When we are introduced to the Work and after many years begin to feel there may be something in it, we are close to the possibility of acting from the Work-ideas instead of those ideas that have been laid down in us automatically, and a person awakening to the Work and evaluating it will begin to think in a new way—that is, to undergo metanoia.

The Work is to get the psychological world rightly adjusted so that it transmits Higher Centers. We may in life conceal our psychological thoughts and feelings but the Work is another force not of life, and from that we can conceal nothing that is psychological.

Many people in the Work find difficulty in understanding what personal aim means, in regard to work on the side of their Being—that is, on the kind of people they mechanically are. Here is a definite stage in the Work. They cannot see what to work on in themselves. One reason is that they do not apply the ideas of the Work to themselves and do not try to do what the Work tells them to do.

To change, one must change. No one can change and also remain the same. To change one must leave, let go of, give up, what one was before. Yet we imagine we can take in new ideas and think in a new way and yet remain as we were formerly—a very strange view.

With our usual ideas of life gained through contact with the senses we cannot undergo the transformation or new birth that the Work indicates. New ways of thinking are necessary and the Work gives them to us, but the trouble is that we do not think with them. We just put them down in notebooks.

The first object of the Work is to make you think in a new way—to change your mind. As I said recently, you cannot do this if you persist in thinking about the Work from life—that is, with your outer mind. You must begin by thinking about life from the Work.

Not realizing that some center or part of a centrer can have force, we tend to feel exhausted when we need not be exhausted, the reason being that we live in a kind of rigid pattern of life and always do the same thing over and over again—that is, we live in very small parts. At that time Mr. Ouspensky was talking a great deal about thinking differently.