Suppose what you have seen in yourself is some bad negative emotion, some really evil ill-will. Hitherto you have identified with it and so you have been it and it has been you. You have been for years under its power.

You cannot work on nothing. At first all is in darkness and you can see nothing in yourself. Conscious objective self-observation begins to let in a ray of light and you begin to see some things dimly. This light, created by the friction of self-observation, should gradually get stronger by practice until you catch sight of something in you clearly and beyond any doubt.

Many people in the Work find difficulty in understanding what personal aim means, in regard to work on the side of their Being—that is, on the kind of people they mechanically are. Here is a definite stage in the Work. They cannot see what to work on in themselves. One reason is that they do not apply the ideas of the Work to themselves and do not try to do what the Work tells them to do.

Now I wish to talk rather seriously to all of you. First, everything pseudo, everything pretended, everything false, is of no use in the Work. To reach anywhere, to get anything, you must be sincere with yourself. You must have inner sincerity and that means that at least you must be able to detect by self-observation when you are not genuine, as far as you can at your level.

The third line of Work is—for us at present—to help the Work in general and try to see what is required of us and not talk wrongly or harm the Work. Right valuation and right attitude to the Work belong to the third line, but they enter into everything, because unless one has valuation and right attitude one will work neither on oneself nor with others nor for the Work.

The first line of Work is to make us know our state of being and state of knowledge. Otherwise we cannot change. To observe is the first thing, but it must be without criticism or analysis. It has been said, on one occasion, that you can change nothing until you know all yourself.

Every one of you has many 'I's which are useless and worse than useless. Everyone has 'I's that hate this Work because they know they will have to starve and even die, so they fight for their own lives and try to persuade you that they are you. If you say 'I' to them, what can you expect?

A person in the Work must come to the realization that they are nothing. We look vaguely at the diagrams or write down notes. Or we say: "Oh, yes, I have heard that before," and go on thinking just as we always do, often thinking we are sure of our own worth and sure that we really know what is right or wrong.

Now in the Fourth Way we are none of us protected lambs, spoon-fed children, and we have to undergo all the temptations of Yes or No individually in connection with esoteric teaching and all the ideas behind it, otherwise we have no real point in the Work.

This knowledge must be understood, before we can be what we know. For example, you can ever remember yourself unless you understand, through self-observation, that you are asleep. To try to self-remember without understanding that you are asleep is useless.

Observation and separation are necessary all your life. Yes, but can you BE the Work? In short, can you live the Work, not merely remember it? If you try to live it, it will feed you all your life.

This is most important— you cannot remember yourself unless you know through sincere observation that you are asleep in some specific sense. Then you must awaken in this part of yourself and try to be what you know. It is necessary to be what you know by working on yourself.

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? In this connection I will add something.

To change, one must change. No one can change and also remain the same. To change one must leave, let go of, give up, what one was before. Yet we imagine we can take in new ideas and think in a new way and yet remain as we were formerly—a very strange view.

We have to have quite new forms of Truth to reach Higher Centers, we have to have a new language, we have to have new ways of thinking which have nothing to do with the world as seen. The Truth that is coming from Higher Centers continually cannot reach us because of the falsity and pretence which only insight resulting from self-observation can penetrate.

With our usual ideas of life gained through contact with the senses we cannot undergo the transformation or new birth that the Work indicates. New ways of thinking are necessary and the Work gives them to us, but the trouble is that we do not think with them. We just put them down in notebooks.

The idea that Personality has to be made passive throughout life, and little by little, before inner development can reach any perfection, is one of the Great Ideas taught by the Work. Now unless your mind catches some of the Great Ideas of the Work you will not ever really comprehend what it is all about.

The first object of the Work is to make you think in a new way—to change your mind. As I said recently, you cannot do this if you persist in thinking about the Work from life—that is, with your outer mind. You must begin by thinking about life from the Work.

To do a thing willingly from a delight in doing it, will effect a change in you. And when you begin to take up your own "cross"—that is, the burden of some difficult thing in yourself that you have at last come to observe—and do it in such a spirit, then you will get results.

To work on oneself from the conviction of sin puts the Work into negative parts of centers, and to work in a negative way can lead to a worse state of oneself than not to work at all. Some tend to take the Work in this heavy way. But no one can fathom the delight people take in making themselves miserable and in enjoying their negative states.