You can bring the atmosphere of the Work into everything that you do. But if you identify with everything and make inner accounts, this will be impossible. Life will eat you. Taking things from the Work point of view can alter your Being.

Do you observe when you are full of cares and anxieties and thoroughly identified with life? Has it ever occurred to you that this is one of the things that you have to observe? And has it ever occurred to you that this is a sign of your Being, of what you are—for example, that you are a person whose level or quality of Being is such that he or she is always full of cares and worries?

If you begin to see all this about your state of Being you are already much further on, however hopeless you may feel, than a person who has never caught such glimpses of himself or herself, because it is exactly this feeling of vacuum, of deficiency, of lack, that is the starting point of work on one's own Being.

In this Work it is necessary to look at people less personally. People become very identified with each other, especially negatively, by taking one another as physical objects. A person whom you see visually through the senses is not necessarily—in fact, never—the person that you think.

Study your negative states, for this is one of the most important sides of self-study. Observe them, note them down, and above all remember them so that when they come back again, as they always do, you may gradually recognize them before they can exert their full power—namely, before you can identify with them.

Now as regards the often-asked question: "Can you give me examples of what personal aim means?" On the side of knowledge, personal aim means to become familiar with the ideas of the Work. On the side of Being, personal aim means to observe yourself in the light of the knowledge of the Work and apply it to yourself. Personal work on your own Being begins when you notice something that the Work tells you about in yourself.

Past moments of sleep, past moments of identifying with wrong 'I's in ourselves, can be to a certain extent cancelled by consciously going over the whole situation in our minds afterwards. You must never think that you cannot work on a thing in your past. Never think that you cannot alter it. You can alter the present, you can alter the past, and you can alter the future.

It is only by applying the Work to oneself in one's own particular case that one can realize what Self-Remembering is. If you do not know what it is to observe you are asleep, how can you remember yourself?

If you feel the extraordinariness of your own existence, if you feel the miracle of your body, of your consciousness, of the world that surrounds you, if you begin to wonder who you are, then you are in the state necessary for Self-Remembering.

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.

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.

If you observe yourself rightly, you notice these thoughts not as yourself but as coming from a negative ‘I’ in you. As a result what it says does not get power over you, because you are separate from it.

If you are always identified with your inner state of the moment, with your thoughts and your moods, then you cannot change. For you to shift from the position you are in, your must first divide yourself into two.

The first stages of the Work are sometimes called "cleaning the machine." The Work tells you more about what not to do than about what to do. Now people often ask: "What am I to do?" On that side the Work says only two definite things: "Remember yourself" and "Observe or notice yourself." That is what you must try to do.

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.

As long as there is no change in your 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.

It has been said that Self-Remembering gives a shock to the whole Being and actually provides better food for the cells of the body. But we do not give this shock to ourselves ordinarily and for that reason it is called the First Conscious Shock, because it has to be done deliberately.