs to you, rather than what does not belong to you. You will then have another source of meaning, so much so that after a time if you lose this source of meaning you will feel utterly lost, whatever you attain in life.

Amwell, 30.4.49

TRANSFORMATION OF BEING

We speak again about transformation of being. This is the central idea of all esoteric teaching. Esoteric teaching is about transformation. It refers to an inner transformation that is possible in a human being who tries to awaken. The first thing to grasp is that no one can begin this process of transformation unless he undergoes change of mind. This means that unless people begin to think in a new Wt!1, they cannot change themselves. With their old attitudes, their old ways of thinking, their old psychology, they cannot change. They cannot undergo any transformation. There are two sides to change of mind. This Work has two sides to it, the cosmological and the psychological teaching. The cosmological side of this teaching refers to the world we live in: the psychological side refers to our inner world. When I say that the Work has two sides to it, cosmological and psychological, I mean, that unless two sides operate on a person's mind together, that person will not be able to change. Unless you can transform the meaning of life on this Earth as well as your idea of yourself, you will not be able to change. Most people think that it does not matter what they think about the world, the Universe, and that therefore they need not bother about this side, but can, through self-observation and doing only the psychological side of the Work, such as not identifying, change themselves. Certainly, they may go so far. Yet they will come up against a barrier. A barrier, in the Work-sense, is something that you come up against and cannot get beyond, in all probability not knowing what is wrong. You are checked.

There are different kinds of barriers. On one occasion, Mr. Ouspensky said to me: "So and so has become a barrier to you." I began to see what he meant, after a time. My antipathy to this person was so great that it prevented me from getting any further in my understanding and practice of the Work. But to-day I am talking about barriers in a much bigger sense. If you do not understand anything about the cosmological diagrams of the teaching, this lack of compre-

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hension will begin to become a barrier to your further inner psychological progress in the Work. You cannot work only for yourself. Your thinking will be, as it were, half-sided. I mean you will be thinking only of the psychological teaching of the Work, which is half the Work. You will be thinking about observing yourself, about remembering yourself, about trying to separate from negative states. But this is only half the Work. The other half belongs to the cosmological side and the great diagrams connected with it in the Work. All the ideas of the Work, whether referring to the cosmological side or to the nature of yourself, can give force. At times they give very great force. Take the Ray of Creation, and the Side-Octave from the Sun which makes it possible to change. This great diagram of Scale, this lowly-placed Earth that we live in, so low-down in Scale, and this Side-Ladder which ascends to the Sun, are ideas which if you meditate on them will give you great strength and force and a new understanding of why we are here. One can begin to understand why it is necessary to work on oneself. One may understand why the psychological work on oneself has another meaning connected with the scheme of the Universe. We can see why this life is a pain-factory. Take the idea of the Ray of Creation and the formation of Organic Life as a transmitting agent between the notes Fa and Mi in the Ray. This transmitting apparatus called Organic Life is a pain-factory. Yes, and remember that you are taught that there is a Side-Ladder to climb so that you can come under fewer laws and no longer be a person simply serving Nature-that is, Organic Life, which surrounds the Earth as a sensitive film.

Many other similar ideas are contained in the cosmological teaching of the Work that can give you force at moments when, by merely trying to work on yourself you discover that you are without force. So it is necessary to grasp that change of mind has two sides to it, cosmological and psychological. They are both necessary to change the mind and so for inner transformation. Try to grasp that we were born selfdeveloping organisms as distinct from animals who have no selfobservation. We were given force more than is necessary for the mere serving of Nature on Earth. We were created to undergo transformation, possible and quite definite. Once you come within sight of the meaning of the Work with this insight, you will never look back. Unfortunately, people try to do this Work with their ordinary view of life, of the world and the Universe in which they live. Many, for example, think they live in a dying Universe, or a meaningless Universe. Or they regard life with all its senseless accidents as the only reali!}' and say that there is no meaning in it. They think life as seen by the senses is reality. As long as they are fixed in this mental viewpoint, the mind cannot change properly. They cannot undergo that change of mind which, as was said, is always spoken about in all esotericism. It is called in the Gospels metanoia which means change of mind. "Unless", said Mr. Ouspensky, on one occasion, "we can change our minds and

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think in a new way, we cannot undergo inner transformation. And," he added, "this Work is to make you think in a new way." Now on the psychological side we have to think in a new way as regards ourselves -namely, that we are not one person always the same but many different people, many different 'I's. We are told that our level of being is characterized by multiplicity of 'I's and lack of Real I. We are also told many other things which we are studying at these meetings. But to think in this way is not enough. We have also to think as to where we come in the gigantic scale of the Universe. We have to think of our position in the Ray of Creation and this can give right emotions that can conquer self-infatuation.

If you can gradually connect your inner work on yourself with the cosmological teaching, you will find that you will get a new source of force. So we can understand that for change of mind to take place, without which transformation of being is impossible, both the cosmological and the psychological ideas of the Work are necessary.

Amwell, 14.5.49

ON MAKING FORCE IN THE WORK FOR YOURSELF

It is necessary in this Work to be constantly reminded about its meaning. If you fall asleep in life, you will wonder what the Work is about. For that reason, these meetings, these conversations, this making of reports, and all the contacts that the Work can and should make possible, are necessary. For a person who falls asleep, which means that he or she is temporarily identified with every event of life, must be awakened to his own level of understanding the Work. Quite often it happens that a man, a woman, meeting the teaching of the Work, awakens a little. That is because the force given them awakens them a little. Then they fall asleep. Why? Because they do not make their own force by working on themselves. They are like those people mentioned in the Gospels who were given talents. It refers, of course, to a school of esoteric teaching. Some were given, say, five talents, and made out of that ten talents, and so on. One was given one talent, and he buried it in the Earth. Let me quote this parable:

"It is as when a man, going into another country, called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one; to each according to his several ability; and he went on his journey. Straightway he that received the five talents went and traded with them, and made other five talents. In like manner he also that received the two gained other two. But he that received the one went away and digged in the earth, and hid hilt lord's money. Now after a time

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the lord of those servants cometh, and maketh a reckoning with them. And he that received the five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: 10, I have gained other five talents. His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will set thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. And he also that received the two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: 10, I have gained other two talents. His lord said into him, Well done, good and faithful servant, thou has been faithful over a few things, I will set thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. And he also that had received one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou didst not sow, and gathering where thou didst not scatter: and I was afraid, and went away and hid thy talent in the earth: 10, thou hast thine own. But his lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I did not scatter; thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the bankers and at my coming I should have received back mine own with interest. Take ye away therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him that hath the ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away. And cast ye out the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness: there shall be the weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matt. xxv.I4-30).

Can you understand, without negative prejudice, that the whole symbolic fairy-story or parable means that if you are given force you have to increase it yourselves? The Work is a seed. It can grow in you. This is a subject well worth discussing among yourselves-namely, what have you made of the seed of the Work yourself? And I would add that the word "talents", which refers literally to physical money, is appropriate. I mean-what talent or ability have you shewn as regards making your own force, through the Work, for yourself, and so for others? The Work, its ideas, its teaching, its directions as to what to avoid and so on, can begin to create force in you if you work. In that case, you do not need only the force that the Work gives you, but you begin to find a source of force in yourselves. This means, the seed is growing. Yet, you will have constantly to be reminded of the Work and what it is about. Otherwise you fall asleep. As I said, to fall asleep is to be identified with everything that happens to you-that is, with every event, for life is a succession of events. Yes-but does not that mean you have lost something in yourself and are taking the events of life as your guiding principle? What have you lost? You have lost all power of remembering yourself. We are born on Earth with this power-but we have lost it, owing to being brought up among sleeping people. So we lose this essential thing given to Man as distinct from

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animals--namely, the Third State of Consciousness. Because if you could remember yourself you would never identify. Why would you not identify? You would not identify because you would be always aware of this strange sense of yourself--called Self-Rememberingwhich is distinct from that side that identifies with every event of life. We have dropped to the second level of consciousness called the socalled waking state. In this state we are driven by life. So you are then a person driven by outer events, and nothing real, essential, can grow. The Work formulates this by the diagram:

Acquired Personality Essence

+---------------------------

~ r.:e .>:

But if you begin to serve the Work in your understanding, then Life is gradually replaced by Work. And so the diagram of the connection is:

Acquired Personality

----------------------------+

Essence

About all this we have constantly to be reminded. Now, go on as you are, identify with everything, say "tut-tut" all day long. Get upset every moment because she said that or he did that and all the rest. Now try to remember the Work and so remember yourself. Then you will begin to understand Psycho- Transformism-that is, transformation of yourself. But only a new Third Force distinct from Life can make all this possible. Life cannot transform you and the more you press into Life, the less will your being change. In order to oppose the terrific hypnotic power of Life, many have died. The result is that we have, on this Earth, in th{s lunatic asylum, forces, influences, that can master the influences of Life and change our level of being.

ApPENDIX

Added Note on the Language of Higher Emotional Centrethe Language of Parable and Dream, which is universal.

Now let me try to make all this more plain, more concrete, as it is called. You dream you are standing by the seaside. You notice that all the time there are events, called in this case "waves", coming in towards you. But do you not know these waves mean events? Sometimes they are small waves, sometimes big. Life is something like that. Now suppose you have a small vessel and launch it when great waves are coming in, you will be swamped--or perhaps you know just how to

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prevent your emaU vessel from being overwhelmed. It is something like that. Perhaps, later on, you learn how to meet all waves and ride them-or not put to sea in stormy weather. Or perhaps you begin to learn to walk on the sea. Or again, to change the imagery, whose source is Higher Emotional Centre, which always speaks to you in physical imagery, of which the meaning is not literal, but symbolical, you enter a room and are wearing the wrong clothes. You feel awkward (in the dream). What does it mean? Your mind is clothed with the wrong attitudes and with the wrong truth. You are taken to a higher level than you are at, and shewn that what you are certain ofnamely, that you know what is right, what is wrong-s-is the wrong clothing of the mind-the wrong views, the wrong attitudes, and so the wrong mind.

Amwell, !/I.5.49

LEVEL OF BEING

Your Being is not your body. Your Knowledge is not your body.

Your understanding is not your body. A man may have attained a high level of Being, despite the fact that his body is weak. So in what follows concerning raising or lowering one's level of being in the Scale of Being, the principle of which is represented by the Ray of Creation, do not think your body goes up and down.

*

*

*

According to your level of being you are either under more or under less laws. We exist in our Ray of Creation and can descend or ascend in it according to whether we work on our level of being or not. If we do not work on ourselves at all, then we tend to descend in the Scale of Being represented externally by our Ray of Creation.

One law (I) Absolute (unknown to us)

Three laws (3) All galaxies taken as one whole

3 +3-6 (6) Our Galaxy or Milky Way

3 +3 +6= 12 (12) Our Sun as one star in our Galaxy

3 + 3 + 6 + 12'" 24 (24) All our planets taken as one

3 +3 +6 + 12 +24=48 (48) Our Planet, the Earth

3 +3 +6 + 12 +24 +48=96 (96) Our Moon

Men or women who like their negative emotions, who transform nothing in themselves, who take every event mechanically, will pass eventually under 96 laws. But if they work on themselves and do not take the ordinary ever-recurring typical events of life mechanically, but try to transform such evil ways of taking life into taking these

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events more and more consciously, they will pass under fewer laws. Evil means mechanicalness. To understand about Good means you must study this Work-idea of transforming events by work on yourself. You can either work on yourself or simply be a mechanical puppet. If you are just a mechanical puppet, then you are asleep, driven here and there by every event. You are then driven by life, which is a series of typical events occurring to millions of others.

Now suppose you have learnt not to identify so much, through selfobservation and Work-memory, then in this Scale of Laws called the Ray, you will begin possibly to move upwards. What is the result? You can see for yourselves. Your level of being can only change by work on yourself--on your attitudes, your negative emotions, your constant criticism of others instead of criticizing yourself-and above all by remembering yourself in difficult moments. The thing which you have to change is the thing you take for granted and call'!, or 'yourself'. The Work, as you may have noticed, begins with observing this thing you take for granted and call'!, or 'yourself'. So a man, a woman, must begin to see and know themselves, otherwise no change in being is possible. Certainly in many respects it is a painful way to have to follow. But the results are out of all proportion to the efforts necessary. I mean simply that something begins to help you from within as when, for instance, you realize that you did not really say that but said something quite different. This sincerity with oneself is the entry to the Work, the entry to change of your level of being. No doubt you may feel you "lose face", and so on. But, as I said, the wonder of letting your pride and imagination of what you are become more passive allows forces to reach you from higher levels to act on you. And, let me add, it is only these forces coming down to us, from Beings at higher levels in the Ray, that can transform us. No person could transform himself, that is, change his or her being, unless there were forces that could effect this change. And we can see that this is the case if we reflect for ourselves-that means, from our own inner thoughton this meaning of the Ray and all it implies. (Here I will branch off.)

How few of you ever think inwardly about the meaning of the Work. You just wait to hear the next talk. This is not work on yourself in the first line of work. Why? Because the Work teaches that it is to make you think in a new way. And if you do not reflect, you do not let it into your own minds and then it merely rests in your external faulty memory. What good then can it do you? Ask yourselves sincerely whether if you are shewn how to do something and what to do and never do it, it is any use.

Now the esoteric key to change of being is that you-yes, youhave to begin to think in a new way, because otherwise you cannot work. From your ordinary contact with life, for example, you never for a moment conceived you were under cosmic laws or could pass under more laws or could reach a state of being in which you were under fewer laws. The ideas of the Work can make you think differ-

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ently both about yourself and life, and this can begin to change you. The Work speaks of lower and higher. The Ray of Creation teaches the same idea-the idea that people can be on different levels of being in the Total Scale of Being exemplified in the Ray. Do not think that a rich man or an eminent man or a peer means necessarily what the Work means by higher level of being. Figures in life do not necessarily represent higher or lower being in the Work-sense. To be identified with one or another aspect of life is not to have real being. It is not a sign of it. So often it means crystallization has taken place. No change is possible in that case. The face becomes harsh, the intonation is harsh, the sense of power is evident, and nothing is possible. Now all development, which means rising in the Scale of Creation or the Scale of Being, is only possible by taking off overcoats, uniforms, and so on. But this is difficult.

G. once said: "I have good leather to sell-but you must make your own shoes." Now recently we spoke of having to make your own force, by hearing and doing the Work. We quoted the remarkable School-parable about the talents and how, given so many talents, you have to make more talents by your own work. To do so will change your level of being. But if, instead of endeavouring to become men and women, we remain machines driven by nature, then we add nothing. The first thing is to observe. A machine cannot observe itself, but a man can-in fact, if a man cannot he is not a MAN but a machine.

NOTE. Self-Remembering, non-identifying, and non-considering, are the things that can change our being. But self-observation is first of all necessary, because otherwise you will not be able to practise these three great things.

Amwell, 28.5.49

THE WORK·CONCEPTION OF MAN AS A SELF.DEVELOPING ORGANISM

The Work teaches that Man is an unfinished house. The Work also teaches that Man is a self-developing organism. If a man develops himself aright, he completes the unfinished house of himself. Let us continue with the imagery of the house in the Work. First of all, the Work compares Man with a house of many rooms and three storeys. About this the Work says that Man lives in the basement of his house as a rule. This is comparable with a similar idea in the Work that Man lives in sex, movement, eating and drinking. Let us again find a similitude concerning the symbol "House". The Work says that a man has his house in disorder. It compares Man with a house in which there is no Master and only one telephone which all the servants use

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in the name of the Master. In this connection it says that Observing I must establish itself and collect round it all those 'I's that wish to work. This stage is called Deputy-Steward. At the same time, the Work teaches a great deal about practical work on oneself in regard to separating from negative emotion, and to non-identifying and SelfRemembering.

The whole conception of Esotericism, its whole meaning, is concerning this development of a New Man in oneself. This experiment has been going on as far back as known history. You must remember that known history goes back only a few thousand years and is incommensurable with unknown history. Yet in known history we meet with traces of Esotericism which is always speaking about one thing, the creation of a New Man. If we go back beyond known history, we find the existence of complete mythologies, rituals, ceremonies, which all contain the same idea.

Now I want to ask you all: what do you think this development that Esotericism is always talking about means? I will answer you. It means overcoming the violent man, the man of violence in you. One might call this, in terms of another modem teaching, overcoming the prehistoric man who is covered in an animal skin. As you must all know by now, negative emotions can easily lead to violence, so you will understand that this creation of another person in himself, which is possible from the definition of Man as a self-developing organism, has a great deal to do with separating oneselffrom all the infinite forms of negative emotion which will eventually always lead down to violence. If we could really overcome violence in all its manifestations, which means at the same time overcoming all forms of negative emotion, out of this violent man covered with skins and bearing a club there will arise a different person who can ascend towards the Conscious Circle of Humanity. But if anyone says: "What are we working for? What is the idea of the Work?" we can say that the supreme idea of the Work and of all esoteric teaching in the past has been this new Being that can arise out of our old being, our former being. To me it seems interesting to feel that one is connected with this supreme idea of the evolution of Man by conscious development. It gives an entirely new meaning to one's existence, yet at the same time I have said nothing new to you, because the teaching about Man being an incomplete house and yet at the same time being a self-developing organism gives you this idea that I am making a little more plain to your consciousness. None of you need be lost in life None of you need be overshadowed by life if you hold this central idea in your mind,remember it and continue to work on yourself.

Now on one occasion I said to Mr. Ouspensky: "Why were we not created perfect-just like that?" He said to me earnestly that that was not the idea, the plan, of the Universe. To be created perfect would mean that we had no work to do on ourselves at all. To be created as a self-developing organism is a quite different matter. When we

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understand the Universe as an experiment in self-development, the conception of the Universe changes into something adventurous. He said to me: "If you were given full consciousness, then you would know everything. But we have to struggle for it. There is no mechanical evolution: there is only conscious evolution," and he indicated that you could not increase consciousness by any mechanical means. "You have", he said, "to become more conscious of yourself, to develop an increasing consciousness of yourself. Mechanical evolution no doubt exists, over long periods of time, but this does not concern us. But a man can evolve through certain kinds of efforts and if he makes these efforts sincerely through his own understanding, his level of being will change."

Now this vision of life has great force behind it. People, as you know, all tend to complain about their lives. They all think that external circumstances should be much better, and so on. But the Work does not teach this. It says that the circumstances in which you were born are the best for you to work upon. The particular form of Second Force-i.e. force of resistance-to your wishes, is appropriate to you, and if you will work on it, once you have received some understanding of the Work, it will give you some results. It is no good your saying:

"If only I had been born in better circumstances, with more money." Everyone, whether rich or poor, is placed where he or she should be able to begin to develop themselves. So many people say: "If I had only met this Work earlier." They are quite wrong. If you receive this Work into your hands and especially into your hearts, then you will find that the circumstances in which you were born are the very things that give you force if you work upon them and against them. As you know, the Work says we have to work against life. Perhaps some of you have seen what this means and others perhaps still identify with life and life-circumstances, and therefore do not see what is meant here. So many people say: "If only." But what is the use of saying: "If only", once you begin to understand that you were born a self-developing organism and that you cannot develop except by conscious efforts against your life-circumstances?

And let me remind you again what is the whole idea. The whole idea of the Work and the whole idea of esoteric teaching as far back as known history goes, is about your being a self-developing organism and consciously working against the circumstances of your life so that nothing can drag you into negative emotions.

Amwell, Whitsun, 2.6.49

ON CHANGING ONE'S LEVEL OF BEING

We speak once more about self-observation and non-identifying.

The Work has two sides, psychological and cosmological. The Ray of Creation is in you psychologically and outside you as visible Nature. This must be clearly and deeply grasped. For example, you can sink to a lower level of the Ray in yourself-that is, to the level of the Moon represented externally as the visible Moon, but internally by a state of your being. Say you become a victim of cocaine, it is not that your body is in the visible Moon, but your psychology has sunk to that level outwardly signified by the visible Moon which is below the Earth. Again, if by supreme efforts and a new growth of understanding with all its inexhaustible, delicate and new perceptions of truth, you rise in the Scale of Being, represented visibly by the external Universe-by Moon, Earth, Planets, Sun and Stars-then you may reach even to the level of the Sun. But it does not mean you go and live in the external Sun, even in the sky. The intelligence of Sun-people is, for us, divine. The intelligence of Moon-people is, for us, insanity. The visible Sun and Moon represent such states of a man or a woman. When you become violently negative and refuse to hear your conscience, then you sink in the Scale of Being in yourself to the lunar level. But you sink psychologically, not literally. A literal mind, glued to the senses, imagines that the visible Moon is the actual place in space to which you go. But this is mixing literal sense with psychological sense. There is in you a psychological Moon and a psychological Sun. The visible representation of Moon, Earth, Planets, Sun and Galaxy is a visible symbol of what is in us psychologically. We have in us a Micro-cosmos based on the Macro-cosmos. But how many times have I reflected that people get this ancient idea, so often quoted in esoteric literature, quite wrongly. If you say the Great Universe or Big Cosmos-that is, the Macro-Cosmos-the heavenly bodies that you see-is in us, it is necessary to grasp that it represents something in us that it is possible to experience psychologically by the observation of our different states, but that is not the external visible representation or symbol of the pale, cold, one-sided Moon or the prodigious Sun with its inconceivable temperature and its vast output of energy.

Now a man must ascend in his being by his own efforts before he can attract the influences that come down from a higher level in the Ray of Creation. Let me remind you again that the Ray of Creation is represented externally by the visible Universe but internally by different degrees of experience. In this sense a low-degree man is one who always enjoys his negative emotions, his hatreds, envies and his venom, but if he works on himself he will become a man of a higher class, who receives the different influences which are new to him. Even as you are, you can be on a better level of being or a worse level. And if you

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wish to shift your own level to the small extent that is possible for everyone you must apply this Work practically. And this is only possible through self-observation and non-identifying and valuation of the Work. Let me speak to you more deeply about self-observation. lfyou don't observeyourself,you can never change. For example, if your usual daily state is one of different forms of negative emotion, as is so often the case, if you do not observe, you can never change yourself. Selfobservation means separating yourself from yourself. It means noticing how you behave externally towards others and how you behave internally towards them. If you can be conscious of something, it can be changed.

Let us quote the Work once more: "Self-observation lets a ray of light into our inner darkness. Unless you let this ray of light into your inner darkness, you cannot change. But if you let this ray of light in, it will gradually change you." Now what is this ray of light? Light in esoteric teaching, and therefore in this system means consciousness. What we are not conscious of is dark. When you become conscious of something that you constantly say or feel or think, do you not see that you become aware, become conscious, of something that you did not know before about yourseIf"and it begins to be 'not 1'. What is the result? The result is that you rise a little in your level of being through the incommensurable power of the light of consciousness. Understand that most people are completely unconscious of themselves. They behave just as they do mechanically and are not conscious of how they behave. In any case, such people belong to the mechanical circle of humanity and are driven by external events and their mechanical, never-altered reactions to them. Most of you have heard it said already that this Fourth Way that we are studying is based on increase of consciousness. Many attempts in the past have been made to lift Man from his state of mechanical sleep. For example, in the Gospels, great emphasis is laid on "love": "LOVE ONE ANOTHER." But, as G. once said: "To raise humanity to a higher level of being, many different teachings, yet all about the same thing, have been tried. For example," he indicated, "you have some teaching based onJaith belonging to a certain period of history, or you have some teaching based on hope, or again, you have a teaching based on love." He said: "This teaching is based on increase of consciousness, and therefore starts with self-observation. The difficulty about self-observation is that people do not observe themselves, although they think they do." Now people nearly all think they are quite aware of themselves in every respect, both inner and outer. In short, they take themselves as fully conscious. At the same time, the Work teaches in its strange and clear way that this socalled level of consciousness is not consciousness at all. I t is called the second level of consciousness, termed in the Work the so-called waking consciousness in which people hate, kill, and injure one another in every possible way. And, as you know, our aim is to get to the Third State of Consciousness called the State of Self-Remembering, Self-

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Consciousness and Self-Awareness. Only this state can nourish the essential part of you which can only grow by truth. The final state is Objective Consciousness or the Fourth State of Consciousness in which we see things as they really are. That means, we know what we are like and we see what other people are like, just to mention only two things that belong to the Fourth State of Objective Consciousness. But the way to this state is long. It can be artificially induced momentarily but whatever is seen is forgotten. As G. taught, the Third State of Consciousness must be attained first to make a foundation for Objective Consciousness.

Now remember that we talk about change oflevel of being internally, represented externally by the construction of the visible Universe. We have in us these different levels that correspond to possible psychological experiences. If you work on yourself long enough with increasing understanding, you will reach a higher level, however small, in yourself, and you will know at once that the Work is true. The door into this possibility is self-observation-that is, becoming more conscious of yourself-from what you are taught. One can begin to become more conscious of other people, and not only that, but one's conception of the world in which one lives begins to change at the same time. The second line of work is extremely useful with regard to attaining more consciousness of ourselves through self-observation. As I said, men and women think they observe themselves already.

So, if you find a friend in the work, you should ask this friend to criticize you. This belongs to the Second Line. The result may be quite surprising. If you do not get negative, then you will begin to have more consciousness of what you are like. Some illusions of yourself may even be destroyed. But it is strong medicine.

Amwell, r r .6.49

FURTHER NOTE ON EFFORT

The efforts we make ordinarily are efforts we cannot help making.

We have to go to our job. This is mechanical effort. In the Work mechanical effort and conscious effort are different. There is no exact dividing line. For instance, you can make conscious effort within mechanical effort, as, say, for instance, you can get to know more about your job or do it with more intelligence and willingness. But in a general sense conscious effort has to do with making efforts in directions that, mechanically, are of no evident use. Every living thing on Earth has to make mechanical efforts. It is not merely the birds, the bees, but the smallest microbe. What we have to realize is that nothing escapes the laws governing this planet.

Now although all Organic Life has to make mechanical effort,

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there is only one small part of it that can make conscious effort. This part is Man. Man can make conscious effort. But he need not do so and practically never does. He merely makes mechanical effort. It is then said of him that he serves Nature. As long as he serves Nature, he will attract war. But if Man were to make conscious effort, his being, which is based on violence, would change, and he would cease to attract war. Now this Work and all the practical side of it has to do with conscious effort. It is not necessary for life. People can get on without making conscious effort, only they will have to make mechanical effort. In this Work, we have to make conscious efforts.

Now where do we have to make effort? Some people think that if they were only in a School, an Institute, they would know what it means to make conscious effort. But you would find that if you were in a School or Institute the kinds of effort that you had to make would be the same as when you take life as your teacher. When life becomes your teacher, you begin to see that life is a series of events and that one moment you are in one event and the next moment you are in another event. It is exactly towards these different events that you have to make effort in the sense of taking them more consciously and not identifying with them. Otherwise you are a slave of life. Life governs you with its different events if you have made no effort to transcend these events. You must understand that when you are in a problem you are in an event. The only way to overcome problems in life is to transcend them by not identifying with them. You cannot solve your life-problems because life is insoluble, you and it being so full of contradictions. But you can transcend them by not identifying with them. After a time, they transform themselves. But if you identify with a problem-and life is a series of problems-you will become negative and this leads to violence.

Now, take conscious effort as regards the small things of daily life.

Whether you go to an Institute or not, you will find it is all the samenot identifying with small things. G. used these at his Institute in France, where my wife and I were. I mean, he used identifying with small things. He did not really arrange things very much, but he knew that if a number of people, not speaking each other's languages, were together for a short time, there would be plenty of sources of becoming identified and negative. For example, I would say to someone: where is that broom I left here yesterday? The answer would be obscure and I would become angry and say that I had left the broom there on purpose and now it was gone. Then at that moment Mr. G. would pass, saying by his look: "So you have got identified again, have you?" and one would get angry again. Such is our state of being. How easily violence is aroused which in this teaching is what we must all separate from. All negative emotions lead to violence, to the prehistoric man, to the violent man or woman.

Now I recently had a question: "What does inner development mean ultimately?" It means overcoming violence in yourself and for

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that to happen a great expansion of consciousness must take place. For example, you must first of all become more conscious of yourself so that you see for yourself what leads you to become violent. You then become conscious of the fact that you cannot lift your level of being as long as this primitive violence reigns. Here lies one of the secrets of esoteric teaching. A fully conscious man cannot be violent. His symbol is the lion with the paws cut off. Negative emotions, even the slightest, begin to bend down towards violence, finally. If you get negative, having spilt your coffee on your dress, the octave of negative emotions will go on in you and will lead down to violence, whether you are a man or a woman. So we have to become hermetically sealed towards negative emotions, towards the ordinary events of life-a very difficult idea, but one that will give you more internal happiness if you will follow the Work-teaching internally than anything that can be described in words. Now you cannot do all that unless you understand that you are not born from your parents and not born of the Earth, that you came down from a very high place, from the Sun-Octave, and you were not meant to identify with life on this planet, but to take life on this planet as a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Now notice when you become negative. It is a quite definite state of yourself that you can observe after some time in the Work. What does it mean? It means that you are not hermetically sealed. Hermes was an actual teacher who taught this Work. He taught sealing yourself from the effects of life on yourself. In one of the teachings of Hermes, it is said that before you get up in the morning, you should seal every centre from being negative, your thoughts, your emotions and your movements, for a man can only attain his individuality by sealing himself off from the effect of the events of life upon him. Do you know that a person may wake up in the morning feeling fairly all right, and, listening to his thoughts, he may become negative before he gets up? He remembers an unpleasant letter, etc. Then he arises and goes into life negative and is described in this Work as going into life insane. In a short time he will quarrel with everyone and possibly become physically violent. Now when Observing I is established with the Work one knows intuitively when one should not talk to people and that in such states one should never drink. We can adjust things in ourselves by working on ourselves quite quietly without anyone's knowing anything about it, and burn up our refuse and approach life in a decent way, but this can only happen when you can observe your centres and what is going on in each centre. Begin with your thoughts. Notice your thoughts and do not identify with your thoughts. Understand that you need not go with an unpleasant thought: you can observe it. But a man without any self-observation cannot do this. He is his thought, if he has not developed inner discrimination which only Observing I can give him. A negative person is an insane person from the Work point of view. Everything is distorted and the next step is violence.

So here you see roughly outlined what we have to do in the Work and how so much emphasis is laid on negative emotions which always lead eventually to violence.

Amwell, r8.6.49

THE EXTERNAL WORLD AND THE INTERNAL WORLD

People all think the world is outside them. But the world is inside you. The world is how you take it. Up to your present age, how have you taken the world? People cannot distinguish between the external world and the internal world. You have two worlds that you experience -one is the external world given by your senses, and the other is the internal world which is how you take this external world. In philosophy the external world is called the phenomenal world, the world of phenomena-that is, of appearances. The phenomenal world is what the senses manifest to you, but the way you take the phenomenal world of appearances belongs to your internal world. Now all this'Work is about how you take this external phenomenal world internally in your own world. Take a trivial example. The other day in the papers it was said that three large crabs escaped from an oyster bar in the neighbourhood of Curzon Street. They rushed into the road, and one was run over by a motor car, one went down a drain, and the third was captured by the proprietor who got his finger bitten. Suppose you are very identified with the phenomenal world: "How terrible", you will say, "that this poor, dear crab was crushed to death by a motor car," Say you burst into tears, thinking of the poor crab. If you did you are really a silly ass. Why? Because you are identified with the world of appearances. I remember O. once speaking in his early days about some people who were climbing Mont Blanc and they all fell down and were killed. Several people asked him why this happened. He said:

"I didn't know them and I do not see why you should waste so much energy in a negative form about these unknown people." He added:

"At this moment I believe there are millions of Chinese dying from plague and famine."

Now suppose you are going to identify with everything that happens in your small phenomenal or external world and are getting depressed by it at every moment-are you then being driven by external life, by the phenomenal world, the world of events as it appears through your senses? In that case, you have no development of the internal world. You are a function of life, of the phenomenal, external world. So you have not developed your inner world. Now what does this development of the inner world mean? I t means the First Conscious Shock. Do you understand that I have been feeling very ill recently thinking about that

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poor crab in Curzon Street that was squashed? Now in that case am I merely a function of external impressions? Is my machine run by the phenomenal, external world or have I a world develeped inside not dependent entirely on the external phenomenal world? All this is indicated by the reception of impressions of the external world and the way you receive them. Do you understand that I need not feel so upset about this unknown crab in Curzon Street? Has it anything to do with me? Or am I going to identify myself with this unfortunate mollusc and feel depressed because of its fate? Now if your machine be driven by the external, phenomenal world you are mechanical, but when you begin to select your impressions and only respond to a few of them your internal world begins to grow and you begin to become an individual distinct from life and its events. This is what is meant by psycho-transformism. But if you are driven by life, by everything that happens in life, depressed by reading the papers, depressed or angry with everything that happens externally in the phenomenal world, you are a machine.

Now the Work says that you can take external impressions coming from the external phenomenal world mechanically or consciously. It also says that unless you begin to take them consciously, you remain a machine driven by life. Every time a typical event comes along to you from the external world you are identified with it and become subject to it, a slave to it. Once you begin to separate from an external impression, if it is unpleasant, you begin to grow in your internal world. This is the first idea of psycho-transformism.

When the events of life are taken mechanically, then there arise in you what are called "problems"-that is, the usual ones. But this happens to all men and women at every moment. If you take in life more consciously you will not have so many "problems". This can only be possible if you do not take life and its tricks mechanically. What you have to do with a "problem" is to discard it, not identify with it. Then you have a different inner world from the external world.

But you have to learn not to take the phenomenal world, the world coming in from the senses, in the way you mechanically take it. You have to catch it before it gets you down=-i.e. before you identify. Life will give you nothing, save uneasiness and disappointment. The Work, coming between you and life, can give you everything. The first idea of Self-Remembering is to bring the Work and what it teaches in between life and your mechanical reactions to it. Put the Work between yourself and life. Then you will take impressions quite differently. Just as we live in a pain-factory, so do we have pain-psychologies. That is why we have to practise psycho-transformism.

Amwell, Rj.6.49

SOME NOTES ON PRACTICAL WORK

One of the first things we have to understand in working on ourselves is that we have three centres-Intellectual, Emotional and Physical. These three centres are not in harmony. Observe for yourself that you can think one thing, feel another thing and do another thing. What you do is through Moving Centre. Unless you can understand that this apparent contradiction belongs to your composition, you will always be in a muddle. The next thing to understand about yourself is that you are not one person but many different "I's that inhabit different centres. You have 'I's in Intellectual Centre, 'I's in Emotional Centre, 'I's in Moving Centre and 'I's in Instinctive Centre.

Now I want to talk to you again about different 'I's in you. Some of you have 'I's that are very dangerous to you if you allow them to take charge. For example, some of you have 'I's in you that can make you quite ill if you identify with them as they come round in the turning wheel of your inner life and have not observed them and have no power of separating from them. These 'I's usually live in the negative parts of centres, especially in the negative part of Emotional Centre. They can make you ill, weak, tearful, full of self-pity. A person rather governed by such 'I's, who makes no effort to separate from them, will tend to be rather a pathetic person. But that kind of pathos you can separate from-not identify with.

The next thing I am speaking about is expressing unpleasant emotions, nasty emotions, in the sense of rather venomous remarks. These 'I's are very dangerous to you in the Work. You should all learn to know about them and beware of them. Sometimes they are far away from you and sometimes they draw near to you and, as it were, stand round you and seek to take blood from you-i.e. they take force from you. If you give way to such 'I's internally you will probably be always ill. A great deal of illness and even worse is due to your going with wrong 'I's in yourself. Here you must be strong, more conscious and more intelligent. Remember we have 'I's in us that may destroy our lives. The difficulty is that nearly everyone takes himself as one unvarying person and cannot through self-observation see that this one unvarying person that we take ourselves as is a pure fiction and it is called Imaginary'!'. If you cannot break yourself up first of all into three centres and then into many different 'l's through selfobservation, you cannot do this Work. Now why is it so difficult? First, because we think that we are always one person-which is Imaginary 'I'-and secondly because our vanity, which belongs to False Personality, is always working in such a way as to keep us in the sense that we are one and the same person at all times. Do you understand that saying, realizing, observing and acknowledging through self-observation that one is not one person but many people is

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one of the great steps in the Work that can lead to the establishment in us of an entirely new development of ourselves? We blame ourselves in a dreary way for not having acted rightly or spoken rightly but we do not see that this is because different '1's were using us at all times. So we come back to this ancient parable about Man being like a house in disorder because the Master is absent, and any of the servants in the house can use the telephone in his name. If you identify your feeling of I with all these different ever-changing 'Ts you will have to justify yourself a lot to maintain this fiction of your being one permanent and unchanging I. Say you talked wrongly yesterday, you blame yourself. Yes, this is quite right in a sense, but have you observed this '1' that talks wrongly as being separate from what you take as I? Can you begin to see it as an'!' in you that takes charge at a certain moment and is not really you--otherwise you have to justify yourself in order to keep up this Imaginary '1'. There is such a thing as Real I, but as long as you take all these 'l's as yourself and cannot separate from them, you are like a man in the street who takes everyone he sees as himself. Real I is only attained by separating from all these 'l's that say I in you, which are not really you, but have been acquired from imitation.

So the Work teaches first of all separation from negative 'l's because they are not you-they are the result of imitating other people, what you have read, what you have been taught, and what you have imagined about yourself. All this gives rise to many '1's in you which are not really you. So the Work says: "This is not I." When you are in a rage, when you are in a negative state, when you are full of selfpity, you have to create the feeling and power of saying: "This is not I." You have to be able to realize and acknowledge that your rage is not you, that your depression is not you, that your jealousy, your negative state, is not you. Here lies the core of the Work, for all of us at our present stage. Sometimes 1 act it to you all by saying:" Where is my rage?" Someone says: "It has gone to the laundry." So 1 say:

"Where is my deep pity of myself?" and the answer is: "We have six but they are all at the laundry." Now, you know, to define the level we are at, we are told that our being is characterized by multiplicityi.e. that we have no real being at all. We only have many 'l's in us and we have no real unity. We can only create unity in ourselves by separating from these different '1's and through seeing that they are not us. The Work lays special emphasis on what kind of'l's to separate from and especially it speaks of negative emotion and all its subtle forms, such as depression, hopelessness, feeling you are no good. Do you understand that such negative emotions are really '1's that wish to drag you down? We have therefore from this point of view Heaven and Hell within us. Everything that is to do with negative emotions is to do with Hell. But all the '1's that wish to work in us have to do with Heaven-i.e. another state of ourselves which will lead us to meet the Master or Real I. People are eaten by negative emotions

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all day long, whether they are by themselves or in the company of other people. It is as if you had a boat and there were an island not so distant, but all the time you are saying: "I do not understand how to sail a boat, I always get seasick, the sea looks rough, I cannot see the island properly," and then, so to speak, you burst into tears because no one seems to shew you how to sail to this island. If you get from this Work sailing directions as to how to manage your ship, which is the Work-teaching, then you will find that you may be able to get to this island. So try to transcend your problems, try to transcend your negative emotions-try, above all, to remember yourself.

Finally, let us remark that every act of "not being identified" saves energy and insulates you from the effects of life.

Amwell, 2.7.49

THIS WORK IS ABOUT CHANGE OF YOURSELF -NOT CHANGE OF YOUR LIFE

In trying to do this Work, you have to understand that this Work is about yourself and the kind of person you are. It has nothing to do with how to furnish your rooms better or what to wear or how to make more money or what are the best restaurants to go to or the best place to choose for your holidays. As I said, this Work is about yourself and the kind of person you are. In this Work it is said that the kind of person you are attracts your life. The actual phrase is that your level of being attracts your life. Your level of being has to do 'with the kind of person you are. Suppose you suddenly win a football pool and receive £20,000 you will probably think at once that your life will be quite different because of this accession of money. You will be quite mistaken. Your life will be the same as it was, only possibly worse. Why is this so? It is so because the kind of person you are remains the same and you will take everything in the same way as you always did. To change your life you must change your being-that is, yourself. So therefore the Work starts from this idea-that it is not about things outside you but it is about yourself. As long as you remain as you are in yourself, you will attract the same problems, the same difficulties, the same situations. People in general think that if only external circumstances changed they would become different. This is a quite mistaken idea. The person you are, the kind of person you are, the being that you have at this moment, attracts the same situations, the same conundrums, the same insoluble problems. So the teaching of this Work is about changing yourself, and if you change yourself, your life will change. What does this mean? It means that if you do this Work on yourself, you are changing your level of being and as a result

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you will find that your extemallife changes in accordance with how you change yourself. Here is a man, for example, who has suddenly acquired a lot of money. He packs his trunks and goes abroad and imagines that everything is going to be different. But everything will be just the same after a time. He will be as suspicious as before, as quarrelsome as before, as negative and upset as before. And this is because he himself has not changed. So he will attract the same kind of events, the same kind of situations.

So the Work says that we do not know ourselves. It says that we do not know our being, the kind of people we are. So therefore the Work begins with self-observation. Self-observation means many things, but its general direction is to begin to see what kind of person you are in yourself. Of course, most people are quite sure that they know themselves very well. In fact, they never thinkor believe that what happens to them has something to do with the kind of people they are. They see outside difficulties, but they have no idea that many of these outside difficulties are due to the kind of people they are in themselves. In short, they leave themselves out in their experience of life. Or, put in another way, they take themselves for granted as being good, nice, well-meaning people. They never see that anything is their fault. On the contrary, they blame what happens to them on other people, not themselves. This is one of the basic things that this Work begins to attack through the method of self-observation. You are not the simple, sweet person that you think, the kind and just man. All this is imagination and belongs to what the Work calls Imaginary'!'. It is just this Imaginary '1', this imagination that we have about ourselves, that this Work begins to attack through the method of selfobservation. You must attack yourself, not others. Through selfobservation conducted on the lines of what is taught in this Work one begins gradually to have a quite new feeling of oneself. One is no longer the sweet little boy, the dear little girl, who has been so badly treated by everyone. Through internal self-observation one begins to realize that all this is Imaginary'!', imagination of what one has hitherto always taken oneself as. And so, as I said, the feeling of oneself begins to change and this instantly means a change in your level of being. When this begins, when this inner transformation begins, then you will find that many things that used to make you furious or bitter or depressed have no longer any power over you. Life no longer has the same power over you as it formerly had. Things that you used to identify with, get upset about, and so on, no longer have the same power over you. Why? Because you have begun to change yourself. And so your reaction to the daily, ever-recurring events of life begins to change. You may lead the same life externally and live in the same house, but you have begun to change in yourself.

Remember, the whole secret is, in this teaching, not to try to change external circumstances, because if you do not change yourself and the way you take the repeating events of life, everything will recur in the

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same way. You will get mad, distracted, upset, bitter, angry, just in the same way as you always have to every recurring event of life. You will react to them all in the same way because you are what you are. Now the Work says you are the same machine as you are. The point in the Work is to change this machinery that is you. Of course, no one thinks that he or she is a machine. Yet it requires only a year or two of self-observation to see that you are or were a machine. The Work says you are a machine driven by life. What does this mean? Life is a turning wheel of events and according to your reaction to these mechanical events so you are a machine. So the Work says we are machines driven by life without knowing it. We imagine we act consciously in every situation. The Work says that we do not act consciously. It says that we act mechanically, in the only way that we can act. This Work says that we act mechanically in every situation-but we are not aware of it. So, one of the first starting-points of the Work is through self-observation, the aim of which first of all is to realize that you are not a properly conscious man or woman but a mechanical man or woman reacting mechanically to life. But you do not see that this is so. Then the Work says that when we begin to realize that we are machines we lose something of the imagination of ourselves that keeps us going and as a result this machinery that we have taken as ourselves becomes more evident to us as not being our real selves. That is, one becomes aware to a certain extent that one is a machine and one need not react to the external events of life, such as having lost all one's collar-studs, or dropped one's india-rubber, or lost one's train, or discovered that the roof is leaking. This means that already you have tasted yourself and to a small extent realized that your mechanical way of taking life hitherto is not you. You imagined you were taking life quite consciously. You realize the conception was incorrect. This is the beginning of an increase of consciousness. Of what? Of yourself. It is a wonderful thing to begin to realize that you need not react to the ordinary common domestic events of life in the way that you do mechanically. If you never attain to this expansion of consciousness, you live and die a machine. So the Work begins with self-observation-that is, beginning to see what kind of a person you are and how you take things mechanically. The Work is about increasing consciousness. The Work says if only we were all more conscious of ourselves and of others, war might cease. The Work begins by saying that an increase of consciousness is possible through self-observation, by becoming more conscious of the kind of person you are. It says that instead of taking yourself for granted, say, as a harmless good and lovely man or woman, you should observe yourself and notice what you are like. So the Work invites you to observe this thing called yourself and become more conscious in this direction, This is the first step in the Work and it takes some time and eventually all your life, because you have to observe yourself at different ages. The first result is that you cease to blame life and other people and the second result

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is that you deeply wish to become another person, a new man, or a new woman. But, as we are, fastened to our imagination of ourselves, we find for a long time difficulty in seeing what this Work is about. We find it very di.fficult to realize that we are the chief malefactor-and this is because we do not know ourselves and live unconscious of ourselves and so never think that most of our own life-problems, which we blame on others, are due to our level of being-that is, the kind of person we are, which, as was said, we leave out of every situation. We do not include ourselves in the equation oflife. We leave out X-that is, oneself-and X remains an unknown quantity. And it is as if all the hosts of heaven were waiting in breathless silence to see whether any man or woman will begin to study this unknown thing, called X, and so start on the path of the inner evolution of a new meaning that alone explains our existence on this insignificant planet. Now this factor X, missing from our equation of life, can become increasingly active and balancing only through direct self-observation. So begin to observe what you are like, how you behave, and so on.

Amwell, 9.7.49

TWO WAYS OF MEETING EVENTS

This Work teaches that if we do not identify, we save energy. It also teaches that all mankind-i.e. the sleeping world of humanityidentifies with every event and loses energy to that event. So we lose energy by identifying with each event. The point of this Work is to save energy and not to be eaten by identifying. Unless we save energy we cannot awaken, because life and its turning events take our energy at every moment. As you have heard many times, some of you, this means that you are a machine driven by life and its external events. You identify with this, you identify with that, you identify with everything said to you, you identify with the weather, you identify with the newspapers. As long as you are like this you are not doing anything, but everything is being done to you and you are simply being used by life. None of the things that happen on the Earth, due to tyrants, etc., is comparable with the way in which we are used by life whose object is to keep us fast asleep. So it is said we are all in prison. But we do not see this. We feel it is someone's fault. Here we err deeply.

You remember the parable which compares us with sheep used by farmers? All they want is our wool and meat. In order to get this result they teach us hymns and warn us not to stray away because dreadful wolves will eat us. And this is quite true, because unless we have reached the level of Good Householder and, still further, unless we have Magnetic Centre, if we try to rebel against life we shall suffer

more than before. We become martyrs suffering from martyrdom. That is why the Work starts with people who are at the level of Good Householder to begin with. We have to rebel against ourselves, not life. Of course, lots of people who come into this Work imagine that they will be transformed into new beings in a few weeks' time. They are taught not to identify but of course they do not understand what it means, because they continue to take every event of life as a fact, as something very serious, and not as an event. And certainly it takes a very long time before a man or a woman begins to see what this Work is about. You may be told many times that you are under 48 orders of laws. But you do not see what it means.

Now there is one thing that I want to talk about to-night, in connection with the power of events over you at every moment. There are two ways of dealing with events, once you become conscious of their mechanical action on you. One is to try to separate from their power by not identifying=-fbr you are under the power of what you identify with. The other way is to will them. In the early days when I was in this Work one of my tasks was to overcome fear. I was told to observe fear in myself-and fear is a very good thing to observe in yourself. I noticed that I was afraid of the new double-decked buses which used to swing round corners at full speed. I had driven cars for a long time and so probably was more sensitive for that reason. On one wet day I got on to the top of one of these early buses and as it swung round a corner at full speed I willed it to fall over and the extraordinary thing was that my fear left me. It had vanished. From that I learnt that a great amount of fear comes from hoping something won't happen. Now try to will what you have to do. Often Mr. O. gave examples of this kind which some of you have heard. The general idea was that if some event is inevitable you can do two things, either try to separate by non-identifying, or will it, and go with it. When I was at the Institute in France I used to be told at about six o'clock in the morning when I was on a certain job that I had to go to a different job. I used to think how unfair this was. I did not understand that the concentrated work on being that the Institute was carrying out was partly about this becoming negative when you cannot do what you wish to do. Of course, this is very difficult work on oneself because it seems unreasonable, as in the case of the novice who was told to plant cabbages and tended them with the greatest care and went out one morning and found that they had all been ploughed up on purpose because he was so identified. Apart from this it is a good thing to will what you find yourself having to do because it frees you inside. "Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" (Ecclesiastes ix. 10). I would add a commentary on this and would say: "Whatsoever you find you have to do, do it with all your might." And that means will it, as far as we have will. Once I said there was a good way to observe yourself from another angle-i.e. observe what you object to during the day and try to will what you are objecting to and not merely accept it. One

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has to say to oneself something like this: "Come, let's go to it." And I assure you it is a very good way of getting through quite a lot of things that you have to do during the daytime. Why? One reason is that you get negative so easily when you want to do something else or you do not see why you should have to do this other thing. You say to yourself:

"This is unfair." But everything in life is unfair. Nothing is fair or just on this Earth, and you should read Ouspensky's wonderful chapter on Experimental Mysticism to realize that what he saw through inner perception from a higher plane of understanding was that our idea of justice on this Earth is illusion. On this level, all sleeping humanity belongs to a tiny planet which is a kind of lunatic asylum. There is no justice, no fairness. Only if everyone on this Earth became conscious, then the whole story would become quite different. Just notice what is happening here in the world to-day. So instead of referring everything to the idea of fairness and justice it is far better to will what you have to do in everything and try to awaken from your negative emotions. That will give you freedom and inner peace. Kicking against the pricks will make you more negative and therefore less and less free.

This paper is about two ways of taking the events of life. One is that you do not identify with them; the otheris to will them. Sometimes we have to use one method, but sometimes to use the other, or both. I will also tell you a secret. We have to will one another: this is the beginning of conscious love.

Amwell, 16.7.49

SELF.OBSERVATION

We speak again about self-observation. This is one of the central practices of the Work. Unless you practise self-observation the Work is useless to you. You may have diagrams in different colours and all the rest of it, but unless you begin to observe yourself it is all useless. Now you have all heard of self-observation. Yes, that is quite true, but it is merely in your external memory-i.e. in Formatory Centre. You can hear the Work many times and begin to think it is nothing but constant repetition of the same thing. To the Formatory Centre and its memory this is quite true. It is the same thing said in so many words, over and over again. If you are superficial you may imagine that you understand the Work simply because you remember, for example, that self-observation is necessary and is, in fact, the starting point of the Fourth Way teaching. But have you begun to practise self-observation in regard to yourself? If not, you will never understand why the Work begins with self-observation. Your external memory-i.e. the memory belonging to the purely formatory part of the Intellectual Centre-will

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not change you. It is only when you apply the knowledge of the Work to yourself that the Work can change you. First of all, you have to receive the Work in the external memory, but if you leave it there nothing will happen. The Work has to become emotional. It has to affect the emotional part, otherwise, as I said, it simply remains in the formatory part-but it has to begin with the formatory part. This means that you have to know the Work in the external memory or formatory part of yourself, but understanding depends on the work of at least two centres. The formatory part is merely a recorder of what you have heard. It has the teaching of the Work. But this teaching of the Work on the blackboard might be compared with water. Our task is to tum this water into wine. Now if you begin actually to practise self-observation you are beginning to tum water into wine. But in order to do this we have to realize that the knowledge of the Work formatorily is not nearly enough. All the ideas of the Work can become living-if you practise them, if you apply them to yourself. As usual, I will ask you the same question: have you observed yourself to-day?

You must understand that mechanical Man does not observe himself and you may have a mechanical man who even knows the Work formatorily and regards himself as rather a professor of the whole subject and yet he has never practised a single iota of it. He has never thought of actually observing himself-that is, it has never occurred to him that the ideas he has received in his formatory part have to be applied practically to himself. In short, it has never occurred to him to observe himself. For example, let us take an imaginary person who is full of envy. Of course, as a mechanical man he will deny that he is ever envious, although perhaps other people are quite aware of it. Suppose people say to this hypothetical person that he or she is very envious, what would be the result? The result would be a flare-up and a denial. So the Work says that it is only through realizing these things from self-observation that a man can begin to change. He has to see for himself that he is envious. But ifhe observes that he is envious, do you see what happens to him? He has begun to become aware of himself. He has begun to see for himself without any compulsion that he is full of envy and that his whole life perhaps has been governed by this unpleasant narrowing negative emotion. But no force on earth coming from without will make him realize that this is the chief block to his inner development. Now the Work says that self-observation is to let a ray of light into our inner darkness. What is this inner darkness? All that we take for granted that we are, all our pictures of ourselves, all the roles we play automatically in life, all the self-justifying that prevents us from seeing what we are really like-this is our inner darkness, the person that we don't see and never suspect ourselves of being. Remember that you are not what you imagine you are. What you imagine you are is called in the Work Imaginary 'I'. Remember that all esoteric teaching says that we do not know ourselves. The Work says that in place of self-knowledge we have Imaginary 'I'-i.e.

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imagination about ourselves that does not correspond with what we are or how we really behave. Now what is this ray of light that is let into our inner darkness through practising self-observation? This ray of light is consciousness. If an envious man through self-observation becomes conscious that he is envious, his consciousness has increased, but if he takes himself for granted and justifies himself, his consciousness remains at a mechanical level which means practically that he remains asleep towards himself.

The object of self-observation is to increase consciousness, because ifit is emotional the man becomes conscious of the fact that he is envious and his position is infinitely better than it was before. Why? Because his consciousness has increased. He has become conscious of himself as envious. And this instantly means that he can begin to work on his envy and perceive it acting whereas before he was unconscious of this factor in himself. The Work says that without self-observation no one can shift from where he is. Everyone is at a certain level and to shift from that level a man must become more conscious of himself through self-observation. Of course, a man of small being cannot observe himself because he will not be able to stand it. But the Good Householder who has Magnetic Centre will be able to do so. Tramps, lunatics, self-satisfied people, self-complacent people, people who have no sense of anything greater than themselves, will not be able to observe themselves. The possession of Magnetic Centre means that a man, a woman, who are Good Householders, are aware even before they have met this Work that there is something greater than themselves. But a very small, envious man will not be able to admit that there is anything greater than his own self-emotions, self-liking, selflove. Now a man who begins to observe something in himself begins to separate from it. Taking yourselffor granted as being quite all right means that you are completely identified with yourself. Of course, you are not selfish, of course you do not always want your own way, and so on. But once you begin to observe yourself rightly, you become divided into two. Observing I observes you and feels itself different from you. This is the starting point of this Work. I can, for example, observe myself as being envious without knowing it. I took myself envying as myself without realizing for a moment that it was envy. But now I can see myself envying as distinct from my Observing lin short, I have established something in myself that is not my ordinary self. In that case, I can make room for other people in the sense that, seeing and knowing my own envy, I am not criticizing them as I would if I only found fault with them for being envious and judged them without seeing my own envy.

Now when you can observe yourself up to a certain point, you attract the influence of the Work, which has a great power to change you. This power of the Work begins to act on Observing I-if you have noticed the diagram-not on Nicoll in my case, but on Observing I. This builds up Deputy-Steward and finally attracts Real I or

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Master. You must understand, in speaking to people in life who have never observed themselves, one finds after a time certain difficulties because they do not understand what one is talking about. In short, they take themselves for granted and justify everything they do, never observing themselves. They are full of criticism of others, as all people in life are. That is one of the difficulties that face us all in the Work. Now the more you have observed in yourself the less do you judge others, the less you find fault with your neighbour. And this is the beginning of "love thy neighbour as thyself"-not in any sentimental sense, but in a real way.

Amwell, 23.7.49

BALANCED MAN

The tendency which is apparent in the present state of the world is to take all people on the same level. That is, the world is moving into that opposite called sameness. The opposite of sameness is differences. As you know, historically, there were forms of society based on differences. But of course this means that a time will come in which society is based on sameness. This is because everything swings between the opposites according to the Law of the Pendulum. The Work teaches that differences are necessary and refers you to the body and its different cells.

Now the Work teaches that people are different. It does not teach this in any social or political sense. People fundamentally are different and although they may have the same form of sameness they must be able to perceive their differences from one another. One very interesting viewpoint that the Work gives us about Man is that, esoterically speaking, there are different categories of Man. For that reason, the Work speaks of Number I, Number 2, Number 3, Number 4, Number 5, Number 6, Number 7 Man. Now the category applicable to Man Number I, Number 2, Number 3, refers to mechanical mankind and the reason why they are divided into three is because of the development respectively of their centres. For example, a Number I Man has his centre of gravity in either Moving or Instinctive Centres or both. On the other hand, Number 2 Man has his centre of gravity in Emotional Centre. And again, Number 3 Man has his centre of gravity in Intellectual Centre. The Work teaches that all these three types are mechanical men and women and as such are undeveloped. In short, they are one-sided and so are not balanced.

To-night we speak of Number 4 Man, which is Balanced Man.

The attainment of the level of Number 4 Man is one of the central ideas of this teaching. So in making an aim, and I mean here a real,

practical aim, you should observe what centres are undeveloped in you. If you cannot read intelligently any book, you should develop this undeveloped function. If you are a Number I Man and bound about on horseback or on tennis lawns and so on, you have developed your Moving Centre, but your Emotional and Intellectual Centres probably remain undeveloped functions. On the contrary, if you are always reading and studying intellectually, your Moving Centre will remain undeveloped-or again, if you are always feeling everything very emotionally, you are always taking life from the Emotional Centrethat is, you are disliking or liking everything in a purely mechanical way-and of course this will make it very difficult for you to get on with other people.

Now the conception of Balanced Man is very deep and involves a very real study of yourself as being unbalanced in the Work-sense. Since the aim of the Work is to lead us to the realization of Balanced or Number 4 Man or Woman, we have to study ourselves from this side also. You may be able to hit a bowler for 6 and receive the plaudits of the audience and swell with pride, and yet you are not a man from the Work point of view. You are a Number 1 Man and usually boring. Can you appreciate art, poetry, architecture or this Work? Can you think and read intelligently ideas contained in books? If you cannot, you are simply a Number 1 Man who mechanically remains under the formidable laws that mechanical man is under. But at the same time, a man who simply develops his Intellectual Centre is in the same position. In each case you are one-sided and your functions or centres are not balanced. So one of the aims of the Work is to develop your undeveloped functions. I once said to 0.: "You mean that a man should be an all-round man?" He looked at me for a long time and said: "That is exactly what I don't mean." I heard afterwards that I was using a phrase which, translated into Russian, means a man who is no good at anything. Now try to notice in yourselves where you are lacking in something in which you could be more educated. In his later years O. took up the study of art. He sent for replicas of all great paintings and began to feel them and to develop an artistic sense. What was he trying to do? He was trying to develop an emotional appreciation of art. You remember that Socrates wrote poems in prison, when he was condemned to death, because in a dream he had been advised to "practise music" and he felt he must not leave the world before he had discharged his conscience by "making some poems in obedience to the dream."

Now, since the Fourth Way has to do with the development of every side, you will understand what I mean when I say that the intellectual professor coming into the Work must learn cooking and he must learn to drive a nail home. So when people come down here to Great Amwell, they should try to think what they have to learn either in the carpenter's shop or the kitchen or the studio and take up something they do not know about or are not trained in yet. And here

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one person can help another and teach him something and perhaps vice versa. This was the conception behind the Institute in France, where, for example, I learnt how to build and many other things that I had never taken seriously.

Now Number 4 Man or Balanced Man really ought to know something about everything. Notice yourself, how you are always avoiding certain things you cannot do because you do not know about them. When we start later on a further development of our place here at Great Amwell, there will be not exactly classes but people will be put on to jobs through which they can learn something that they did not know before. When I was at the French Institute, I was not allowed to be a doctor at all, because that side was in a relative sense developed. Nor was I allowed when I was with G. to go on reading esoteric literature. Do you see why? Because he wanted me to learn other things such as carpentry, building, washing the kitchen floor, washing up for a hundred people, and doing complicated exercises late at night when I was completely tired. Do you see the idea of developing what was not developed in me? So try to think what centres are completely undeveloped in you because if you reflect you begin to see what the idea means that we should aim at being Number 4 Man for whom all centres are to a certain extent developed. What are you totally ignorant of? Well, reflect on it and begin to see that you must know something that you are totally ignorant of if you want to reach this state called Balanced Man.

Amwell, 30.7.49

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE INTERNAL WORLD

In saying bad things you must remember that you are making internal accounts. I should say, after many years in the Work, that to say bad things is to invite unhappiness. However, people do not see that what they say or think affects their lives. Suppose all day long you have been taking in impressions negatively, you may be surprised that you feel unhappy or depressed. This simply means that you do not observe that you have been taking impressions in negatively all day long and that that produces a bad effect on yourself. Is it not extraordinary that people think they can say, think and behave and feel as they like on the internal side when they already know that they cannot do that in outer life because, for example, they may be arrested by the police for slander? The external world and what happens to it has to do with our first teaching. You cannot go and shoot a man whom you dislike, because the police will arrest you. This Work is our second teaching. Now in the Work you cannot murder a person in

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your heart without suffering the consequences. The Work is about developing the internal side of you so that it is so governed by the power of the Work that you cannot behave badly to anyone in your mind, heart, and soul without feeling a loss offorce. We stand between two realities, one given by the senses and the other given by our relationship to Higher Centres. One is external and the other is internal and, I would add, eternal. It has often been said that this Work is to prepare the lower centres for the reception of Higher Centres. Your lower centres turn you towards life, in their mechanical parts, so that you learn how to catch buses, how to speak, how to read, and, in short, how to relate yourself to external visible life. All this Work is about relating yourself to the internal world, which is represented in the diagram by the two Higher Centres. Here we begin to have a great paradox. You cannot relate yourself to the internal world, which Plato called Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and which the Work calls the two Higher Centres, unless you have made a good relationship to the external world. This is referred to in the Work by the term that you must be a Good Householder towards the external world before you can begin to make a relationship to the internal world. Therefore it is said in the Work that unless you are a Good Householder, which means at least a fairly good relationship to the outer world, you cannot do this Work. Suppose you are nothing but a tramp or a lunatic towards the external world, suppose you have never learnt anything seriously, never done a job, and do not know how to earn your own living, then I am afraid that you have not done what is necessary on the side of Good Householder, and, in that case, if you enter this Work, you will tend of course to use the Work as an escape. About these people I have not much to say until they accept this and realize it. One has to pay to life by life-effort before one can expect to get anything else more blessed.

Now I speak to those who have been through life to a certain extent and who are now connected with the Work. They are not necessarily in it. If they say bad things, that will increase their inner accounts. I want you to get this distinction very clearly. If you are simply a man, a woman, governed by life and its external events-i.e. your mechanical reactions to them-you can behave as you like, you can say what you like, you can feel and think as you like. But the Work begins in a man or a woman who is beginning to understand that he or she cannot with impunity think or feel mechanically. Higher Centres are near or far according to the inner state of yourself. If your inner state of yourself is one of envy, malice, hatred, bitterness, judgment, your psychological body-that is, your inner state~is wet, a sodden mess, and will never conduct the higher vibrations of intelligence and meaning that come from Higher Centres. That is why the Work starts with self-observation, observation of what is going on, observation of what your state is in regard to what is going on in you. This forms a psychological body. The Work is about developing this inner relationship to events-Leo

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how you take events. If you cannot see that we are simply governed by events, you cannot see that you are driven by life-that is, a machine. You must understand that if you are identified with every event of life, you are in life and not distinct from it. You are in all the feelings that life gives, you are in all its anxieties, etc. You are far away from giving to yourself the shock of transformation of impressions coming in from life. So you must observe how you take in the impressions of life, and transform them through your understanding of the Work. Then you begin to hear Higher Centres.

Amwell, I7.9.49

WORK ON FALSE PERSONALITY

A question was asked at one of the sub-groups: "Do we follow the path mapped out for us?" In answering a question like this, one must begin with what is meant by "us". Most of you have heard that we are not one but many different people and also that we have in us two distinct things, one called Essence, one called Personality; also you have heard that Essence is under the Law of Fate and Personality under the Law of Accident. As long as Personality overpowers Essence-that is, as long as Personality is active and Essence is passive-we do not follow the Law of our Fate. In that case, we cannot talk about a path mapped out for us. If we were conscious in Essence, then one might say we would be following a path mapped out for us essentially, but since Essence becomes surrounded by Personality, to which is attached False Personality, we cannot say that we follow any path. Now a person who is in False Personality is far away from his Fate. One of the greatest experiences of this Work, after you have been in it for a long time and held on to it internally, is that you find yourself shifted from what you thought you were and literally told not to be that kind of person. It would be no good at all to try to change yourself if there were not something waiting ready for you to change into. False Personality is composed of pictures of yourself, amongst many other things. False Personality, in short, gives you an entirely wrong feeling of '1' of yourself-and causes you to put yourself into situations that do not belong to you and have nothing to do with what you are fundamentally. False Personality is a kind of painted up thing or a picture. So the Work begins with self-observation whose object is to free you from this wrong thing that you imagine yourself to be and which, as often as not, tortures you all your life.

Now, getting free from oneself begins with making False Personality more and more passive-that means, not identifying with it. Your Personality may be all right-i.e. you may be a very good shoemaker.

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Remember that Personality is what you have acquired from lifeEssence is what you are born with. As I said, you may be a very good shoemaker, and this is not anything to be got rid of, but suddenly you begin to think yourself the best shoemaker in the world. That is, you begin to have a picture of yourself as being the best shoemaker in the world, and whether you are or not it makes no difference, you will be tortured by the pictures of yourself being the best shoemaker. To speak more deeply, you usually find that your False Personality centres on what you are not really good at, what you want to be good at. The study of False Personality is always extremely interesting and most people do not see quite what it means. For example, you may be a good shoemaker, but you want to pretend you are a political orator, so you go to Hyde Park on Sundays, and you might be involved in a row and get shot in Hyde Park, which would not belong to the Law of your Fate. It would not belong to your real development and certainly it would not lead to any growth of Essence. If everyone lived more or less within the orbit of Essence and real Personality as distinct from False Personality, they would probably find their lives quite different from the lives of those who follow False Personality.

To speak practically, this Work begins with self-observation and that means that you have to observe yourselves, each one of you. You have got gradually to observe how you speak, how you behave, and so on. If you are sincere, you will begin to be very surprised after some years that you could have said that or behaved like that. You have become more and more free from what does not belong to you and what you have acquired from False Personality. You cannot estimate the feeling of liberation that results.

Now the Work teaches that we have to relax. First of all, we understand by relaxing, relaxing the body and the muscles, especially the small muscles of the face. But the supreme feeling of relaxation is to relax from the picture of yourself-in short, from your False Personality, which means all the facade of pretence that you are always living by which conducts to you absolutely wrong experiences and makes you get involved in things that do not belong to the path of your essential life.

Ask yourselves: "Why am I behaving like this? Why am I in such a furious temper?" This leads to relaxation of your mind, relaxation of wrong ideas of yourself, and gives you inner peace. The trouble with life is that everyone is being something that he is not. A little sincerity, a little real observation, begins to make you think: "What am I doing? Why am I behaving in this way? What is the matter with me?" Because, if you have sincere Observing I, it will ask you:

"What are you pretending that you are? What are you playing up to?" That will give you a movement towards Essence, through which what you really are like will become more evident to you.

In connection with this paper an extract from volume II was read from Commentary on Memory (pages 584-5)'

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Amwell, 24.9.49

ON DEVALUATION IN THE. WORK

On one occasion Mr. Ouspensky said that we have too many overcoats on. He said we have to strip these overcoats off ourselves before we can get any further in our being than we are at present. Many people speculated on what these overcoats meant. We understood that by these overcoats was meant that we are clad in the wrong psychological garments and so therefore it was meant that we are not really ourselves. We have been speaking recently about False Personality and it has been emphasized that False Personality gives you wrong ideas, wrong valuation of yourself. One is, so to speak, covered with pretences and overvaluation of oneself and so is a fraudulent person. Now the Work is to devaluate oneself. Christ said: "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. xviii.g}, This is differently expressed in John, where Christ said: "Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John iii.g). So if we wear many overcoats we cannot expect to become little children because we are all dressed up, layer by layer, with what is not ourselves but which we keep up the pretence of being. Notice in yourselves some of these pretences and you will become not weaker but much stronger. An enormous amount of energy goes into keeping up these pretences, these overcoats, and we feel that if we lost even one we would lose face. If you read the Sermon on the Mount psychologically and not religiously you will see that it is all about taking off overcoats-i.e. getting rid successively of these many overcoats.

You remember when we act here coming up to the Bar of Heaven, how you tend to bang the counter and say: "Don't you know who I am?" when no notice is taken of you to begin with. Why is this so? It is so because you come up dressed in these overcoats which are not anything to do with you really, and you expect with all these false overcoats and false coverings, false valuations of yourselves, to pass into a world of a reality much greater, much more profound, than the reality that we now meet with, called life. In life, False Personality, many overcoats, may be extremely useful in getting you a job, but it is all insincere, it is not really you at all. In short, it is false, false valuation, False Personality. So it is necessary to devaluate ourselves in this respect. Are you really the person you think you are, so good at everything, or is it possible that this valuation of yourself is really false and that all your life you have been acting from this false valuation? Only through prolonged and very sincere observation in the light of the Work can you begin to lose these overcoats. As a result you become much simpler, and you begin to understand what inner peace means. Because you are always dressed up in garments that are not you, you are worried, discontented, anxious, careworn, insulted and angry. So

the Work has to do with devaluation of oneself. This is only done by gradually observing that you are not the person that you always have imagined yourself to be, for self-observation gives you another sense of yourself. One can detect False Personality in other people if one is sensitive and can see that they are speaking in false intonations with false gestures and false expressions. A person full of False Personality becomes a nuisance to others but it is very difficult to see the same thing in oneself. The reason why we have to separate from False Personality-namely, pictures of ourselves, imaginary ideas of ourselves, imaginary requirements, phantasies of ourselves-that is, to take off overcoats-is because otherwise we cannot move towards anything more real in ourselves, we cannot move towards the goal in this Work. which is Real 1. Now by observation, Self-Remembering, inner separation, non-identifying, not internally considering, making ourselves more conscious of ourselves, constantly perceiving our negative emotions and evading them, and by external considering-in fact, by doing all the Work on its practical side-we move towards this inner thing called Real I, or, in terms of the Gospels, the Kingdom of Heaven, or, in terms of the Work, the Conscious Circle of Humanity, where people are different from people on Earth and can understand one another and so not hate. You cannot hate when you understand. Therefore it is said in the Work that the most powerful force we can create in ourselves is understanding.

Amwell, 1.10.49

OBSERVATION OF CERTAIN '1'5

Every aspect of the Work-teaching is linked with another aspect.

The whole of your psychological make-up is linked together in a very complicated way, just as in your physical body every organ in normal health is linked up with another organ. For example, your liver, your stomach, your heart, your kidneys, are all linked up. You could not possibly take the heart out of the sphere of your body and study it separately by itself. One thing depends on another. On another scale, the Earth depends on the Sun and the Sun is a small member of the Galaxy. So when you try to alter something in yourself you will always find it linked up with something else. There are in us very deep connections that go right back in our Time-bodies to almost the beginning of our lives. One cannot therefore say arbitrarily: "I am going to change this or that in myself." You may find that in trying to change this or that in yourself you must also change something else. So what can we change in ourselves? Are we simply associative mechanical machinery-i.e. are we predetermined or is there any possibility of

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changing or at least modifying something in such a way as to make ourselves a little different from what we used to be?

Now the Work teaches that certain 'I's in ourselves are useless to us. For example, the Work says, in so many words, that you can change the '1's belonging to False Personality without any harm to yourselves. People try to change their diet, their physical habits, and so on, but without result. The supreme formulation in this case from the Work point of view is that you can transform incoming impressions. T his is called the First Conscious Shock to the machine. You can take impressions differently and, the Work adds, if you begin to work here, if you take in impressions consciously, instead of mechanically, you will not do any harm to yourself. As you know, this Work begins on the psychological side. A man can say: "I will from henceforth starve myself." He is beginning at the wrong end. Why? Because his psychology will not change. There is no reason in imposing almost asceticism. As you know, aim in the Work must be intelligent and directed on to something that has been observed and separated from.

In illustration of what has been said, let us once more return to the doctrine of'l's in the Work. When you meet a man you cannot stand, it is almost always because you are the same as he is, only you have not become conscious of it. This absolutely imaginary feeling of , I' that we rest in is not the feeling of'!' that we shall have after several years in the Work. Why? Because this Imaginary'!' will have become broken up into many different 'I's. Unless you can bring your 'I's into consciousness, they remain semi-conscious or even unconscious and can act on you so as to make it impossible for you to trust yourself at all.

Now, as I said, in trying to see 'I's in yourself, notice where you criticize anyone else very strongly. You may be certain that this person whom you see with your external senses represents an 'I' in yourself of which you are not yet conscious. I once said, as a kind of analogy or parable, that if we passed into the spiritual world-whatever that means-we should probably see a man whom we simply could not tolerate. An angel might say: "Do you know who this man is?" And the answer would be: "It is yourself, whom you have never seen and never tried to see while you were on Earth." Sometimes in dreams we meet a person whom we cannot stand and with whom we quarrel. As a rule, that is an'!, in oneself that one has not observed. The task therefore for us is to try to make more conscious these dark parts of ourselves-namely, these semi-conscious or unconscious sides of ourselves. We must become much more aware of ourselves instead of taking ourselves for granted. We have to realize practically, by direct experience, that we are not one but many and that this Imaginary'!' that we imagine ourselves to be does not really exist at all.

Now I may wish to be a different person from what I am. This would be an excellent aim, would it not, but do I know what I am? As I said, everything is linked together in us. Why cannot I be happy, I ask? Why does it always seem that when I am in a charming mood,

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other people don't like me or that I get no response? Now suppose after many years in this Work I become far more aware of the very unattractive 'I's, the fault-finding 'I's, the mean 'I's, the jealous 'I's, envious 'I's-suppose I begin to become more and more aware of such '1'8 in myself, do you think I have a little more chance of being less unhappy? Certainly. Why? Because I no longer have the same feeling of I as I had before. In fact, I begin to know that I have everything in myself that I criticize in other people. Is it not curious to think of the Imaginary 'I' that vaunts itself, overvalues itself, and is it not equally extraordinary to think how people are going about with this sort of bloom over themselves and trying to get into relationship with one another?

Now the transformation of impressions, which is the First Conscious Shock and which the Work-teaching says is something we can do without hurting the machine, has amongst many other things the idea behind it that we do not take what happens to us in life in our usual mechanical way. Between the reception of the impressions and the reaction that would mechanically arise, consciousness begins to interfere and this is the whole secret. Have you studied how many incoming impressions-namely, what people say to you, how they look at you, how they behave towards you-fall on False Personality and therefore on the negative part of Emotional Centre? Have you tried to prevent this from happening? Now you cannot do it unless you have observed yourself and seen that you also speak and behave in the way that you criticize others for behaving in. Just to try to remember yourself-i.e. to transform impressions-without a lot of previous work on observing different 'I's in you will be purely theoretical. You have to be able to bring up the same thing in yourself as you criticize in another person. That for us, at our level, is the supreme form of giving the First Conscious Shock. The magical side of self-observation is to give yourself a little time before you react to the incoming impressions.

Amwell, 8.IO.49

ON OBSERVING INTERNAL CONSIDERING

If people say that they do not know what to observe in themselves, they should study what the Work teaches in this respect. For example, the Work says we must observe Internal Considering, one side of which is making accounts against other people. Making accounts against other people means feeling that they owe you something for their bad behaviour towards you. Some people make themselves very weak by this form of Internal Considering, feeling they are owed by others and believing that if others treated them better their own lives would be

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