We Cannot Love With a Broken Instrument
The object of the Work is to cleanse our lower centers, to clear them out, to open their windows, so that they can begin to transmit these ideas and directions coming from higher centers.
Purification of the Emotional Center
When you begin to serve this Work really you have to lose these petty, daily, small self-emotions and you can only do so by realizing that the Work is much bigger than you. You have to serve the Work and not yourself. The Work must not be a function of yourself but you must become a function of the Work.
Feeling the Work
The Work is not something that you hear about from time to time but is something that must eventually be always with you, something that you eventually think about even more than your interests and problems in life. This takes time.
When Being Becomes a Problem
When you begin to see the truth of this Work for yourself, without the help of others, you begin to have your own source of work in yourself. It grows on you.
Recognizing Negative Emotions
It is a good thing to try to make lists of negative emotions for yourselves. The purification of the Emotional Center is especially emphasized in this Work.
The Inner Murmur: How Complaint Undermines Inner Work
Now, if I will to do what I have to do, I will not make inner accounts against others. But if I do what I have to do and all the time think that someone else should do it and that it is unfair that I should have to do it, then I am making internal accounts. That is, I am internally considering.
Self-Remembering Requires Emotional Force, Not Parrot ‘I’s
The act of Self-Remembering must have a certain emotional quality. It is owing to the emotional quality that one is put at once into higher parts of centers, into bigger 'I's. These can remember the Work, they can understand it. No one can work continuously but only at times.
Three-Centered Self-Observation
In trying to control an observed 'I', you must remember that it is something that thinks, and feels and moves—that is, each representation of it in each center is different. The control of the human machine is difficult therefore because everything that is formed in it psychologically —namely, as an 'I'—is represented in three entirely different ways, that seem at first sight unconnected.
Observing the Emotional and Intellectual Centers: Breaking the Cycle of Mechanicity
We should observe not only vaguely our emotional state but the words or gestures or expressions that accompany this state—and this means to observe two centers.
Evaluation and the Awakening of the Emotional Center
The Work says very many things about evaluation. For example, it says that the octave of inner development, and so change of level of one's Being, begins with the Note Do, which is termed "Evaluation of the Work". The Note Re is application of the ideas to oneself. The Note Mi is realization of personal difficulties. The Work also says that its ultimate aim is to awaken the Emotional Center.