Now let me speak about the next level of Being awaiting you. What for you is the Kingdom of Heaven? What for you is the Conscious Circle of Humanity? It is no good thinking about matters very remote from you. The whole thing is very close to you—in fact, "closer than your neck-vein". Your Kingdom of Heaven, your Conscious Circle of Humanity, is your next level of Being, which lies very close to but very distinct from your present level of Being.

Now things exist and have power over us because we are not properly conscious of them. The more unconscious a thing, the more power it exerts on us and the more mechanical our behaviour. To bring a thing up into the light of Consciousness is to rob it of its power. For this, long self-observation is needed and much patience with oneself. We observe—but not fully. Full self-observation takes time—years—one life-time perhaps.

If a person is not conscious of the fact that he or she speaks or acts in a certain way, can that person change it? No—it is quite clear that it is impossible. Now suppose you point out to the person that he or she speaks or behaves in this particular way— what will happen? Most likely you will be accused of unfairness. Why? Because the person concerned has no idea that it is true. The matter is not conscious to the person's mind. It is unconscious.

Taking photographs of oneself is 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.

To become more conscious of yourself is a strange experience. To become conscious of others is just as strange and even more strange. The life you yourself lead with passions and jealousies, meannesses, dislikes and hatreds, becomes utterly ridiculous.

If we begin to obey the ideas of the Work by seeing their truth and eventually realize what good lies in them, then we begin to be more free from the momentary wills of different 'I's —doing what they like.

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.

Now every expansion of consciousness leads to a development of intelligence, leading to more consciousness of ourselves and of other people connected with us. This is a development, a growth of intelligence, and if we practice this long enough and undergo all the temptations, all the attacks of 'I's in us that do not wish the Work and hate it, if we defend the Truth of the Work and are passive to attacks on it, then after a time we will become aware of this Intelligence that I spoke of that is behind everything that you do and is at present an Onlooker, quite uncritical, quite impersonal.

This system promises nothing. But if you work, you will get something. Let us say, you will receive leather with which to make shoes. But you must make the shoes yourself, so that they fit you. They must be your own shoes—not borrowed shoes.

The Work Octave starts with evaluation as Do, and application of the ideas to yourself as Re. Certainly this is a big step. Remember that you are the subject of the Work, you yourself.

So the first step in increase of consciousness is to see through yourself and acknowledge what you see. What is the result? Instantly other people who are keeping up their facade of False Personality will feel more at ease with you.

You know what it is to do your daily work mechanically and the difference if you do it more consciously. In the one case, you get no impressions: in the other case, you get some impressions.

The point of the Work is to create a conscious place where we can be 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.

Now when you take in impressions voluntarily the associative paths they follow are different from the paths followed when you take in impressions involuntarily. In this Work we gradually learn to take in impressions more and more consciously—-that is, to take in impressions voluntarily.

Self-Remembering from one aspect is the practice of a certain relation of consciousness to one's body and through it to the world as rendered by our senses. If we take it like that, then there are three things (1) consciousness, (2) the body with its external senses, (3) the external world of things and people.

As long as there is no change in the level of being, your personal history remains the same. Everything repeats itself in your own life: you say the same things, you do the same things, you regret the same things, you commit the same things. And all this belongs to this immensely deep idea that the level of being attracts your life.

And so you must understand that we have to make something very strong in ourselves by the help of the Work little by little so that we can withstand the shifting scene, moments of happiness followed by moments of depression, moments of hope followed by moments of despair, in order that we may have a center of gravity within ourselves so that we are not shaken because now we feel happy and the next moment we feel unhappy.

The idea of this Work is to enlarge consciousness. We have, we are told, to become far more conscious to ourselves through direct self-observation, so that all sorts of narrow pictures that we have of ourselves are destroyed and we begin to live in a larger edition of ourselves. We can take it as a general rule in the Work that when we are up against someone else we may be sure that that is the very thing we have to work on in ourselves. This gives us an entirely different orientation and in my opinion it is the beginning of real work.

You cannot alter yourself directly. You can only alter by means of certain kinds of effort. These efforts are shown us. There is the great effort of non-identifying—not identifying, with yourself, to begin with. (What a fine fellow I am!). There is the great effort of Self-Remembering. This is the first effort of all, but very difficult.