There are two ways of taking the events of life. One is that you do not identify with them; the other is to will them. Sometimes we have to use one method, but sometimes to use the other, or both. I will also tell you a secret. We have to will one another: this is the beginning of conscious love.

In this Work it is necessary to look at people less personally. People become very identified with each other, especially negatively, by taking one another as physical objects. A person whom you see visually through the senses is not necessarily—in fact, never—the person that you think.

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 life becomes one's teacher, then the highest work is reached. And then you are right in the track of the Fourth Way. But it is difficult—Oh, how difficult!—and requires much and long work on oneself and patient understanding. You must, as it were, be able to suffer all things at the hands of men and yet keep on working.

A person in the Fourth Way of Work must be able to be quite ordinary in life. There must be no kind of superiority, no hinting, no persuasion, no dark remarks. But if you work on yourself, when the other person is difficult, that will make the other person aware that you are different. But you must not show it openly.

It will be very easy for your attempts at external considering to turn into an increased form of internal considering. You must calculate second force—that is, the difficulties.

You know how in life people are always trying to improve one another by reproving one another, always finding fault with one another. This is quite useless and leads to all the endless strife in life. But making oneself passive to a person and working on oneself therefrom—for to be passive requires constant inner work on yourself —this, I assure you, can effect a change in the other person, because your work makes room for him to alter.

You must have a genuine matured conscious aim that starts in the light of the Work and to which you hold on every time you remember yourself and every time you think of what you are doing practically in this Work. Only then will the Work help you

A person in the Fourth Way of Work must be able to be quite ordinary in life. There must be no kind of superiority, no hinting, no persuasion, no dark remarks. But if you work on yourself, when the other person is difficult, that will make the other person aware that you are different.

It is impossible to endure one another's unpleasant manifestations in the right sense of the meaning of the word unless we see our own unpleasant manifestations and know them and accept them.

Now suppose you are sufficiently interested and sufficiently conscious to notice how impressions fall on you mechanically, and suppose that you have sufficient valuation of the Work to wish to transform these impressions, which means not letting them simply fall on their usual place, exciting your usual dislikes and hatreds.

We have to make effort in regard to stopping internally mechanical disliking and it was also said that this is not so difficult to do, once one can notice it at work by observation. One says "Stop" to it. One makes "inner stop" in regard to it, without arguing or self-justifying.

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.

To be offended is extremely easy. It is a mechanical reaction. Not to be offended, or to transform being offended, is difficult. It requires conscious effort. It requires a lot of thought, a lot of inner adjustment, a lot of remembering what one is like oneself, and so on, to transform the first impact of being offended.

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…

Remember that we see one another by our associations, once we become "familiar", as it is called, with each other. What we do not understand is that seeing a person by one's own associations with him or her has nothing to do with what the person really is. Try to see another person without associations.

 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.

Observe yourself from the standpoint of your negative states; be sincere and admit you are in a negative state; then say to yourself: "I have a right not to be negative." Here all your understanding of the Work will come to your aid and maybe the whole negative state will vanish in a moment.

Study your negative states, for this is one of the most important sides of self-study. Observe them, note them down, and above all remember them so that when they come back again, as they always do, you may gradually recognize them before they can exert their full power—namely, before you can identify with them.