You no longer take your being for granted but have become conscious of so many things in your being which were in darkness to you before and which you blamed others for, that you no longer judge from one harsh intractable angle nor are you continually putting people, even those you love, in prison. Everything broadens and becomes much wider, clearer, and so less and less violent in you.

It seems a paradox to say that to become conscious of an unattractive feature operating all through one's life of which one was formerly ignorant gives a sense of liberation; but you can find the reason for yourself.

When you realize beyond any doubt that you have different 'I's in you, when you can hear them speaking or notice them working in your emotions, and yet remain separate from them, you begin to understand the Work on its practical side. You begin to understand the first line of the Work— i.e. on oneself.

Simply to see a bus or a tree requires zero attention. To observe them—their colour, shape, and so on—requires directed attention. You see hundreds of buses and trees every day but do not observe them. It is all a vague, confused picture. In the same way, your inner life is a vague, confused picture. You do not observe it, but you are in general aware of it, as you are of buses and trees.

The supreme effort of the Work lies in making effort against your Chief Feature, whether you are digging in a field or listening to a meeting or cooking or travelling by train or are alone with yourself or surrounded by other people.

The Work Octave starts with evaluation as Do, and application of the ideas to yourself as Re. Certainly this is a big step. Remember that you are the subject of the Work, you yourself.

Do you observe when you are full of cares and anxieties and thoroughly identified with life? Has it ever occurred to you that this is one of the things that you have to observe? And has it ever occurred to you that this is a sign of your Being, of what you are—for example, that you are a person whose level or quality of Being is such that he or she is always full of cares and worries?

It is a good thing to will what you find yourself having to do because it frees you inside. Observe what you object to during the day and try to will what you are objecting to and not merely accept it. One has to say to oneself something like this: "Come, let's go to it." And I assure you it is a very good way of getting through quite a lot of things that you have to do during the daytime.

So the first step in increase of consciousness is to see through yourself and acknowledge what you see. What is the result? Instantly other people who are keeping up their facade of False Personality will feel more at ease with you.

When you find a person who obviously dislikes you there is another task for personal work. Notice what that person dislikes in you if you can. Remember that we have to thank those who make it necessary for us to work on ourselves.

As long as you externally consider another person with a view to trying to change him or her—that is, as long as you think the other person should be different—you are not externally considering, but internally considering. The basis of internal considering is thinking that others should be different, and from this comes "making accounts" against others…

 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.

Try to see for yourself by direct observation how a negative state drains force from you and try to see what happens when, having observed your condition, you genuinely try to separate from this state for your own private reasons and not for the sake of being congratulated or to gain merit.

Aim must be made consciously, with insight, after long observation, in view of realizing what is putting you to sleep and what helps you to keep awake.

The Work explains to us that we must have an AIM. It says that without an AIM we cannot do the Work. We can listen to it, attend meetings, sit looking at the diagrams on the board, but this will not be the same as doing the Work. And unless we do the Work we will never understand what it is all about.

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.

Now if you have cleared a portico, a hall, a space in yourself by self- observation so that you can see a negative impression coming in and are able not to let it enter freely, not to identify with it, not let it go where it wishes, not say 'I' to it, then you keep clear of the mechanical result of that impression. This is magic.

You all can understand that life is continually causing us to react to it. All these reactions form our life—our own personal life. To change one's life is not to change outer circumstances: it is to change one's reactions. But unless we can see that outer life comes in as impressions which cause us to react in stereotyped ways, we cannot see where the point of possible change comes in, where it is possible to work. If the reactions that form your own personal life are mainly negative, then that is your life. Your life is chiefly a mass of negative reactions to the impressions that have come in every day.

When you have this pause in you, this momentary consciousness in a new place—you can begin even to like what you dislike. As was said, if you can stop mechanical disliking— the common source of loss of force and negativeness—by catching the impression of the disliked person before it fully engages the acquired machine you take as yourself—then this work on yourself will lead you to the possibility of sounding the next note in this octave—namely, of beginning to like what hitherto you so easily, so continually, so unchallengeably, so automatically, disliked.

How can we bring the work up to the place of incoming impressions? In brief, by remembering the work emotionally. The more we through right self-observation feel our own helplessness, the more we realize our ignorance, the more we see our mechanicalness and that we are a machine, the more we perceive our own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to us.