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.

The Work acts on Being according to our understanding of it—our level. Nothing can take the place of understanding. Being told is not the same as seeing.

Our receptive side is greater than our doing side. We therefore find ourselves in the position in this Work of being able to see better than we can do. In certain situations we have flashes of understanding in which perhaps we see quite clearly what we should do and yet we find it impossible to do what we have seen.

This system promises nothing. But if you work, you will get something. Let us say, you will receive leather with which to make shoes. But you must make the shoes yourself, so that they fit you. They must be your own shoes—not borrowed shoes.

You no longer take your being for granted but have become conscious of so many things in your being which were in darkness to you before and which you blamed others for, that you no longer judge from one harsh intractable angle nor are you continually putting people, even those you love, in prison. Everything broadens and becomes much wider, clearer, and so less and less violent in you.

As regards yourself, you no longer see yourself as good and others who do not agree as bad. You no longer see and value yourself, as you once did, but see yourself from many sides and accept your contradictions.

It seems a paradox to say that to become conscious of an unattractive feature operating all through one's life of which one was formerly ignorant gives a sense of liberation; but you can find the reason for yourself.

All real effort—that is, intelligent effort— is about developing the undeveloped sides of ourselves. Each of us has a machine that is only developed to a small extent on one side of itself. All intelligent Work-effort is about developing all the sides of the machine to which we are connected and bringing it to a right state of working.

When you realize beyond any doubt that you have different 'I's in you, when you can hear them speaking or notice them working in your emotions, and yet remain separate from them, you begin to understand the Work on its practical side. You begin to understand the first line of the Work— i.e. on oneself.