The act of Self-Remembering must have a certain emotional quality. It is owing to the emotional quality that one is put at once into higher parts of centers, into bigger 'I's. These can remember the Work, they can understand it. No one can work continuously but only at times.

To remember oneself it is necessary to look in and look out. One must see the outer and see oneself in relation to the outer. But actually no one can see in and see out at the same time any more than a person can breathe in and breathe out at the same time. An act of Self-Remembering is a double movement as is an act of breathing.

It is only by applying the Work to oneself in one's own particular case that one can realize what Self-Remembering is. If you do not know what it is to observe you are asleep, how can you remember yourself?

There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. Unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help, and that unless you receive help you cannot reach a different level of being. But at the same time unless you prepare yourself by means of Self-Observation and trying to separate from what the Work teaches are wrong functions, you cannot receive the influences coming from Higher Centers.

The act of trying to remember myself is to endeavour by trial and failure to reach some new state of oneself called the State of Self-Remembering. If already I know how to reach this state then the act or effort that I make will put me into this state. But I cannot expect at first by performing the act of Self-Remembering to reach the State. It will only be by long work, by innumerable acts, that I gain any success in reaching the state that I aim at reaching.

But you cannot come into the inner perception of your Chief Feature until you are ready for it. All your separate observations and aims in regard to your own work on yourself, if done sincerely, will gradually combine and shew you what it is that you have to work against and will give you the reason why you are down here on earth. This is finding one's meaning, or rather, the meaning of one's existence.

Try, therefore, to observe your 'I's. Try to see that it is 'I's thinking and feeling that are inducing these recurring moods and thoughts from which you suffer. The Work will look after your good 'I's. But, as regards your bad 'I's, the way of release is in stripping and skinning them, in tearing from them the precious feeling of I that you have been so foolishly squandering, allowing them to steal it from you all this time, and without which they would be formless.

Reference was made to the Sly Man in the Fourth Way who knows how to make a pill and swallow it, instead of making all kinds of painful, prolonged efforts such as the Fakir or Monk makes.

In trying to control an observed 'I', you must remember that it is something that thinks, and feels and moves—that is, each representation of it in each center is different. The control of the human machine is difficult therefore because everything that is formed in it psychologically —namely, as an 'I'—is represented in three entirely different ways, that seem at first sight unconnected.

We should observe not only vaguely our emotional state but the words or gestures or expressions that accompany this state—and this means to observe two centers.

In all self-observation, if it is to becomes full self-observation, you must observe IT. That is, you must see all your reactions to life and circumstances as IT in you and not as 'I'. If you say 'I', then nothing can happen.

To know and to observe are not the same thing. You may know you are in a negative state, but that does not mean that you are observing it. A person in the Work said to me that he disliked somebody intensely. I said: "Try to observe it." He replied: "Why should I observe it? I don't need to. I know it already."

It is a remarkable fact that even after many years we do not really observe ourselves. Self-observation is turning the other way round from life. It is the employment of a new sense, an inner sense, called Observing I, which looks inwards at the kind of person one is.

The Observing 'I' in the sense of the Work does not take sides with anything. It merely records what you are doing, what you are saying, at different moments, through the action of different 'I's, and does not say that this is better or this is worse. Observing 'I' is not shocked by anything, it is not a kind of Grandmama or Grandpapa in you, but it is quite pure and simple.

Remember that it is said that self-observation must be uncritical. You do not observe yourself in order to criticize yourself. If you do so it will at once stop self-observation and lead to internal considering.

But this Work tells you to observe yourself in the light of what the Work teaches, so that you can change yourself. That is, it starts inside you, like a spy, inside your heavily guarded fortifications. Yes, Observing 'I' is a spy.

Let me remind you what self-observation is, because without self-observation no sealing can take place. You are composed of many 'I's amongst which sits Observing 'I'. These 'I's are all looking at a play on the stage: the play represents life. This is the situation of yourself asleep.

One of our unused inner senses is the faculty of self-observation. We have to train ourselves to use this internal camera. If used, it eventually presents us with full-length portraits of ourselves entirely different from what we should ever have expected.

To do this Work requires effort. Effort in the Work is psychological. It is all about not identifying and Self-Remembering. Effort in the Work is all about observing oneself—observing 'I's in oneself and not going with them.

To be conscious of a state, to observe it, means you are not that state. This is the secret—the first secret of esotericism.