When life becomes one's teacher, then the highest work is reached. And then you are right in the track of the Fourth Way. But it is difficult—Oh, how difficult!—and requires much and long work on oneself and patient understanding. You must, as it were, be able to suffer all things at the hands of men and yet keep on working.

A person in the Fourth Way of Work must be able to be quite ordinary in life. There must be no kind of superiority, no hinting, no persuasion, no dark remarks. But if you work on yourself, when the other person is difficult, that will make the other person aware that you are different. But you must not show it openly.

It will be very easy for your attempts at external considering to turn into an increased form of internal considering. You must calculate second force—that is, the difficulties.

You know how in life people are always trying to improve one another by reproving one another, always finding fault with one another. This is quite useless and leads to all the endless strife in life. But making oneself passive to a person and working on oneself therefrom—for to be passive requires constant inner work on yourself —this, I assure you, can effect a change in the other person, because your work makes room for him to alter.

You must have a genuine matured conscious aim that starts in the light of the Work and to which you hold on every time you remember yourself and every time you think of what you are doing practically in this Work. Only then will the Work help you

As long as you externally consider another person with a view to trying to change him or her—that is, as long as you think the other person should be different—you are not externally considering, but internally considering. The basis of internal considering is thinking that others should be different, and from this comes "making accounts" against others…