When the Work really strikes home, this house of cards that one takes as oneself begins to fall to bits. You know the Work speaks about the necessity of coming to the point where one realizes one's own utter nothingness.

All self-realization, all self-knowledge which is real, destroys the imagination of oneself—i.e. the False Personality. The result is an immense broadening of one's powers and not a weakening of them.

So you will find that your understanding keeps on changing as the life of the Work grows in you, and yet it is always the same thing. When you begin to get force from the Work through your evaluation of it you must remember that it requires care.

But if something stronger than life governs you, you will find that in place of internally considering you will begin to externally consider and then a great deal of peace will come to you and a great deal of strength that hitherto has been wasted in Internal Considering.

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.

Now for the Essence, or inner, part of us to grow and become gradually active, you must be able to be utterly sincere with yourself when the occasion arises. Essence cannot grow from anything false.

If we were all more in Essence than we are at present everything would become much more real, much more genuine, much more simple, much more true, and much more good.

But as the feeling of 'I' is drawn out of the active one so does the passive one become strengthened until the time comes when the passive one becomes active and the active one passive. That is, a reversal takes place and the inner controls the outer, not the outer the inner.

Now if you fundamentally disbelieve this Work and the ideas in the Gospels, but do not observe you do, you will be indignant with those who seem to disbelieve it. This is simply due to seeing what is really in you as if it were outside you in others. This is a common enough occurrence. It is necessary therefore to bring your own disbelief into your consciousness so that you can face it yourself.

The Work begins in you when you have to struggle for it yourself and keep it alive for and by yourself—because all that is best in you really wants it and feels a loss if it is not present.

When you remember yourself you lift yourself in the vertical line upwards and taste for a moment a new state. This happens when you no longer merely think about self-remembering, but actually do it—when you no longer try to escape from negative states by thinking yourself out of them, but stop all your thoughts and lift yourself up into self-remembering. And it is only by this inner movement that new influences can reach you.

Whenever we move inwards meaning increases. Where we saw one thing before, we begin, by self-observation, by inner sincerity, and by much thought, to see a hundred meanings. Internally one feels loosened. How else can anything new enter—and how indeed can Real 'I' enter when one is tightly shut up in one's own narrow ideas which so soon form a grave for so many?

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.

When you see you are in the wrong—that is, when you get a little behind False Personality with all its Vanities and Prides—you take force backwards or interiorly into yourself and these moments of confession or separation from what is false will cause Essence to grow because you give it energy that would otherwise have gone into self-justifying.

The side of what we actually are, and the side of what we pretend and imagine we are, are two contradictory sides. These two contradictory sides, however, exist in everyone without exception. The action of the Work, once it is beginning to be wished for, makes us become gradually aware of this contradiction—over many years.

All effort in the Work is passive. Self-development starts from passive Do. Effort is something very quiet and deep and clearly seen. It is not noisy, not pretence. It is not contracting muscles and thrusting chins out.

It is quite easy to see when a person only has knowledge but not understanding of this Work. If you understand something you can speak of it in different ways; if it is merely knowledge you will speak of it from memory.