If you take things as you have always taken them, nothing new can form itself, but if you take life from what the Work teaches and take yourself in a new way, you will make a new pattern, new associations in the frontal lobes if you like, and these will connect with Higher Centers. If your aim is right this will happen gradually, but if your aim is a life-aim, a purely ambitious aim, you will not form any new patterns, but just ordinary commonplace ones.

The Work is to get the psychological world rightly adjusted so that it transmits Higher Centers. We may in life conceal our psychological thoughts and feelings but the Work is another force not of life, and from that we can conceal nothing that is psychological.

Consider for a moment what the Work says—that you have no Real I and you are nothing but a mass of mechanical reactions to life. I say, think about this, and think about it deeply, and you will begin to see what the Work is about, but of course if your ordinary associative paths of thought are never challenged by yourselves you cannot progress

We have to have quite new forms of Truth to reach Higher Centers, we have to have a new language, we have to have new ways of thinking which have nothing to do with the world as seen. The Truth that is coming from Higher Centers continually cannot reach us because of the falsity and pretence which only insight resulting from self-observation can penetrate.

When people say to me that they do not know what to observe in themselves, one answer is: "Can you observe your negative states? Can you observe that you are negative?" Remember, as I said, if you are negative it is always your fault. Self-justifying has such sway over us however that it takes us years before we can realize what this means.

You can never make aim unless you see what the Work is about—namely, about yourself and your relationship to Higher Centers or Real Conscience. All aim in the Work must be connected with the Work —work on yourself first of all, work with others, and with the whole meaning of esotericism, i.e. the Work itself. You should start with the first line of Work in connection with aim.

If we were all more in Essence than we are at present everything would become much more real, much more genuine, much more simple, much more true, and much more good.

As regards yourself, you no longer see yourself as good and others who do not agree as bad. You no longer see and value yourself, as you once did, but see yourself from many sides and accept your contradictions.

Simply to see a bus or a tree requires zero attention. To observe them—their colour, shape, and so on—requires directed attention. You see hundreds of buses and trees every day but do not observe them. It is all a vague, confused picture. In the same way, your inner life is a vague, confused picture. You do not observe it, but you are in general aware of it, as you are of buses and trees.

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.

The reason why you don't see yourselves is that you take what you know as fixed and final. You think you know. You are certain you know what is good and bad. It is not merely your vanity that makes you think you know, but also your ignorance. From the standpoint of Higher Man we are all ridiculous, just like monkeys.

Observe yourself from the standpoint of your negative states; be sincere and admit you are in a negative state; then say to yourself: "I have a right not to be negative." Here all your understanding of the Work will come to your aid and maybe the whole negative state will vanish in a moment.

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.

There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. Unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help, and that unless you receive help you cannot reach a different level of being. But at the same time unless you prepare yourself by means of Self-Observation and trying to separate from what the Work teaches are wrong functions, you cannot receive the influences coming from Higher Centers.