The object of the Work is to cleanse our lower centers, to clear them out, to open their windows, so that they can begin to transmit these ideas and directions coming from higher centers.

You must have a genuine matured conscious aim that starts in the light of the Work and to which you hold on every time you remember yourself and every time you think of what you are doing practically in this Work. Only then will the Work help you

 You can, and indeed, must, find and invent for yourself ways of circumventing negative emotions. To find something that requires directed attention is one way, if you can bring yourself to do it. Another is to remember and recall and go back in time to similar previous occasions—provided you have got a Work-memory based on genuine self-observation and not merely the usual illusory lying memory.

Observe yourself from the standpoint of your negative states; be sincere and admit you are in a negative state; then say to yourself: "I have a right not to be negative." Here all your understanding of the Work will come to your aid and maybe the whole negative state will vanish in a moment.

If you find you cannot keep your aim as first intended, because it is too difficult, modify your aim, and then you may find that a better aim is suggested to you, especially if you remember your aim whenever you try to remember yourself. Everything taught in this Work on its practical side shows more than one aim to you. You must begin with one thing. But after a time you must include all the rest.

Today I will speak to you about one method of Self-Remembering in terms of the following Work-phrase: "Try to will what you have to do." I once said by way of commentary that when the telephone rings you must not let it take you to it but go to it. By this I mean, will it. To will what happens to you has a most marvellous issue in your own relationship to Second Force.

The First Conscious Shock does not happen to one asleep. It is a conscious effort requiring special knowledge and self-observation and given in connection with the incoming impressions of life and a person's mechanical reactions to them. Roughly, it consists in seeing the object and seeing one's reactions to it simultaneously.

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.

Yet Self-Remembering is not going against the flood-stream of inner and outer things. It is raising oneself—not contending. Contending is another kind of effort. Self- Remembering is a non-identifying with oneself—for an instant—as if one were merely acting and had forgotten. When one remembers oneself one forgets oneself.

So when you pray you must remember yourself. You must be conscious of yourself and of what you are praying for. You must feel the meaning of everything you say and feel yourself saying it. You must feel it is really 'I' in you that prays and not a set of frightened little 'I's or a set of mechanical 'I's formed by habit.

This extension or expansion of consciousness to include at the same time all the centers is not supernormal but is actually what a normal person should possess. This is the 3rd state of consciousness—the state of Self-Remembering or Self- Awareness.

To remember oneself is a surrender of oneself. One realizes one's helplessness. It is impossible to self-remember if one does not realize and understand that better influences can reach 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.

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.

You must reach the point of discerning your own helplessness. And this, if it is not a negative experience, will bring you into a state of self-remembering. Through seeing your helplessness you attract help.

It is a very marvellous thing to experience a moment of not being identified with oneself, with all this uproar, with all this ever-returning and useless turmoil. And we realize how true it is that help cannot reach us while we are in this ordinary state.

The Work says that a moment of Self-Remembering supplies every cell in the body with food of a kind that it does not ordinarily get. The Work says that when you remember yourself you give a shock to the whole of you.

Impressions that are taken in in a state of Self-Remembering become emotional. Even the simplest thing can become interesting or beautiful and reflect some meaning you had never perceived.

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?