Simply to see a bus or a tree requires zero attention. To observe them—their colour, shape, and so on—requires directed attention. You see hundreds of buses and trees every day but do not observe them. It is all a vague, confused picture. In the same way, your inner life is a vague, confused picture. You do not observe it, but you are in general aware of it, as you are of buses and trees.

People even think it is right to worry about everything, about the past and the future, about themselves, about others, and so on. This is simply nothing but a serious negative illness, difficult to cure, for once a person has become nothing but an inverted machine for worrying, all sorts of wrong connections have been established and everything works in the wrong way, and since the only thing we enjoy is worrying, to deprive us of this, were it possible, would be to destroy our chief interest.

In learning how to live from the Work point of view, so that we live more consciously in life, or live in the Work in life and not just in life without anything between us and life, worrying is one of the things that show us something about ourselves if we notice it uncritically and over a long enough period.

Worrying is the wrong work of centers. It is always useless. It is a form of inner considering—i.e. of identifying. It is a continual mixing up of negative imagination with a few facts and so makes only wrong connections in centers.

The supreme effort of the Work lies in making effort against your Chief Feature, whether you are digging in a field or listening to a meeting or cooking or travelling by train or are alone with yourself or surrounded by other people.

You can bring the atmosphere of the Work into everything that you do. But if you identify with everything and make inner accounts, this will be impossible. Life will eat you. Taking things from the Work point of view can alter your Being.

After a time, when the Work is beginning to touch you, you will hate feeling that you are simply doing everything mechanically. Then perhaps you will begin to know what it means to transform the day, to transform the moment, this very moment.

To do what the Work teaches is one thing: to hear what it says is another. The second note in the Work-Octave of personal development is, we are told, to apply what the Work teaches to ourselves.

The Work Octave starts with evaluation as Do, and application of the ideas to yourself as Re. Certainly this is a big step. Remember that you are the subject of the Work, you yourself.

In terms of the Work-Octave we have to return to the note Do and sound it more strongly. Many 'I's attack this note and seek to drain its energy of vibration—mocking 'I's, clownish 'I's, ugly 'I's, cruel 'I's, hard 'I's, arguing 'I's, denying 'I's, mob 'I's. All unpleasandt things in you seek to attack this opening note of the Work.

The object of the Work is to cleanse our lower centers, to clear them out, to open their windows, so that they can begin to transmit these ideas and directions coming from higher centers.

When you begin to serve this Work really you have to lose these petty, daily, small self-emotions and you can only do so by realizing that the Work is much bigger than you. You have to serve the Work and not yourself. The Work must not be a function of yourself but you must become a function of the Work.

To serve the Work means to obey what it teaches you to practise on yourself. You want to be gloomy and moody, to object, and so on, and you observe your state and begin to separate from it—then you are serving the Work. And in so doing you are giving up some of your mechanical suffering.

The Work is not something that you hear about from time to time but is something that must eventually be always with you, something that you eventually think about even more than your interests and problems in life. This takes time.

When you begin to see the truth of this Work for yourself, without the help of others, you begin to have your own source of work in yourself. It grows on you.

Yet that small amount of awakening you had yesterday should have been put into the room of your inner memory which is outside time and is in shelves, arranged vertically in scale of value. Such moments eventually begin to lift us. They enable us to remember ourselves—out of time and its cares.

If a person really felt he or she knew nothing, could he or she ever object to anything? But are not all of you continually objecting, finding fault, judging people, condemning people, and so on?

The reason why you don't see yourselves is that you take what you know as fixed and final. You think you know. You are certain you know what is good and bad. It is not merely your vanity that makes you think you know, but also your ignorance. From the standpoint of Higher Man we are all ridiculous, just like monkeys.

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.

It is necessary to say sometimes: "I can work". To say to oneself: "I can work" is a good thing and gives a little shock to oneself. It scatters those stealthy negative 'I's that tend to come in through one's unguarded spots.