It will be very easy for your attempts at external considering to turn into an increased form of internal considering. You must calculate second force—that is, the difficulties.

As long as impressions fall on Personality they will always produce the same effects mechanically. But when they begin to fall on Essence everything is always new and far richer and more varied. In fact, everything is wonderful. Instead of having the feeling that everything is repeating itself, everything is the same, one begins to feel that nothing is ever the same.

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.

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.

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.

When we are told to remember ourselves and ask: "Which self?" what answer can we expect after a time almost with certainty? We can expect the answer: "The self that knows its own nothingness." Yes, this would be a full form of Self-Remembering. The result of work is gradually to make us see we cannot do.

Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way. If you behave in the same way every day to the same recurring events of the day, how can you believe that you can change?