To serve the Work means to obey what it teaches you to practise on yourself. You want to be gloomy and moody, to object, and so on, and you observe your state and begin to separate from it—then you are serving the Work. And in so doing you are giving up some of your mechanical suffering.

Try to see for yourself by direct observation how a negative state drains force from you and try to see what happens when, having observed your condition, you genuinely try to separate from this state for your own private reasons and not for the sake of being congratulated or to gain merit.

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.