Yet that small amount of awakening you had yesterday should have been put into the room of your inner memory which is outside time and is in shelves, arranged vertically in scale of value. Such moments eventually begin to lift us. They enable us to remember ourselves—out of time and its cares.

Aim must be made consciously, with insight, after long observation, in view of realizing what is putting you to sleep and what helps you to keep awake.

When we are awake—i.e. when we are surrounded by the strength of the Work and are conscious of what it teaches—then impressions of life are transformed. They have another meaning. It is not the external situation that we think about and react to, but the ideas of the Work to which we react. Life does not fall directly on us, but passes through this medium of the Work, and then life becomes a teacher to us through this medium of the Work.

It is only through a feeling of something higher that you can separate from something lower, and, after a time, when you have experienced what this means, you will do everything you can to keep the feeling of something higher alive in you at all costs and you will begin to hate those periods in which you are totally identified with external things.

Let me remind you what self-observation is, because without self-observation no sealing can take place. You are composed of many 'I's amongst which sits Observing 'I'. These 'I's are all looking at a play on the stage: the play represents life. This is the situation of yourself asleep.

One of our unused inner senses is the faculty of self-observation. We have to train ourselves to use this internal camera. If used, it eventually presents us with full-length portraits of ourselves entirely different from what we should ever have expected.

It is only by means of observing myself uncritically and over a considerable period that I begin to understand that I do not remember myself.

The one who has reached a stage in which they have something independent of outer conditions, something which is independent of failure or success, cold or heat, discomfort or comfort, starvation or plenty, such a one has Second Body.