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.

The Work teaches that there are three forces in every manifestation. We see only two—if we see as far as that. Third Force lies between the opposites and so we can picture it as the mid-point of the pendulum-swing.

Try sometimes to see the opposite point of view to that which you hold. If the opposite is genuinely and with effort included in consciousness the sphere of consciousness is greatly increased and a number of unpleasant features in us disappear.

An increase in consciousness in regard to our emotional life through the making of the opposites conscious by following the swing in Time, and so seeing how they are connected, shifts consciousness gradually towards the middle zone of the pendulum, to a third place lying between the opposites which becomes receptive of new emotions not on the pendulum. We acquire a middle.

The feeling of I can be squandered in infinite ways. We have to draw the feeling of I out of the opposites. That means one attempts to withdraw the feeling of I from the feeling that one is good or the feeling that one is bad.

The pendulum is the great thief within. I only remind you that you have to find some method of managing it; or else it will take away anything it gives. It is uncomfortable to see a person totally asleep or unguarded, temporarily at one end of the pendulum, full of excitement, terribly happy, looking forward to a new life and so on. In this state the person is wholly identified with one end of the swing of the emotional pendulum. There is no sign of Self-Remembering. Notice this point.

Our whole lives, ordinarily, are governed by the Law of the Pendulum. We all swing to and fro. When you are in one opposite you are unconscious of the other, and vice versa. You may have idle dreams of rising and rising, of progressing and progressing, of getting better and better, but all these are indeed idle dreams.

Our moods are all hung on to pendulums. We should not trust them. Unfortunately we identify with them. We take them as ourselves. We say: "I feel", "I think", and so on.

The original idea of prayer was to put us in a state of Self-Remembering, to let go our troubles, or, as it were, to ask for help and acknowledge our powerlessness to do. But prayer, in this sense, is very difficult.