But you cannot come into the inner perception of your Chief Feature until you are ready for it. All your separate observations and aims in regard to your own work on yourself, if done sincerely, will gradually combine and shew you what it is that you have to work against and will give you the reason why you are down here on earth. This is finding one's meaning, or rather, the meaning of one's existence.

You are born into this planet with an inner task and life is so arranged that you cannot find yourself and your meaning through life alone, but only through seeing what this inner task is. The Work says that everyone is born into, and is in, exactly the best circumstances in regard to this task, and that if you meet this Work your conditions are just what is best for the purpose of work. But of course everyone thinks that if only you were in different circumstances everything would be easy. This is not the case.

People keep on thinking of self-remembering, but they do not do it. It is necessary to stop the chain of automatic associations every day. This can be done by inner stop—that is, stopping everything, all thoughts, etc. This is the beginning of self-remembering.

It is only through a feeling of something higher that you can separate from something lower, and, after a time, when you have experienced what this means, you will do everything you can to keep the feeling of something higher alive in you at all costs and you will begin to hate those periods in which you are totally identified with external things.

It was said that a person in the Work should practice Self-Remembering at least once a day and that if they cannot do that they must practice it three times a day —that is, they must make still greater efforts. All Self-Remembering is to lift you out of the whirlpool and uproar and dreariness going on in yourself and caused by life acting on you mechanically and by your looking to life as your only nourisher, your only source of happiness.

Bear in mind that the Work says that one cannot remember oneself unless there is an element of acknowledgement of the existence of Greater Mind during the act. Also remember that the most important thing in the Work is remembering oneself especially when things are difficult.

If you feel the extraordinariness of your own existence, if you feel the miracle of your body, of your consciousness, of the world that surrounds you, if you begin to wonder who you are, then you are in the state necessary for Self-Remembering.

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.

The Work says very many things about evaluation. For example, it says that the octave of inner development, and so change of level of one's Being, begins with the Note Do, which is termed "Evaluation of the Work". The Note Re is application of the ideas to oneself. The Note Mi is realization of personal difficulties. The Work also says that its ultimate aim is to awaken the Emotional Center.

As long as there is no change in the 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.

At this time of the year the idea of Goodwill is mentioned on Christmas Cards, in religious services, in hymns, and so on. In the Gospels the message from the Angels at the Birth of Christ is said to be: "Peace on earth and goodwill towards men." A strange message if you think.