When the Work says that you must come to realize your own nothingness before you can be re-born, it does not mean that you must humble yourself and so on, but that you must by long self-observation actually begin to realize that you are nothing and that there is no such person as self. The object of this is to get into a position, psychologically speaking, between the opposites.

When the Work really strikes home, this house of cards that one takes as oneself begins to fall to bits. You know the Work speaks about the necessity of coming to the point where one realizes one's own utter nothingness.

To be offended is extremely easy. It is a mechanical reaction. Not to be offended, or to transform being offended, is difficult. It requires conscious effort. It requires a lot of thought, a lot of inner adjustment, a lot of remembering what one is like oneself, and so on, to transform the first impact of being offended.

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.

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.