You must understand that every event is attracted by your being and this is phrased as: "Your being attracts your life." That means that your being attracts events that happen to you because life is simply events of different kinds and on different scales.

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.

The act of trying to remember myself is to endeavour by trial and failure to reach some new state of oneself called the State of Self-Remembering. If already I know how to reach this state then the act or effort that I make will put me into this state. But I cannot expect at first by performing the act of Self-Remembering to reach the State. It will only be by long work, by innumerable acts, that I gain any success in reaching the state that I aim at reaching.

In the practice of Inner Stop, you stand motionless in your mind. Thoughts pass you, speak to you, ask you what you are up to and so on, but you pay no attention to them. You will see at once that Inner Stop is connected with a form of Self-Remembering.

If you feel emotional about getting to know your Chief Feature, and really want to know about it, you may catch glimpses. Sometimes you can see Chief Feature in other people. Ask yourselves: "What is it in this person that would make him different if it were changed?" Sometimes it is possible to see this in someone else.

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.