there is one saying that “the level of being of a man attracts his life”.
What is at fault is the level of being of people.
History repeats itself because man remains at the same level of being – namely, he attracts again and again the same circumstances, feels the same things, says the same things, hopes the same things, believes the same things.
A higher level of being lies immediately above all of us at this very moment. It does not lie in the future of time but in ourselves at this very moment, now.
Man’s essence can only grow by itself unaided to a very small extent, and as such a man is nothing but a little child. Now in order for it to grow further something must happen. Something must form itself round essence and this is called personality. Essence must become surrounded by something that is really foreign to itself, acquired from life, which enters through the senses. A little child must cease to be itself and become something different from itself. As you were told, the centre of gravity of itself begins to pass from essence into personality. It learns all sorts of things, it imitates all sorts of things, and so on.
A man finds himself in a good position, able to deal with life through the formation of a rich personality in him. And if he is satisfied, he is, for all life purposes, adequate. But this work, this teaching, is about a further stage of man, and this stage I will call the third stage.
In this sense, personality, which is formed around essence, and must be formed round essence, becomes eventually, if this third stage is entered upon, the very source from which essence can grow further.
What he does, he does to acquire merit, or from fear of loss of honour or reputation, and so on, but he does nothing from himself, nothing from the love of doing it, quite apart from praise, authority, position, popularity, or any other gain in the eyes of the world.
In other words, a kind of reversal must take place in him which is well-expressed in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and unless we understand that this third stage is possible and leads to a man’s real development we will never understand what the Gospels are speaking about or what this system is speaking about.
“Let the dead bury their dead.” The dead are those dead to all possibility of working on themselves and so changing themselves.
unless he feels some delight in it, it cannot affect him. It cannot act on him, for a man unites with truth only through his love, as it were, and in this way his being is changed.
It speaks not of sin, but of being asleep, just as the Gospels do not really speak of sin, but only of missing the mark – the Greek word means that.
It depicts a man lying fast asleep flat on the earth, and a ladder stretching to heaven, and angels on it blowing trumpets almost in the man’s ear. Yet he hears nothing.
This work is beautiful when you see why it exists and what it means. It is about liberation. It is as beautiful as if, locked for years in prison, you see a stranger entering who offers you a key. But you may refuse it because you have acquired prison-habits and have forgotten your origin, which is from the stars. How, then, will you ever be able to remember yourself with only prison-thoughts and interests, and hand back your life whole and not twisted and soiled by negative emotion and every form of identifying? It will then be only natural for you to refuse the key that will unlock all the doors of the prison, one by one, because you prefer to remain in prison – that is, as you are in yourself. Nay, even more, you may be indignant and seek to kill the stranger and fight for your prison-life and even sacrifice your life in order to remain in prison.
You must learn that every change in the work externally is always useful to you, whatever form it takes, and all of you must be prepared to follow the work in its changing outer manifestations, and at all moments maintain a clear inner attitude towards it.
The lack of unity in a man is the source of all his difficulties and troubles. Man’s body is a unity and works as an organized whole unless it is sick. But man’s inner life is not a unity and has not organization and does not work harmoniously as a whole. Man, in regard to his inner state, is a multiplicity, and from one angle in this teaching, this inner multiplicity is spoken of in terms of ‘I’s or egos in a man. Man has no one permanent ‘I’ but a host of different ‘I’s in him that at each moment take charge of him and speak out of him as if in his voice: and from this point of view man is compared with a house in disorder in which there is no master but a crowd of servants who speak in the name of the absent master.
He is continually changing. But he imagines that if a person is called James he is always James. This is quite untrue. This man whom we call James has in him other ‘I’s, other egos, which take charge of him at different moments, and although perhaps James does not like telling lies, another ‘I’ in him – let us call it Peter – likes to lie and so on.
These are all the different ‘I’s belonging to personality, which it is necessary to observe, and try to get to know, otherwise no self-knowledge is possible – that is, if one really seeks selfknowledge and not invention and imagination about oneself. Not one of you here has a real permanent, unchanging ‘I’. Not one of you here has real unity of being. All of you are nothing but a crowd of different people, some better and some worse, and each of these people – each of these ‘I’s in you – at particular moments takes charge of you and makes you do what it wants and say what it wishes and feel and think as it feels and thinks.
He will find excuses and justify himself and so cling to the idea that he is really one and has a permanent individuality and that he always knows what he is doing and thinking and saying and is always conscious of himself and in control of himself at all times. It will be very difficult for him to admit to himself that this is not the case.
But if he goes to sleep in himself – that is, if he ceases to be conscious of what is going on in him and which ‘I’s are close to him – he falls under its power and, becoming identified with it, imagines that it is he himself who is thinking in that way.
Whenever we feel a sudden loss of force, it is practically always due to the action of a negative ‘I’ which has started a train of thought from our memories and, by carefully selecting its material, represented something in a wrong light
Section II – Let us return to the illusion everyone has that he is one. This illusion exists in each of you. It can only be discovered gradually by personal observation.
that he is one refers to a possibility. Man can attain unity of being. He can reach his true individuality. But it is precisely this illusion that stands first of all in the way of man’s attainment of this possibility. For as long as a man imagines he has something, he will not seek for it. Why should a man strive for something that he has never doubted for a moment that he possesses already? This is one of the effects of the imagination, which fills up, as it were, what is lacking or makes it appear that we are like this, or like that, when actually we are the reverse.
This is the power that illusion has and for this reason it is said, in the workparable of the sheep and the magicians, that man is hypnotized through his imagination and is under the illusion that he is a lion or an eagle when he is really a sheep; and at the same time, as a sheep he has the power of escaping from the magicians, who are too lazy or too mean to build fences to shut him in.
As we have seen, man imagines he is one and because of this illusion he cannot shift from where he is in himself. Everyone is, in himself, at a certain stage of himself, and no one can shift from this stage where he is in himself unless he sees very distinctly for himself that he is not one and the same person, but many different people and that to continue to think he is one is an illusion. This realization, this inner perception, changes a person’s feeling of himself. It changes, or begins to change, his feeling of ‘I’. As long as he lives in the illusion that he is one, he has a wrong feeling of ‘I’.
For a man cannot change as long as he ascribes to himself oneness of being, for then everything in him is himself. He will ascribe to himself everything good or bad in himself. He will be responsible for every thought and for every mood, through taking everything in himself as himself, because if he believes that everything he thinks and does and says, he thinks and does and says from himself, then it will be his own because he makes it all his own by ascribing it all to himself.
Self-observation will shew him that he has practically no control of his thoughts and cannot even stop thinking if he tries to do so and that thoughts of every kind come and go in his mind whether he wishes them or not. And it is the same with his feelings and with his moods, and his words and his actions.
Each day is an epitome of one’s life.
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
A single moment in which one is conscious enough not to behave mechanically, if it is done willingly, can change many future results.
follow the mechanical habits of the day and so have no real life and take in no new impressions. “It” acts – that is, the machine.
To work on yourself, begin to work on daily life and then you will understand what is meant by the strange phrase: “Give us this day our daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer. For the word “daily” here means in the Greek supersubstantial bread or “bread from above”. The ideas of this work are to give us bread for life in the double sense of ideas and force to meet with the troubles of daily mechanical life and so supersubstantial “bread”; and to feed a new life beginning in oneself, for in the work everyone seeks to become a new person. Now no one can alter his life or change anything in regard to his mechanical reactions to his daily life unless he has the help of new ideas and is helped by the force coming from these new ideas and the new thoughts that are born in his mind if he begins to understand them.
Actually, in esotericism, a man must become hermetically sealed, as an ancient phrase puts it, and this refers to something internal, of which we will speak at some other time, connected with the power of silence. The phrase belongs to the language of ancient times when there existed a teaching on man’s inner evolution connected with the name of Hermes.
Self-remembering, non-identifying and not-considering all help to insulate us from the influences of life. Acting consciously at a difficult moment has the same effect.
COMMENTARY IV – Birdlip, June 17, 1941 ON A, B and C INFLUENCES
Why must false personality be struggled with in all its unpleasant manifestations? Why should it be necessary to remember oneself?
The same teaching has always been given, but it has been given in different outer forms, in different dress, according to circumstances, according to the times and according to the nature of the people or race to which it is being given. It has changed only in regard to the general state of people – that is, their level of being and the depth of their sleep in the things of the external senses and so of their opportunities in respect of inner evolution.
Have you been insane? you ask yourself. Yes, exactly. In the deep sleep we live in, in the light of the Kingdom of Heaven, we are all utterly insane and do not know what we are doing.
Take quite simply this one single instruction: do not identify.
MAN IS NOT A UNITY BUT MULTIPLE (1) If a man takes himself as one, no struggle can develop within him. If no struggle develops within him, he cannot change. Why is this so? (2) If a man supposes there is only one thing that acts, thinks and feels in him – that is, one ‘I’ – then he cannot understand that there should be one thing that commands and another that obeys. This means that if man regards himself as a unity, nothing can change in him. The work says: “Unless a man divides himself into two, he cannot shift from where he is in himself ” – that is, he cannot be different in himself.
(7) After a long time in the work the inner system, which starts from willing Self-Observation – that is, from a willing Observing ‘I’ – begins to act and control the mechanical man. It does this by means of collecting round it all ‘I’s in Personality which wish to and can work.
What you do unwillingly simply because you are told to do it is worse than useless.
If all men could awaken, Real Conscience would speak in them all and they would agree with one another, because it would speak in the same way to everyone.
Real Conscience exists in everyone but is buried and so out of reach.
What especially prevent a man from seeing contradictions in himself are buffers. In place of having Real Conscience a man has Artificial Conscience and buffers. Behind everyone there stand years and years of a wrong and stupid life, of indulgence in every kind of weakness, of sleep, of ignorance, of pretence, of lack of effort, of drifting, of shutting one’s eyes, of striving to avoid unpleasant facts, of constant lying to oneself, of abuse and blaming of others, of fault-finding, of self-justifying, of emptiness, of wrong talking, and so on. As a result the human machine is dirty and works wrongly.
Buffers make a man’s life more easy. They prevent him from feeling Real Conscience. But they also prevent him from developing. Inner development depends on shocks. Only shocks can lead a man out of the state he is in.
These laws or influences, some waxing and some waning, as it were, or intercrossing and forming different combinations, produce the events that form the drama of human existence on the surface of the earth.
It is said simply that planetary influences create war on earth.
Because man is so deeply asleep, these influences act on him in a particular way. If he were awake, they would act on him in another way.
He need not serve nature if he practises Karma Yoga – that is, if he does not identify with what he has to do and must do. But if he feel it is a fine thing to do what he is doing, he will identify and even go so far as to wish for rewards for his meritorious actions. To practise non-identifying can lead somewhere: to serve nature leads nowhere. There are no outer rewards for non-identifying. Everything a man does in regard to working on himself has no relation to the rewards of outer life. Only you know what you do in this respect.
As you all know, this work attacks false personality, because it is unreal – that is, because it cannot form the starting-point of inner evolution.
To observe and to observe oneself are two different things. Both need attention. But in observation, the attention is directed outward through the senses.
These two starting-points lead in entirely different directions. A
man may spend his whole life in observing the phenomenal world – the stars, atoms, cells and so on. He may gain a great amount of this kind of knowledge – namely, knowledge of the external world – that is, of all that aspect of the universe that can be detected by the senses, aided or not. This is one kind of knowledge and by means of it changes can be made. The changes are in the external world. Outer, senseexperienced conditions may be improved.
It cannot change a man in himself.
Transformation means the changing of a thing into a
But this idea did not always have a literal meaning, because the language of alchemy was sometimes used by secret schools of teaching as referring to the possibility of the transformation of man into a new kind of man. Man as he is – that is, mechanical man serving nature and grounded in violence – was represented as base metal and the transformation of base metal into gold referred to this possible transformation latent in him.
Most people think that external life will give them what they crave and seek. Life comes in as impressions, as Do 48.
What all the time you are receiving is impressions. You see a person you dislike – that is, you get impressions of this nature. You see a person you like – that is, you get impressions once more. Life is impressions, not a solid material thing such as you suppose and believe is reality. Your reality is your impressions. I know this idea is very difficult to grasp. It forms a very difficult crossing-place. You are, perhaps, sure that life exists as such, and not as your impressions. The person you see sitting in a chair wearing a blue suit, smiling and talking, you think is real. No, it is your impressions of him that are real for you.
Unless you can grasp this, you will never understand the meaning of what in the work is called the First Conscious Shock.
But everyone can transform his impressions, namely, the third and highest food taken in by the three-storey factory. For this reason this system of teaching says that it is necessary to create a transforming agency at the point of intake of impressions.
So you will agree that in a sense work on oneself is comparable to digestion in the sense that digestion is transformation. Some transforming agency must be formed at the place of the intake of impressions.
All this work is to give you an entirely new way of thinking. Let me give you one example. You are told in the work that if you are negative it is always your own fault. The whole situation as recorded by the senses must be transformed. But to understand this, it is necessary to begin to think in an entirely new
Part II. – The personality that we all acquire receives the impressions of life. But it does not transform them because it is dead. If impressions fell on essence they would be transformed because they would fall on centres.
The result is that the wrong centres are nearly always being rung up. This means that incoming impressions are sent to the wrong places and produce the wrong results. A man’s life depends on this secretary, who mechanically looks up things in her reference books without any understanding of what they really mean and transmits them accordingly without caring what happens, but feeling only that she is doing her duty. This is our inner situation.
If you can relax enough physically, and drop away mentally from all ideas of yourself (which is mental relaxing) you will be able to see what I mean.
We take our typical reactions to impressions as life. We take our reactions to a person as him or her. All life – that is, outer life, which is what we usually think “life” is – namely, what we see and hear – is for each person his or her reactions to the impressions coming in from it.
It is your feelings and your ways of identifying that make you
regard this or that thing as important. It is not the things that you see with your physical eyes.
The Idea Of Transformation In The Work
(1) The First Conscious Shock does not happen to man asleep. It
conscious effort requiring special knowledge and self-observation and given in connection with the incoming impressions of life and a person’s mechanical reactions to them. Roughly, it consists in seeing the object and seeing one’s reactions to it simultaneously and without being identified.
(2) The First Conscious Shock to the human machine increases the energies of the machine in the form of Hydrogen 24 and Hydrogen 12. The result is actually to give every cell in the body different food – that is, higher hydrogens.
This net is the Personality, with its strong Buffers, its fixed Attitudes, its mechanical Associations, its Rolls automatically set in motion, and its ideas that it knows and can do, with all its contradictory ‘I’s, with all the different forms of negative emotion, which it has acquired by imitation, with all its habits of identifying, considering, self-justifying, imagining and lying, centred in the False Personality. All these prevent impressions from passing on in their normal transformations. In other words, something opaque, as it were, has formed itself at the place where impressions enter, and closed up the way for their passage onwards.
The more a man through right self-observation feels his own helplessness, the more he realizes his ignorance, the more he sees his mechanicalness and that he is a machine, the more he perceives his own utter nothingness, the more emotional will the work become to him.
In that case, False Personality will begin to collapse and a man will become “as a little child”. This is one meaning of the saying: “Except ye become as little children.”
When the valuation of the truth of esoteric teaching becomes stronger than self-valuation, it begins to act on a man. He begins to take everything differently. The whole way in which he reacts to outer life changes. (Why cannot you all understand that life is impressions?) He no longer reacts to impressions from his mechanical personality by always saying the same things, feeling the same things, and so on.
A thing cannot observe itself. How could it do so? So if you take you as yourself and yourself as you, and think that you and yourself are the same thing, then how do you propose to begin to observe yourself? You will try to observe you – and how can that be possible? A thing cannot observe itself. A thing identical with itself cannot see itself, because it is the same as itself, and a thing which is the same as itself cannot possibly have a standpoint apart from itself, from which to observe itself.
He says ‘I’ to everything. And if a man says ‘I’ to everything in himself, then everything in him is ‘I’, and how can he observe himself? How can ‘I’ observe ‘I’, if they are one and the same thing?
To every train of inner talking they say ‘I’, to every negative monologue they say ‘I’, to every suspicion they say ‘I’, to every hurt feeling they say ‘I’, to every form of imagination they say ‘I’, to every movement they make they say ‘I’. To everything that takes place within them they say ‘I’.
To all their manifestations, to all their mechanicalness, to all their inner life, they say ‘I’. And since everything is ‘I’, what is there to work on?
You have heard it said before that “unless a man divides himself into two he cannot shift from where he is.”
man must first divide himself into two. But the further stages of inner separation are more complex than this.
At any moment the strangest thoughts and images can enter us. If we say ‘I’ to them, if we think that we thought them, they have power over us. And if we then try to eliminate them, we find it impossible. Why? I will repeat one of my own illustrations of this situation. Suppose you are standing on a plank and trying to lift it and struggling as hard as you can to do so. Will you succeed? No, because you yourself are trying to lift yourself and this is impossible.
If a person is in the imagination and its meanings, he is then always out. He is not at home. Such a person does not see you. He sees his dream of you, his imagination of you, his illusion of you. This is not a very satisfactory basis for any real relationship.
It compares mankind with people in a hall of turning mirrors. These mirrors are so arranged that everyone thinks he is going forward toward some goal. But actually the mirrors are turning and people are going round and round in an ever-repeating circle. It is imagination that makes people believe in progress.
Imaginary people dress up to meet other imaginary people dressed up. Imaginary people converse politely with imaginary people. Imaginary people marry imaginary people. Imaginary people kill imaginary people – and so on. And since people are based on false personality, which is entirely composed of imagination, it is not so surprising that this is the case.
Work on oneself signifies, among other things, destroying imagination, for the Work is to make the real side of a person to become active and grow, and the false side of the person to weaken and become passive. This is called awakening from sleep.
If a man takes life as Work, everything can come to have new meaning. As a result of new meaning, new parts of centres are touched and new connections made internally, and new interpretations are possible. That is, the man becomes a little more free, not so mechanical.
Centres can be roughly compared with very delicate and extremely complex machines,
Everyone possesses these highly complex and delicate machines, but knowing nothing or next to nothing about them, people are liable to use them wrongly.
This Work must fall on bigger ‘I’s and never be allowed to sink to small ‘I’s. This is a very real and important side of work on oneself – that is, it is very important not to let small ‘I’s living in small parts of centres think and decide about the ideas of this Work.
If the ideas of this Work fall, as living seeds, on very small ‘I’s, on very little parts of centres inhabited by very small, very little ‘I’s, it is as if the seed – that is, the ideas of this Work – fall “by the wayside”. Let us remind ourselves of this parable: “The sower went forth to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden under foot, and the birds of the heaven devoured it. And other fell on the rock; and as soon as
grew, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And other fell among thorns; and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And other fell into the good ground, and grew, and brought forth fruit a hundredfold.” (Luke: VIII v-viii) In interpreting this parable to his disciples, Christ says: “The seed is the word of God. And those by the wayside are they who have heard; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word from their heart, that they may not believe and be saved.” Do you understand why it is called the wayside? It means that the ideas of the Work fall amid the traffic of one’s mind, among the ordinary thoughts of one’s life, and are taken in the mechanical side of the mind which Christ calls the devil – for mechanicalness is the devil.
Now you all know that, in the Work-sense, a person can only understand at his level of being. This means that if you meet a man on a higher level of being than your own you will not understand him.
You will then only understand what is very small, very little, very personal, and, as was said, if you centre yourself in these little ‘I’s, these small ‘I’s that relate to the small business of your daily life and to your little jealousies, little hatreds and desires and meannesses, you will be unable to adapt yourself to anything new, so the ideas of the Work will “fall by the wayside” and either be quite meaningless to you or even ridiculous, silly, unnecessary and fantastic.
I remember hearing G. say more than once that people who expect to gain increased powers by means of breath-control were fools unless they had gone through long preliminary training under a teacher and had been selected by him. They were fools because they interfered with a function which, once wrongly interfered with long enough, might never work normally afterwards.
You cannot understand about centres and their right and wrong work just in a moment. If you think you can, you will ask the wrong questions and indeed never take in anything about the subject. Think a moment. All your life is a function of, and is controlled by, centres – your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas, your hopes, fears, loves, hates, your actions, your sensations, your pleasures, your
comforts, and so on.
Please do not ask questions about the parts of centres not mapped out. It is always a sign of negative thinking and automatic questioning which is worse than formatory questioning, to ask about Asia when a lecture is being given on America or to ask about the exception when a rule is being explained.
WRONG WORK OF CENTRES THE INTELLECTUAL CENTRE AS DIVIDED INTO POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTS
What is the function of the negative part of Intellectual Centre? Roughly, its function is to think No, to negate. The function of the positive part of the Intellectual Centre is to think Yes, to affirm. Thus the whole centre can be represented in this way.
When the Intellectual Centre is working as a whole, all its different parts and divisions and subdivisions fall into their right order and functions but this rarely happens. The whole centre is rarely lit up.
For when the Work is understood, then it has formed something in a man that he did not possess before and this instrument, so to speak, thus formed in him, can respond to influences of which he was not formerly conscious.
And it is these influences that modify, change and eventually transform the man. You will see, therefore, how important it is to keep the Work alive in oneself and to hear its ideas over and over again and think of them again, and again try to act from them. For if the Work dies out in a person through the overwhelming pressure of life and its daily demands, it may be difficult to awaken it again. People easily fall asleep; and it takes very much time, study, effort and sacrifice before the Work forms itself strongly enough in a man to remain alive of itself, so people must keep in touch with those who can keep it alive and whose task it is to do so.
In order to illustrate this, the example given in the Gospels is useful to think about: “A man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to-day in the vineyard. And he answered and said, I will not: but afterwards he repented himself and went. And he came to the second and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of the twain did the will of his father?” (Matthew XXI xxviii-xxxi) A person who has a too-mechanical affirmation from the Intellectual Centre will say “Yes” but that belongs to his thought – not to his will. The basis of the will is in the Emotional Centre. So he says “Yes” with his thinking, but eventually “No” with his Emotional Centre. Or a man has negative thinking and positive feeling. He says “No” with his mind but his feeling says later on “Yes”. The parable or psychological definition can be understood differently. But it means that a man is not one – and has two distinct sides which do not necessarily agree.
But this will only be the case when he works on his negative emotions genuinely from the deepest, inner, individual perception of the truth of the horror and uselessness of negative emotions, for that is the point where real work starts, from this inner vision.
A man must reach the point of discerning his own helplessness – of realizing his own mechanicalness. And this, if it is not a negative experience, will bring him into a state of self-remembering. Through seeing his helplessness he attracts help. For realizing one’s own helplessness puts a man into the Third State of Consciousness where help can reach us.
Let us take suspicion. Suspicion is an emotional state which soon involves the negative part of the Intellectual Centre and leads it to form conclusions of a negative kind.
You will remember that there is a very hard saying in the Work – namely, that it is always your fault if you are negative. This is difficult to realize. It always seems the other person’s fault.
KARMA YOGA A TALK GIVEN BY DR. NICOLL Karma-Yoga is the science of action with non-identifying. This phrase must be remembered by everyone. It must not be changed into “the science of action without identifying”. The essence of the idea of Karma-Yoga is to meet with unpleasant things equally with pleasant things.
We have to remember something we have all forgotten. Life is very short; we lose ourselves too early in life. Do not drift. Take hold of yourself and ask: “What am I doing? Where am I going?” Think what you must do before it is too late; think what it is important for you to work on.
Right and wrong depend on a third factor. As they are themselves, they are merely opposites, which cancel each other. The third factor is aim. If your aim is to go to Edinburgh, then it is right to go north and wrong to go south. But if your aim is to go to Brighton it is right to go south and wrong to go north.
Many inflexible ideas of this kind dominate people’s minds and render their development sterile.
SELF-REMEMBERING People keep on thinking of self-remembering, but they do not do it. It is necessary to stop the chain of automatic associations every day. This can be done by inner stop – that is, stopping everything, all thoughts, etc. This is the beginning of self-remembering. But people, as I say, keep on thinking of remembering themselves, and never
Commentary On Effort
Conscious effort means effort that is not necessary in life and is not occasioned by life. That is, life is not the cause of it; the source of its origin does not lie in life.
You must understand that if man had not an inner secret destiny, if man were not a seed, and often a very unhappy one, there would be nothing for him save life and its interests. But the inner destiny of man does not lie in life. This seed that is man is capable of its own evolution and only certain kinds of light and heat can develop it – not the light and heat of the sun which governs external life and is the source of it.
When a man feels the existence of A and B influences and realizes that C influences must exist outside life, to account for the presence of B influences within life, he begins to feel the existence of something higher than himself.
Nothing better can be sought for in the long run than understanding: and in the Work a man is defined as his understanding. A man is his understanding.
Understanding is the arithmetical mean between your knowledge and your being.
To relax is not necessarily to fall asleep.
So ask yourself some questions such as these: (1) Do I think I am badly treated by someone? (2) Am I jealous of someone? (3) Is it mechanical disliking?
External considering means putting yourself in another person’s position and realizing his or her difficulties. It is one way of transforming life. So now become the person you think has treated you badly or the person you are jealous of, etc. Try to do this sincerely. It requires a conscious effort.
To be internally quiet, to stop imagining, to stop complaining, to relax, to realize one is ill and has little available force, is the right approach. Unlike depression, negative emotion is caused always by another person. The other person need not be present. One has something called imagination which acts instead.
The thing to realize is that everyone tends to pity himself – rich or poor, married or single, successful or a failure. When a man pities himself, he feels he is owed – like the dog. If you feel that you are owed, you will never begin truly to work on yourself. How could you? You must feel you owe. To make the effort to work on yourself you must actually feel something is wrong with you. It usually takes years and years before a person can even begin to see this with any conviction. The Work has to pass through layer after layer of pride, vanity, ignorance, self-complacency, self-indulgence, self-love, self-merit, and so on. Yet it can penetrate eventually.
The first change is in the mind – i.e. to think differently. This is metanoia – in the Gospels wrongly translated as “repentance”. It is called “Driver awakening” in the Work. It begins with realizing one’s situation.
effort in the Work, to mechanical effort, or effort in life. Work is vertical to life. All Work-effort is to lift a man to a higher level, and a higher level is vertical to him – that is, above him. Let us take this symbol, which gives one meaning of the Cross.
The vertical line is a line representing different levels of being, not only of Man, but of the Universe itself. A horizontal line, drawn at right angles, such as AB, and cutting the vertical line at C, will
represent a person’s life in Time at the level of being represented by the point C.
You have heard that higher states of consciousness are timeless – i.e. without any sense of Time. Movement on the vertical line is timeless. A higher state of a man does not lie along the line AB, but above the man – namely, on the vertical line. This line is what gives meaning to all things. It represents the eternal scale of meaning.
But I intend to give as much help as possible, in the form of comments, to bring the cosmological side nearer to you so that some of its meaning can begin to influence you. The cosmological side is a very powerful thing, but if no attempt is made to think of it, its force will not affect a person and so he will not feel the Work much beyond his limited self-interests. Now try to think of this vertical side. We can understand Cause and Effect in Time. In Time Cause always comes before Effect. But Cause is not only in past Time. Cause can be above and below us.
You see how Man is not free, because he is a minute part of the Cosmos of Organic Life and he is composed of minute parts belonging to the Cosmos of Cells, which in turn are composed of minute parts – namely, molecules – and so on. Man is composed of cells, which belong to their own cosmos. But Man is part of Organic Life. If Organic Life dies, Man, who is a part, would die. And if the cosmos below Man – the myriads of cells – dies, Man would cease to exist. Now this vertical arrangement is permanent. It is, as it were, vertical Cause and Effect. Or you can call it permanent order, or permanent relationship, or the inter-fitting of all things.
The bricks make the house in Time. But the house makes the bricks in the vertical scale of meaning. Man, as was said, stands like this, in the centre of the Cross. He has vertical meaning and temporal meaning. The temporal cause of Man is the past in Time: vertical cause is his meaning, and his meaning will be the level of being to which he belongs.
But this point only becomes now in its full meaning if a man is conscious. When a man is identified there is no now for him. If he is asleep in Time, being hurried on from past to future, identified with everything, there is no now in his life.
This feeling is sometimes called the feeling of Eternity. It is the beginning of the feeling of real ‘I’, for real ‘I’ stands above us, not ahead of us in Time. Eternity and Time are incommensurable.
in the scale of states of being, in the level of understanding and the quality of knowledge. Everything in the Universe, visible and invisible, known and unknown, is at some point in this vertical line.
Past Present Future
Above Below
vertical direction, that does not lie ahead of us, in the future of Time, in next year or the next century, that does not lie either in Space or in Time, but lies in another dimension – namely, above us.
but stops all his thoughts and lifts himself up into self-remembering. And it is only by this inner movement that new influences can reach him.
Man is born as a self-evolving organism. He can rise from one level to another in this vertical scale. And that is why there is such a thing as esoteric teaching.
He is an experiment; but he is of no importance in the total Universe unless he begins to fulfil the experiment that he represents.
(1) Work-aim has to do with the vertical line. Life-aim has to do with the horizontal line. A man can reach his life-aim.
The Kingdom of Heaven is above a man, not in the future of Time, but now. It is a state of man, reached internally, and so is said to be “within you”.
(merged from the other Kindle edition of Vol. 1, 2026-06-23) speaks not of sin, but of being asleep, just as the Gospels do not really speak of sin, but only of missing the mark—the Greek word means that. the first sign is usually that a person suddenly begins to realize the Work is talking about something real and shews some sign of thinking about the ideas. The first change is in the mind—i.e. to think differently. This is metanoia—in the Gospels wrongly translated as “repentance”. This happens when a man no longer merely thinks about self-remembering, but actually does it—when he no longer tries to escape from negative states by thinking himself out of them, but stops all his thoughts and lifts himself up into self-remembering. “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” Work-aim has to do with the vertical line. Life-aim has to do with the horizontal line. A man can reach his life-aim. (When he does so he usually is at a loss and does not know what to do.) Life does not contain inexhaustible meaning, but the vertical line represents inexhaustible meaning—hence “vertical aim” can never be fulfilled as “life-aim” may be. Nothing in Time remains the same—even the mountains are changing. But this change, that belongs to Time, is not transformation. The inner arrangement of a man must change—i.e. the lower centres in a man must be prepared by work before the transforming influences from higher centres can begin to reach him. The forces of transformation act from the vertical line. They act upon “substances” lying in the horizontal line in Time. In this horizontal line representing our lives we live and move. But where this horizontal line cuts the vertical line marks the point of our level of Being, and what we experience in Time is the result of our level of Being. Being is vertical to Time, and is a man’s “stature”. In life we try to be like something; we are always trying to be like something, always trying to imitate, always pretending to be something we are not. If a man were to find real ‘I’ in himself, which lies vertically above him in the scale of being, he would no longer be like anything but would be himself, what he is. ON THE STUDY OF THREE FORCES IN ONESELF Part IV. Actually, we are far more permanent even for ourselves than is the world. One reason why we have so much difficulty in understanding three forces is that we tend to see in everything one force. The next point is that creation is forcible—that is, it is brought about by force. It begins with the work of the Primal Triad of Three Forces derived from the Absolute and continues by the reduplication again and again of further triads of 3 forces. The ultimate or last point of Creation —World 96—is under many forces. This means enormous forces are locked up in creation. Through the action of the Law of Three the Universe is wound up. Sometimes in nature we can see these forces unwinding themselves, as, for instance, in the element radium. Thoughts from personality may seem far cleverer than thoughts from Essence, which are thoughts from the most simple and genuine side of us. But the quality of thought from Essence is of a far higher order than that from personality. This is the first object of the Work: to connect a man with higher parts of ordinary centres, and finally with Higher Centres themselves. And this gradual process is called awakening. If a man denies all meaning in the Universe, his higher parts of centres are blocked by his attitude. The Universe is then what he thinks it is—that is, exactly as his attitude is to it—and then the man himself is what he thinks. But this Work is to make a man think in a new way. For unless a man begins to think in a new way, he cannot change. This is obvious enough if you look at people. But to think in a new way, a man must have new ideas, new conceptions, and take them in, and think from them. The whole Ray can be called an octave in which the Absolute sounds the first Do, but we do not know of the existence of the lower Do. The Will of the Absolute does not reach this point and therefore something must be created at this point to act as a shock. It is here that Man appears. The Ray of Creation represents a descending octave. It descends into greater and greater obscurity and complexity and restrictions the further it proceeds from the Absolute. This Law governs the order of creation and brings about conditions at certain points where something must be added in the nature of a shock. The Law of Seven is therefore sometimes referred to as the Law of the Shocks. Understand this clearly: certain shocks are required at certain points in the unfolding or progress or evolution of anything. From this point of view Organic Life, including Man, exists only for the purposes of the Ray and its creation is due to the nature of the Law of Seven, which causes certain difficult or narrow places to appear in the order of creation. If this were the only object Man’s situation would be one in which as a part of this transmitting machine he must always serve the Ray and its evolution, which takes place over immense periods of time. In creating the small octave, the Sun is not merely creating on behalf of the Ray itself to fill a missing place, but is also acting for itself. The Sun wants something apart from the needs of the Ray of Creation. It is here that the possibilities of Man are found. For this reason it creates Man as something incomplete, as an unfinished being. In what sense incomplete? In regard to being a part of Organic Life, serving the purposes of the Ray of Creation he is complete and nothing more is required of him than the life he ordinarily leads. But in regard to his real origin from the Octave from the Sun he has another destiny locked up in him. In regard to this destiny Man is unfinished, incomplete, because the Intelligence of the Sun has created him for another reason and has put in him, apart from what is necessary to serve Nature, other powers and possibilities. That is, Man has in him far more than is necessary for the purposes of serving Nature. In regard to the second object of the Sun, Man is created on the Earth as incomplete in order that he may develop up to the level of being represented by the Sun. It is in this sense that Man is said in the Work to be a self-developing organism. Man is thus an experiment of the Sun, placed on the Earth. He can remain asleep and serve Organic Life: or he can awake and serve the Sun. But Man is also created to develop himself, until he reaches the level of the Sun. If you will make the effort to think, if you will really try to understand the meaning of the Ray of Creation and the Octave from the Sun, many inexplicable and apparently irreconcilable things will become clear to your mind. That is, you will be able to begin to think rightly about life on Earth, and of Man’s situation—that is, of your own situation. But when we speak of the Intelligence of the Sun we are speaking of another light seen only internally by the mind—the light of Intelligence—and so we are speaking of the Ray of Creation in an internal sense as a vertical scale of intelligence and being of increasing excellence as we ascend it. In this respect, the Intelligence of the Sun is divine in relation to the Intelligence of the Earth. He has attained his full develop- ment and is under only 12 laws, so for him there is freedom. For all freedom is gained by rising in the vertical scale of creation and so passing under fewer laws. And at the same time No. 7 Man has attained immortality on the scale of the life of the Sun. A man can be under the influences of the Sun or the influences of the Planets, or the Earth or the Moon. But he must learn to make an inner choice and to do so he must know a great deal about himself and about different “I”s in him and about parts of centres. The influence of the Sun reaches Higher Centres. All work on oneself consists in choosing the influence to which you want to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence. And here, by long observation, you must know what you want in this respect. the state of Self-Remembering or SelfAwareness—which is a man’s right and into which he is born, but which he loses very soon owing to the effect of the sleeping people by whom he is surrounded. The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. The mind of Man based on the senses has to be raised so that he no longer—to give one example —thinks in terms of Yes or No about everything. ‘A man may be born, but in order to be born, he must first die, and in order to die, he must first awake.’, In another place it says: ‘When a man awakes he can die; when he dies he can be born.’ We have already spoken enough about the meaning of being ‘born’; this relates to the beginning of a new growth of essence— the beginning of the formation of individuality, the beginning of the appearance of one indivisible ‘I’. Attachment to things, identification with things, keep alive a thousand useless ‘I’s in a man. These ‘I’s must die, in order that the big ‘I’ may be born. But how can they be made to die? They do not want to die. It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one’s complete and absolute helplessness. And in feeling his nothingness, a man should see himself as he really is, not for a second, not for a moment, but constantly, never forgetting it. This continual consciousness of his nothingness and of his helpless- ness will eventually give a man courage to ‘die’, and that is, to ‘die’, not merely mentally, or in his consciousness, but to ‘die’ in fact and to renounce actually and for ever those aspects of himself which are either unnecessary from the point of view of his inner growth, or which hinder it. It teaches that higher centres are fully developed in us and are always transmitting meaning to us only we cannot hear them. We cannot hear their finer vibrations. We are tuned in to the life of the earth and of the five senses. We listen to the crudest ‘I’s, the most mechanical ‘I’s, the ‘Is turned out to external life, and its small adventures. We listen to our jealous ‘I’s, our offended ‘I’s, our negative ‘I’s and so on. And so it is in this sense that we cannot hear these influences that are continually coming down to us from higher centres. man who can never speak from his understanding is a dumb man; a man who is always talking from the ‘I’s of false personality is a dumb man—dumb because he can never say anything real. higher centres in us that are continually telling us what to do, only we cannot understand their language. the practising of it is to open you to what is already in you, to something that we have all lost contact with owing to falling asleep.