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

Suppose you are standing on a plank and trying to lift it and struggling as hard as you can to do so. Will you succeed? No, because you yourself are trying to lift yourself and this is impossible. This massive stumbling-block lies across everyone"s path and long, very long overcoming of it is the task of Work on Oneself.

Remember that there are no final solutions to anything. To try to find final solutions to things is like trying to do away with the waves of the storms of the sea. You have to have a good ship, a good rudder and a good compass. The solution to things lies in seamanship. Or, to change the metaphor—it is said in this Work that it sells leather from which you can make good shoes. You cannot clear away all the mud and stones and pebbles, but you can construct good shoes to walk over them.

If the Work is thus formed in you, you have a new thing, a new organized instrument, in you. Even a single part of the Work, if taken in with valuation and understanding, will begin to work a change in you because it will transmit new influences. But the whole of the Work must be formed in you. This can be thought of as another body—another organized thing in you—if you live the Work. Then it will control the person you were.

The increasing feeling of the Work as stronger than life and all its ups and downs and swinging to and fro between the opposites brings about a state of Self-Remembering that is not due to chance nor is merely a fleeting experience.

The idea of this Work is to enlarge consciousness. We have, we are told, to become far more conscious to ourselves through direct self-observation, so that all sorts of narrow pictures that we have of ourselves are destroyed and we begin to live in a larger edition of ourselves. We can take it as a general rule in the Work that when we are up against someone else we may be sure that that is the very thing we have to work on in ourselves. This gives us an entirely different orientation and in my opinion it is the beginning of real work.

As long as there is no change in your level of being, your personal history remains the same. Everything repeats itself in your own life: you say the same things, you do the same things, you regret the same things, you commit the same things. And all this belongs to this immensely deep idea that the level of being attracts your life.

The most important thing is self-remembering. You must try to remember yourselves at least once a day, and you must do it willingly, from yourselves. All other work on oneself ultimately depends on self- remembering. Only half a minute is necessary, and even if it consists in nothing else than stopping your thoughts and trying to relax everything, it is better than nothing. Don't think about self-remembering, but do it.

Very often we forget to remember ourselves. We wonder what to do, but forget to remember ourselves. Perhaps we think of it but we do not try to do it. We are always thinking of but not doing the Work. When we make no attempt to self-remember, our inner continuity with the Work is broken. The Work moves away from us and we pass into life. When this happens it is necessary to self-remember. This opens us again to the influences of the Work.

It is necessary to work on yourself today. Each day is an epitome of your life. A day in your life is a small replica of your life. If you do not work on a day in your life, you cannot change your life, and if you say that you wish to work on your life and change it, and do not work on a day in your life, your work on yourself remains purely imaginary. You solace yourself with the imagination that you are going to work on your life and actually never begin to work on a single day of your life.