You should always remember yourself but as you are you have not the force and even cannot remember that you have to remember yourself. The most important thing is to remember yourself. Self-Remembering puts us into a different state of consciousness. In that state of consciousness you cannot do certain things without going to sleep at once and you can see it happening—that is, you can see yourself becoming identified. Or, to put the matter differently, if you do certain things and remember yourself at the same time, you will do them in quite a different way.

To be taught in this Work about negative emotions is one thing, but as mere knowledge it is useless. It remains theoretical only—in the memory. You have to apply the knowledge to yourself and this is only possible through observing yourself. Unless you connect the knowledge of this Work with Self-Observation, nothing can happen to you. The Work will remain purely theoretical and not practical. The function of Self-Observation, therefore, is something that can be understood quite logically. Its object is clear.

Let us say that a person makes a small aim to cook an excellent dinner. There are so many ways in which that excellent dinner can be cooked —I mean, psychological ways, not ordinary ways. Now suppose you have made a big and real aim that you are going to try to remember to act in life without identifying and that you are going to try to practice this great Work-exercise at least several times a day.

Suppose what you have seen in yourself is some bad negative emotion, some really evil ill-will. Hitherto you have identified with it and so you have been it and it has been you. You have been for years under its power.

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? In this connection I will add something.

The Work begins by teaching you very earnestly that there are many 'I's in yourself. Unless you can bear to realize this, you cannot do this Work beyond a certain point. You cannot separate from yourself and if this is the case you cannot really grasp the Work. Everything will remain personal. You will be offended.

Now when the Work begins to build itself up in you—which it will do if you do not internally deny it or if you do not put little value on it— a new point of will begins also and so a new point of being. It resists the stream of constant changing. As long as we follow each one of our passing desires—as long as we are slaves to every passing mood, we cannot form a new will.

A question was then asked: "What then should I do?" This question always arises in everyone's mind. The Work-answer is about what you should not do. The question should be: "What then should we not do?" It is just here that the Work comes in.

For a long time the Work remains external, as something on the blackboard of the memory. But after a time a person may realize it is quite true that he or she is asleep and has negative emotions, etc. Or they may realize some other thing, some other idea that the Work teaches. The Work asks us to think from itself—to have a Work-mind, a mind formed by the ideas of the Work, to see things from what the Work teaches about ourselves, others and life.

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.

People even think it is right to worry about everything, about the past and the future, about themselves, about others, and so on. This is simply nothing but a serious negative illness, difficult to cure, for once a person has become nothing but an inverted machine for worrying, all sorts of wrong connections have been established and everything works in the wrong way, and since the only thing we enjoy is worrying, to deprive us of this, were it possible, would be to destroy our chief interest.

In learning how to live from the Work point of view, so that we live more consciously in life, or live in the Work in life and not just in life without anything between us and life, worrying is one of the things that show us something about ourselves if we notice it uncritically and over a long enough period.

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?