Now let us turn to another thing that we can and must observe— namely, the absence of Self-Remembering in oneself. Do you try to take life from the Work point of view or do you take it from your mechanical reactions to life ? If you bring the Work in between what happens in life and how you react to life, you will already be beginning to remember yourself.

Here no question of doing in the Work-sense enters. IT is doing. In my case Nicoll is doing; in your case Smith, Robinson, Brown is doing. There was a question: "Well, how can I do in the Work-sense?" The answer is that you cannot do as you are in a Work-sense. "Then, what am I to do?" "Realize that you cannot do. Realize the mechanicalness of your Being."

Have you noticed the rigid man, the rigid woman, who always thinks in the same set way, always says the same thing, always expresses the same opinion, like a parrot? Perhaps you may have, but I advise you first of all to notice yourself in this respect. Are you a parrot?

A man, a woman, in this Work, must learn by self-observation that what they seem to be, what they pretend to be outwardly, is not what they are internally. Realizing this, they begin to suffer from the sense of contradiction. This is useful suffering. The outer and inner must conform eventually and become one—a unity.

If we begin to obey the ideas of the Work by seeing their truth and eventually realize what good lies in them, then we begin to be more free from the momentary wills of different 'I's —doing what they like.

Can you see your level of Being at all yet? Can you see where you stand in the world of Being yet? Do you understand about levels of Being? How can we change our level of Being? What is it we have to do to change this level of Being that we speak of as all having? The whole Work is about changing our Being and giving us methods as to how to change it.

One must get to know about the ideas of the Work and register them. What I am talking about is the next state—i.e. when these ideas must become emotionally perceived through application of them to yourself, first of all to your thinking and then to your Being. When it is said that this Work is to make you think in a new way it means that the ideas of the Work must begin to change your way of thinking, and you cannot expect this to happen until you have registered the ideas by hearing them many times 50 that you will know them in your memory.

Always expecting to be different is wishing. It is a kind of continual, vague 1st Force. It will summon a continual, vague 2nd Force which will appear as something lying in outer circumstances. But the 2nd Force is not in outer circumstances, but in oneself.

Try sometimes to see the opposite point of view to that which you hold. If the opposite is genuinely and with effort included in consciousness the sphere of consciousness is greatly increased and a number of unpleasant features in us disappear.

Suppose that you have observed yourself for some considerable time and you begin to see yourself over the period of time acting in a certain way. You see how something starts, leads to something else, and so on. In fact, you see yourself in action, in movement, so to speak, inner and outer, in some typical way of behavior. This is a photograph.

The object of uncritical self-observation is to collect facts about oneself. For this reason Observing 'I' must not be right in front of oneself in the sphere which False Personality influences but further back. The power of self-observation increases as Observing 'I' moves more internally. This partly depends on the deepening of feeling or valuation of the Work when surface enthusiasms are seen through.

For this reason it is said in the Work that the light will cure us. Have you ever thought what it means, this extraordinary phrase: "the light will cure us"? When I first heard it said to me by Gurdjieff it had such an emotional effect upon me that I was unable to speak to anybody for some time afterwards. I think perhaps I understood that we could not cure ourselves but that there was something that could cure us if we could gradually reach it.

But the organization of all these snapshot observations, these discontinuous personal events, into a full-size photograph is not one's own work. We did not see the connections of our observations. But something in us did and finally presented us with the photograph. "This", it says, "is one aspect of your life that can no longer imprison you."

If I observe something in myself now and remember what I observe, I will become slowly aware of its having existed before I observed it. The observation begins to travel backwards in time, usually very gradually. But it may happen that one experiences a flash of consciousness extending far back into the past of what one has just begun to be conscious of now in the present. One sees one has always been like that.

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.