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?

If you are in a bad state you remember yourself in one way, and when in a good state you have to remember yourself in another way and it is often more difficult.

A moment of Self-Remembering, the whole idea of Self-Remembering, is to draw into oneself all these scattered elements that have been glued to events. One definition of Self-Remembering was given in ancient days that runs as follows: "I come out of everything else into myself."

Try to get out of your own way. Try to let something get in that cannot because you are in the way. Can you stop the noise of yourself for even a moment? Can you get out of the ordinary feeling of yourself? Can you become no one for a moment to yourself?

We notice what was and is no longer useful and invent some other way. Everyone should above all things think of and study and try to self-remember each day. There are many ways of Self-Remembering. But they all depend on the feeling that there is something else, that this life on this extremely bad planet is not explicable in terms of itself. There is something else.

Self-Remembering from one aspect is the practice of a certain relation of consciousness to one's body and through it to the world as rendered by our senses. If we take it like that, then there are three things (1) consciousness, (2) the body with its external senses, (3) the external world of things and people.

There can be no progress unless and until you remember yourself. Unless you can lift yourself up by Self-Remembering you do not receive help, and that unless you receive help you cannot reach a different level of being. But at the same time unless you prepare yourself by means of Self-Observation and trying to separate from what the Work teaches are wrong functions, you cannot receive the influences coming from Higher Centers.