Now if you have cleared a portico, a hall, a space in yourself by self- observation so that you can see a negative impression coming in and are able not to let it enter freely, not to identify with it, not let it go where it wishes, not say 'I' to it, then you keep clear of the mechanical result of that impression. This is magic.

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.

When we are awake—i.e. when we are surrounded by the strength of the Work and are conscious of what it teaches—then impressions of life are transformed. They have another meaning. It is not the external situation that we think about and react to, but the ideas of the Work to which we react. Life does not fall directly on us, but passes through this medium of the Work, and then life becomes a teacher to us through this medium of the Work.

You all can understand that life is continually causing us to react to it. All these reactions form our life—our own personal life. To change one's life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one's reactions. But unless we can see that outer life comes in as impressions which cause us to react in stereotyped ways, we cannot see where the point of possible change comes in, where it is possible to work. If the reactions that form your own personal life are mainly negative, then that is your life. Your life is chiefly a mass of negative reactions to the impressions that have come in every day.

When you have this pause in you, this momentary consciousness in a new place—you can begin even to like what you dislike. As was said, if you can stop mechanical disliking— the common source of loss of force and negativeness—by catching the impression of the disliked person before it fully engages the acquired machine you take as yourself—then this work on yourself will lead you to the possibility of sounding the next note in this octave—namely, of beginning to like what hitherto you so easily, so continually, so unchallengeably, so automatically, disliked.

How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more we through right self-observation feel our own helplessness, the more we realize our ignorance, the more we see our mechanicalness and that we are a machine, the more we perceive our own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to us.

You know what it is to do your daily work mechanically and the difference if you do it more consciously. In the one case, you get no impressions: in the other case, you get some impressions.

The point of the Work is to create a conscious place where we can be conscious of the quality of incoming impressions and so detect a typical event, and what would be our mechanical reaction to it before we react mechanically to it.

Now when you take in impressions voluntarily the associative paths they follow are different from the paths followed when you take in impressions involuntarily. In this Work we gradually learn to take in impressions more and more consciously—-that is, to take in impressions voluntarily.

Impressions that are taken in in a state of Self-Remembering become emotional. Even the simplest thing can become interesting or beautiful and reflect some meaning you had never perceived.