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.

It is only by means of observing myself uncritically and over a considerable period that I begin to understand that I do not remember myself.

It is well worth while in the great discipline of self-observation to notice very carefully what vexes you, what destroys such happiness as you are capable of experiencing. When you have made a good observation, try to find out whether it is due to a picture of yourself that was not satisfied by the behavior of someone, or a role that you turned on that met with no praise, or an attitude that was completely useless.

The one who has reached a stage in which they have something independent of outer conditions, something which is independent of failure or success, cold or heat, discomfort or comfort, starvation or plenty, such a one has Second Body.

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.

If you observe yourself rightly, you notice these thoughts not as yourself but as coming from a negative ‘I’ in you. As a result what it says does not get power over you, because you are separate from it.

Change of being begins with changing your reactions to actual incidents of the day. This is the beginning of taking your life in a real and practical sense in a new way. If you behave in the same way every day to the same recurring events of the day, how can you believe that you can change?