AUGUST 4, 1944 'Constantly perform action which is duty …' (Bhagavad Gita)—this seems to be the way out of the impasse where man's impulses and personal ambitions constantly push him into activities which still further feed these same ambitions and impulses.

But it is one thing to see this as a clear idea, another to live by it. So much so, that sometimes one is forced to put aside all that one has read in books or heard, and ask oneself what one really knows for oneself, knows in such a way that all one's conduct is guided by it.

MARCH 14, 1947 We pass through certain phases, come to certain problems, that can only be solved by ourselves. The only help that is possible is when other people are friendly and open-hearted and patient, even though we may make it very difficult for them to be so. I doubt whether any other kind is possible on our level.

There are many things we have accepted in theory; but we have not yet seen their full implications. The mind is very slick; it has the blueprints and can describe them. But the being of man is a jungle, as the Mathnawi says, and there are many creatures there that we have not yet assessed, have not tamed. There are so many possibilities, for good or evil, that we have not yet seen. So much is unknown when we look into ourselves, our fate, our duty, our connections with people and things around us. We are. like men who have studied the theory and history of architecture, but haven't yet started building their own houses.

It is the individual himself who in the end has to get in there and do the work, if he is to reap the harvest he wants. No one else can do the work for him, no one else can solve his problems, no one can persuade him or coax him. He must find something in himself that longs above everything to grow, to struggle, to wake up. Then he may be some use perhaps, not otherwise. This is how it seems.

JULY 25, 1948 If people always remember that they cannot lose by experiment, they can only lose by trying nothing, much can be learned. Much can always be learned; good times or bad times—it is all the same from one point of view.

NOVEMBER 5, 1949 There is a phase when one has to go away from external knowledge, and find everything in oneself.

NOVEMBER 27, 1949 It is not necessary to give up one's own point of view easily, nor to agree with other people just because one likes them. From my point of view, what makes the work of a group much more interesting than that of an individual, is that each person should find in himself his own sincere viewpoint, which is peculiarly his, and contribute it to the whole— in this way the whole becomes rich and balanced.

AUGUST 50, 1950 The reason why some people do not understand each other is quite simply because they are at different points on a circle. It is not necessary that the different points should agree, and follow a middle course. On the contrary, each point must fulfil its own duty as purely as possible, without imitating the duty of another, which has nothing to do with it. How awful if we were all Collin Smiths or X's ! All that is necessary to attain tranquillity in our differences is to learn to understand the great whole, the majesty of the great plan in which each has a part. From there one begins to respect the duties of others without wanting to change them.

NOVEMBER 24, 1950 What you know, you know. Do not let anyone steal that from you, with the best intentions.

FEBRUARY 15, 1951 We can regard impressions as all that which enters from the outside world through the five senses. Only these impressions may just reach us without affecting us internally in any way, or they may enter us very deeply, their innermost meaning may be seen, and they may become transformed into intense emotion. For instance, one walks on the street and receives an impression of a beggar—one day it will be just a vague face which one takes as part of the scenery and which has no more significance for one than an old piece of newspaper. Another day one may actually see the man, see all he has been through, see what he is, see all that he can expect to become. Such a perception may suddenly connect with many pictures, memories and experiences, and give a flash of new understanding. It need not be a beggar. The same thing can happen through the simplest scene or object. The impression may be the same that one receives every day, but one day it is digested, that is, transformed into higher hydrogen*. And this transformation is directly or indirectly connected with the possibility of self-remembering*. Such moments may come as a result of efforts to self-remember; and they may in turn make a new level of self-remembering possible.

In the chapter on 'Experimental Mysticism' in A New Model it is described how in certain mystical states 'what is ordinarily objective becomes subjective, and what is ordinarily subjective becomes objective'. In self-remembering, one takes the first step towards this, and it may happen that inner voices, arguments, thoughts, emotions, hopes, fears, aspirations, which in the ordinary way are felt as subjective, as 'I' and 'mine', suddenly become objective, become 'he' and 'his'. In this way one begins to find different people within one. One's own inner life becomes the object of observation, gives one new and important impressions. And one comes to perhaps the deepest question of all, 'Who am I?'

JUNE 20, 1951 Energy and will and effort can be useful. Only sometimes something has to melt first, otherwise it is will, will, will for its own sake, like beating one's head on a wall.

Some people seem to play the part of one who has to walk a long difficult way home. They plod, plod, put one foot in front of the other, until at last the sense of muscular effort, of making themselves go on, seems the only thing in the world. Finally they come opposite their house. They have only to turn in and enter. But they do not notice, because the effort of plodding has become so inevitable that they can't imagine anything else. So they keep right on going, on, on, on to nowhere.

A miracle* was done which brought certain things actually within our reach now. I think that the belief that these things can only be achieved with tremendous effort and self-mortification and shame and time, is exactly the illusion that prevents us enjoying them at once.

Some people are like men laboriously digging an enormous well to reach water, when a clear stream is flowing past two yards away. In some, pride in effort has to melt, and they have to sit back quietly and let good things gently soak into them, certainty gently spring up in them.

They feel that gentle and pleasant impulses, warmth and humanity, are of the devil and have to be exorcised with effort, 'going against oneself, unpleasantness and discomfort. But my experience over the last years is that it is exactly the impulse towards that which is both good and pleasant, that reveals to each person what his true path really is. We cannot be what we are not, do what we are not made for. No school expects it of us. We can only be what we really are, do what we really can—in a higher service. And that is pleasure, happiness.

SEPTEMBER 9, 1951 Perhaps finding one's role is connected with finding the positive side of one's weaknesses, and the higher possibilities of one's likes. But to one's own role one must come; then everything else falls into place.

NOVEMBER 12, 1951 How does desire grow? The wider the vision the greater the desire. We desire little because we see little. As we see more, desire grows. If we see enough, it becomes uncontainable.

NOVEMBER 28, 1951 The question of aim is not easy. It is not so much that one 'accepts' any particular aim. For this suggests that there is a choice. There is no choice. My wish is that each person should find what their real aim is, what they want. For no aim that isn't real, no imitated aim or wished-for aim is going to move anyone anywhere. So I would rather someone said frankly: 'My aim is to produce a first-class play', than for him to say: 'My aim is to wish to become conscious.' For from the first he can begin to move here and now, whereas he may sit twenty years in the second without any appreciable change at all. My experience is that behind real aims, even apparently material or worldly ones, a man may if he wishes find the deeper desires and possibilities of his essence*. Whereas 'noble aims' often (though not always of course) arise from beautiful imagination of personality* and can find no daily nourishment. It is most clear that those who know certainly what their own immediate first line is, who take full responsibility for it, and willingly overcome all obstacles connected with it, by that very fact make openings for others and create all kinds of possibilities that those who only wish to 'work on themselves', or something subjective like that, never do.

You remember one of Ouspensky's last meetings:

OUSPENSKY: If I know your aim, perhaps I will be able to say something.
QUESTION: How can I find permanent aim?
OUSPENSKY: Find an impermanent aim first. Why do you begin with permanent aim? It is very difficult and very long. How can you find it?
QUESTION: Can one find a permanent aim by seeing one's situation, seeing what one is?
OUSPENSKY: I don't know. Depends what means permanent aim.
QUESTION: An aim stronger than those we ordinarily know in life.
OUSPENSKY: Why are these aims bad? Why cannot they be used? If you cannot find permanent aim, why not begin on impermanent?

MARCH 4, 1952 There is much to do, on a big scale as well as on a small one. And he who already knows his own aim in life most easily finds his place in the Work.

APRIL 2, 1952 It sometimes happens that we interpret complete stagnation as 'liberation'. On this road we can only hope to liberate ourselves from our illusions and limitations, never from struggle, discomfort and responsibility, which, on the contrary, ought to increase with the strength and understanding of the student. There is very much to be done. But fortunately the greater the widening of our vision, the more interesting our work becomes, and the more 'interior food'* we derive from everything and from everyone with whom we come into contact.

MAY 1, 1952 One has to form within oneself one's own judgement of the esoteric. Ouspensky himself always told us: 'You must not believe me. Observe. Prove or disprove what I say. You must come to your own conclusions.'

Easy acceptance on the one hand or negative argument on the other are equally resistant obstacles, each belonging to different types of people.

MAY 20, 1952 I think of essence and personality like this. Let us take the digestion of food. It enters the mouth and passes to the stomach. There it is ground, purified, mixed, warmed and prepared for passing into the bloodstream. But while it is in the stomach it is not yet organically part of the man himself. Only when food is digested into the form of chyme does it enter the bloodstream, is organically absorbed into the man. It is an integral part of him.

We can take the digestion of experience in the same way. It enters by the five senses and passes into personality. There it is ground, purified, mixed, warmed and prepared to enter into essence. But while it is in personality it is not yet organically part of the man himself. It can always be lost. Only when experience is digested in the form of understanding or permanent capacity does it enter into essence and is organically absorbed into the man. It is an integral part of him.

AUGUST 23, 1952 There are tremendous possibilities before us. I say 'possibilities' because although now they present themselves as practical possibilities, they depend on our efforts and our understanding.

A little before his death Ouspensky, after having spent a whole night forcing his dying body to walk, and waking us in order to make many experiments, said to me: 'Now do you understand that everything has to be done by effort, or do you still think that things come right by themselves?' It was difficult to answer sincerely. Because at that moment I saw clearly that if we really understood that everything is done by effort, all our life would be on another basis. We would not be able to hope.

It is strange that in these last years, nearly all the nebulous ideas that I had before about esoteric work have presented themselves as practical possibilities—but depending upon my own work and effort. I have understood that we ourselves have to develop our own will up to the highest possible point; that is, the power of putting into practice what we know. It is a duty inherent in the esoteric economy.

AUGUST 28, 1952 In order to find his real field of work, a man has first to find himself. In some superlogical way all types* enjoy all possibilities. Through being themselves they can find everything—at any rate when they are disciples.

OCTOBER 1952 To seek the Kingdom of God always implies willingness to accept many more responsibilities, not to avoid those we already bear. Often in the stimulus of new experiences this fact is forgotten.

DECEMBER 15, 1952 I feel that each group must find and adhere to its own inner line, no matter how this may appear to contradict that of others. At the same time I see no reason why this should mean quarrels or disputes, any more than there need be quarrels between the brain, the heart and the liver. In fact the more certain a group is in its own line, it seems to me the more generous and understanding it can afford to be towards others.

JANUARY 19, 1953 Those who have found a profession through which they can learn and apply these ideas are very lucky. This is the most satisfactory situation—that one can make of one's profession one's own way. Because it is characteristic of the tradition we are studying that it must be realised in life itself. Of course its realisation through one's profession is not a question of months nor of years but of a whole lifetime. But to have a profession that harmonises with one's aim is already an enormous advantage.

AUGUST 29, 1955 Although it may be necessary for a certain length of time for a person to give up his own line of work and interest, in order to rediscover it on another scale, I am quite sure that in the long run each person has to find his way and his contribution through what most deeply satisfies him. The work eventually uses us for what we are, not for what we are not. All the rest is preparation. It would surely be very bad economics if the Great Work used a chisel as a screwdriver and an architect's square as a paper-knife!

Certainly there is more to it than this. For a man's feature (or talent as the Gospels say) can be either his undoing or his salvation. If it is at the service of personality, it will be his weakness, that which trips him up. But if the same thing serves essence or an ideal then it is that which justifies the man's existence in the world, which enables him to fulfil himself and to serve the Work.

SEPTEMBER 24, 1955 Nobody can or should supplant one's own inner way of understanding. I have always been convinced that each person has his own potential way of responding to school* direction. With some people this response takes 'psychic' forms, with others it may take the form of logical understanding, a flair for right action, healing, art. God knows what. When a group becomes organic, all these individual responses dovetail together and reveal the plan being manifested.

No one is expected to have faith in what they have not experienced. Faith is never to go back on what one has already known at certain times oneself. This is the only way to the miraculous. And if the miraculous comes as a result of it, let it come!

FEBRUARY 25, 1954 We must not hanker after what our companions were. That does not help them or us or the Work. We must long for what they will be, and what we will be.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1954 One has to learn to be. There is no substitute. I think each person has to find his own way of returning to the state of complete certainty and freedom—it may be by meditating alone in silence, by praying, by music, by certain reading or pictures, or in the happy affection of chosen companions. Anyway, when we expect to find ourselves in critical circumstances, we must first restore this freedom in ourselves, and then project it intentionally before consideration and timidity reaches us from others.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1954 It is very clear to me that we are trying to make free people and strong people, who will have confidence enough to act from their own deepest feelings in any circumstances.

SEPTEMBER 20, 1954 Surely what unites all traces of our work is a point of view. I believe the same point of view can be presented in diametrically opposite ways, and often was in the past, in order to make people think for themselves.

SEPTEMBER 20, 1954 We must never forget that nothing that can happen or can be said can affect what we are. And it is from what we are that we can help others. Difficulties are a test of being. We have to show by example that inner certainty resolves all things.

OCTOBER 19, 1954 Tremendous pressure is being put on people to help them find their own true place, their own inner source of certainty. Whatever happens we must not let ourselves be shaken in what we really know. We need riot fight or challenge. But we must never allow our own faith to be sapped, however little it is understood. We must always act and speak from it, never from imitation. This is very important—on a big scale it is important.

NOVEMBER 6, 1954 The first condition of being helped and used by Great School is to find one's own way, to have confidence in what one can become. The man who is himself, who is sincere and determined to do what he knows he must, will receive all the help he needs.

FEBRUARY 11, 1955 It's sad if a place which has provided the conditions of movement in one period becomes an inhabited museum the next—and difficult to prevent. It is true that one feels a little lost when the background of work that one has become accustomed to, is taken away. But when one exposes oneself without this background, in no time at all life begins to demand new expressions of work from one, new experiments, new solutions. Everything begins to move again. I don't say it's comfortable, but it's lively.

It is important to take work in new conditions as a new way of working, not repetition of the old way. Work is never work if it doesn't progress. It has to progress by mutual understanding, real love, harmony. It progresses by leaving fears behind. Fear of losing old forms, fear of being left naked, fear of opinions, fear of the new, fear of the forces of life—all these must be left behind. To understand the big work, we must be free of all fear whatsoever.

This Work is in each of us, in ourselves. It means making a permanent certainty within ourselves out of what we have received. Then it means projecting this certainty to others around us. We have to give to receive. We have to teach to learn. To teach is to understand, to understand is to accept, to accept is to realise, to realise is to find truth.

FEBRUARY 11, 1955 Really every sincere experiment is wonderful, if one doesn't stop in the middle, but carries it through to the point where it attracts inspiration and high help. Everybody has to find their way to this point individually. Everybody has to find their own way, their own understanding, their alert conscience. They have to accept by themselves for themselves what self-remembering means for them.

FEBRUARY 23, 1955 Everybody has known truth in different degrees—very few people understand that it must be consciously fixed, and nobody but oneself can do the fixing. Higher powers can tint us with their understanding, but we have to take the mordant ourselves.

JULY 18, 1955 About Ouspensky's teaching, it is not only a question of a philosophical system or of a great teacher. It is more like a field of influence which was projected through Gurdjieff and Ouspensky from an invisible level much beyond them. When we really enter this field of influence and expose ourselves to it, many things change for us. Some things become easier, others harder. Some doors close and others open.

Only it takes a very long time and much study and experience to take advantage of this situation. For to do so we have to learn to be ourselves, to find a new confidence and security deep in ourselves. Then we will feel ourselves more and more intimately connected with an influence which is completely reliable, because it does not originate in our world.

AUGUST 12, 1955 The only sanity lies in far and high vision. In the light of that, we know we are all fellow-actors, though we don't yet guess our true relationships or even how the plot is going to develop.

All I wish is that we should learn to be sincere and consistent, be really ourselves, not talking in one way and acting in another. Like everybody else, I profess beliefs which I am tempted to forget when living up to them is inconvenient and uncomfortable. To be sincere and consistent in one's own position, whatever it may be—that's not easy. Because personality enters in. I see that our teachers didn't do this. They lived consistently by the pattern of their belief, no matter how unpleasant or how much misunderstood. Were there ever two men who silently absorbed more misunderstanding than Ouspensky and Gurdjieff? But they were strong enough to swallow all that, and go straight on playing their true roles. Perhaps this is the final proof of their greatness.

I don't think it matters what position is taken, if it is taken honestly. Each man's conscience gives him an individual credo. But the important thing is to be true and consistent in that credo. Trying to please other people whose credos are different is exhausting, demoralising and leads nowhere. I wish we could give it up and become free in our differences. For that is harmony. And that is what I am after.

OCTOBER 5, 1955 Of course we must never give up the expression of our talents. They are God-given gifts. What shall we do if we throw away the possibilities which God has given us to fulfil our individual tasks?

OCTOBER 22, 1955 I think one's own work is much simpler than we imagine. It is the constant effort to become honest, truthful and sincere. Honest—realising that everything has to be paid for, both what one wants for oneself and for others, and to be up to date in one's payment is great happiness and freedom; truthful to measure everything and everybody, including oneself, impartially by the laws we have been given, not by comfort and preferences; sincere—learning to be truly oneself, to make one's own way without imitation even of those we admire most. In the field of influence in which we now find ourselves we are being watched and helped all the time. In proportion as we achieve these three qualities, we will also be used.

I feel very much the truth of the parable about the workers in the vineyard—how the ones who came at the first hour, the third, the sixth, all received the same payment. It is the same now with groups all over the world. The same higher help is available to them, no matter whether they have been working twenty years, or five, or one.

NOVEMBER 50, 1955 We must find everything by ourselves in ourselves, without stumbling over words, but feel the meaning of everything within ourselves.

The key of our work is to give; to give we must have, to have we first have to find. We have to find who is ourself, who he was and who he ought to be. Then be it.

DECEMBER 22, 1955 Why should we be afraid when we find ourselves saying more than we know? That must happen to us, if we are to become useful instruments. Some have written like that, some have painted like that, some have simply acted like that. Then we must understand the meaning of what has been said or written or acted through us. And so we grow and make it really our own.

DECEMBER 26, 1955 We must all—both as groups and individuals—find our different ways of understanding and manifesting the great truth which is above us as best we can. If we all used the same way of expressing that truth, we should be merely repeating each other, and how dull that would be for those who are directing us!

Fortunately, the influence under which we live seems to be pressing us all every day harder to be our true selves, to leave behind pretensions and protections, and to affirm what we know deafly and bravely. It is made so extraordinarily uncomfortable to loiter that we have every possible incentive to go on towards light and freedom.

FEBRUARY 2, 1956 What strange things happen to us, when we are alert. Fate pushes us into a corner, and if we don't try to slip out from under, teaches us as much in minutes as would otherwise take years to learn. But what is this fate which knocks the ground from under our feet precisely that we should learn to fly? And who arranges it? That we must find out.

As one goes on, if one is on the right road, it will happen more and more. Sometimes disconcerting, sometimes unbearable—but those moments when we are stripped of habit, and left helpless, are really the moments of our opportunity. It is important not to struggle against them or run away—but quietly go through them to something new.

FEBRUARY 7, 1956 When we speak to people, we must learn more and more to speak in our own words, our own understanding, without worrying how it sounds, asking them simple sincere questions which they cannot take theoretically. It is impossible to remain theoretical in the face of real simplicity and sincerity. But this means that we have to be very simple, sincere and humble ourselves, speaking without guile and acknowledging what we have found from our own experience.

As to all suggestions and possibilities, we must always remain very open to what people suggest and to what life brings. We have to learn to respond continually to what comes to us in a living and true way. The rest will come by itself.

MARCH 18, 1956 I think that in order to help our children, we have to reduce all we understand to its simplest terms, and then try to live by that. For children really are most deeply affected by example, and only secondly by explanation, when it is very simple and clear. Most important is that they should grow up in an atmosphere free from negativeness, and in which they are encouraged to be confident and to express their real selves. Teach them to be truthful, honest and sincere. That covers everything.

It seems very important that children should be encouraged to find their own beliefs and interpretations, not to imitate us —which they won't do in any case. It is important because it is on them that fulfilment of today's work depends.

JULY 50, 1948 Evidently the yielding up of the capacity of understanding is a very much more serious sin on the way of development than it appears. And no amount of other efforts can neutralise it.

The reason is that understanding is very closely connected with conscience, and that one who gives up the struggle to understand and simply accepts, must at a certain point stifle his own conscience. And from this one can only recover with very great suffering.

Understanding gives power and confidence; absence of understanding creates suffering and weakness—even though the individual may struggle bitterly.

It is interesting in this connection that people say: 'Collin Smith is teaching, will teach, won't teach.' They don't understand that I am learning and this is the only way that I or anyone else can do so. I remember very clearly sitting with Ouspensky at Longchamps in New York sometime about 1945, I think, and asking why everything seemed to have come to a stop. He said: 'You forget one thing; many people forget it—to learn more, you have to teach.'

Since then I have seen how many people, who had got very far, began to understand less and less, because they were unwilling to accept responsibility for passing on to others what they understood. Understanding cannot remain static—it can only increase or diminish; and the safest way to increase one's understanding is to help others to understand.

Actually this applies on all levels—though of course it cannot be said until the distinction between understanding and opinion is clear, and until various illusions of self-importance are broken. But it is a general principle.

OCTOBER 7, 1948 The more one understands, the more one is forced to try every method and every experiment that may help to narrow the great gap between one's being as one observes it and the possibilities that one begins to glimpse. If understanding of the whole pattern of things and one's place in it grows, then one has no choice but to struggle. What one sees forces one on. Ouspensky used to say that the key of this way was 'understanding', and that every effort made with understanding of its reason and possible effect was worth ten times as much as the same effort made without understanding. With understanding, time and persistence, many things become possible.

OCTOBER 27, 1948 I think it is a principle that sooner or later each person must find right expression for what he has understood. Anything which has no outward expression at all must be very suspect—it will be awfully like imagination. Right expression is a sort of magic which enables one to make transient understandings really one's own, and which may reveal new connections that one never suspected before. At the same time right expression doesn't necessarily mean talking, though it may include talking, if intentional and for a definite reason. For example, Ouspensky wrote many things in his books that he would practically never agree to talk about. Evidently each individual has to find his own right expression, some safe way of adding his understanding to the general stock, as well as preserving it for himself.

Perhaps if one can find a perfect method of expression it is not necessary to say anything. I think of Ouspensky, who for years explained in greatest detail the whole theory of change to a higher level of man, then gradually explained less and less, and finally became silent and performed the miracle*. Performance is the perfect expression and transcends every other.

DECEMBER 15, 1948 Such an extraordinary power of new knowledge, understanding and certainty was released by Ouspensky's last work—before he died and at his death—that those people who opened themselves to it can never see things in the old way again. Particularly that time and achievement opened up quite new ideas both of the possibility of the Work and the purpose of it. In my own case, I feel that all my previous ideas were inexpressibly personal, trivial and lacking in daring, compared with what was finally made clear by Ouspensky.

We used to think it was our hope that was imagination; we were quite wrong—it is our doubts and fears which are imaginary and unnecessary, and prevent us from understanding anything. Energy comes from above, not below—everything is in that.

APRIL 5, 1949 How to keep an original line developing with emotion and without deviation? The only practical answer I have found is 'people'. The pressure of people from many different sides—if one really exposes oneself to their questions, requirements, hopes, demands—can provide the force to drive one forward, provided one holds the rudder straight.

I remember once in a very bad time indeed sitting with Ouspensky at Longchamps and asking why everything seemed to have come to a dead stop. He said: 'You forget that in order to learn, you have to teach.' I wouldn't put it like that now. But I do see that if the pressure of others— some who require you to be better than you know, others who tempt you to be as weak as you were, those who ask questions whose answers you can only learn in trying to answer, those whom you have to force yourself to ask, the man who can talk about recurrence, and the deformed beggar who catches your leg as you walk along the street, the man above and the man below— all these push you if you don't spare yourself, and it is up to you to make them push you in the right direction. Their pressure never relaxes, if is only we who have schooled ourselves not to notice it.

The only other thing which I have found to produce the same effect is the pressure of ideas requiring to be expressed— in writing, painting or something like that. And curiously enough this is pressure of people—those from whom the ideas come and those to whom they must go. But at second hand, so to speak.

MAY 24, 1949 If one man really achieves higher states in which he experiences different parts of the universe, and different states of time and matter, he may—in favourable circumstances —be able to convey this to those in sympathy with him as understanding.

But such a state as Ouspensky reached was evidently outside time* as we experience it, so that what was real then is equally real now, and just as able to produce this kind of reflection in our minds today as it was in October 1947—if we can bring ourselves to the receptive state to which he intentionally raised us. For this, an intensely positive attitude towards Ouspensky, the sacrifice of all our personal doubts and sufferings, and great and prolonged attention are certainly necessary.

But it is possible—this is the chief thing.

Things like experiment with diet can give us a start. One must become as physically well as possible. What one sometimes feels as inertia is a purely physical state, and one has to deal with it by physical means: reasonable diet, exercise, drinking water, and so on.

Only nothing should be exaggerated—and any experiments should be for a definite and limited period. Later one can repeat them or try other experiments. It is not good to let any discipline become too fixed. Ouspensky said: Team to make demands upon yourself.' This is the secret. But it applies to all sides of oneself—physical, emotional, mental. And one kind of demand should never become such a habit that it makes one forget all the other kinds.

JULY 25, 1949 I am sure that everything which comes to us from a higher source must in turn be expressed by us, if we are to take advantage of it. In school*, influences must flow from above down and through one person and another and so, more diluted but equally necessary, out into life. Each person through whom this influence flows learns and benefits. But the one with whom the influence stops, gets nothing and can understand nothing. He is like the end of a blocked-off water pipe where no water moves.

All the same, I don't mean that there need be any formal expression. Some people may express and pass on influence in a very undefinable way, just by being. It is different for everybody.

JANUARY 22, 1952 Understanding more, seeing things more objectively, comes first; when that sinks in thoroughly enough, one begins to be different, act differently. There isn't any other way.

MARCH 15, 1952 As Ouspensky always said, this is the way of understanding. Everything must be understood, and being understood, everything from the popular to the esoteric, from the tango to Catholic prayers, can reveal interior connections.

JUNE 10, 1952 At those times when understanding suddenly widens, day by day more and more, one should leave traces of how the crack that lets in the light of new understanding was opened. These traces have a very special flavour and strength, and one day in their turn will produce effects. They also help to fix the new understanding. For when suddenly without warning we find ourselves in the middle of that which we have been seeking, we should remember the necessity of fixing the state that has been given us, in order for it to become permanently ours.

These times of sudden enlightenment and understanding are part of the most mysterious and miraculous aspect of the Work. We cannot anticipate them, we cannot deserve them. 'We do not know the day nor the hour …' as it is said in the Gospels. But when they come, all values are upset. And they fix the direction and the course of the whole of the stage that follows.

JULY 1, 1952 In a highly emotional state we are flooded by emotions and visions. The wave of emotion will inevitably subside. But the task is to fix the understanding that it brings in order that this understanding may remain even when the emotion that brought it has gone. To fix a new attitude— towards oneself, towards other people, towards one's teacher and towards God—this is the problem. The person in whom new attitudes are fixed, permanent, reliable, can be the instrument of higher powers.

JULY 8, 1952 I am glad when people tell me their experiences and new understandings. But we must also be prepared for the lean days. We must store uncompleted understandings in order to digest them and nourish ourselves with them in those times when further 'supersubstantial bread' is not given. There is so much to do—we must work for the bad times as well as for the good.

SEPTEMBER 9, 1952 An individual life may be quite rich, good and satisfactory, without the power of organisation. In the ordinary way, it is made up for by other qualities. But in our way, one has to be able to 'organise' to the full all that passes through one's hands and one's understanding—we must have organised thoughts, organised effort, organised knowledge. It is part of the economy of esotericism—question of the 'talents'.

SEPTEMBER 12, 1952 Sometimes one finds in people real and deep perception mixed with personal prejudices and wild shots in the dark. How Ouspensky used to struggle with us about 'lying', that is, speaking of what one does not know as though one knew. One did not understand properly then, now it becomes clearer. It is not so serious in a state of ignorance; it is when one does begin to learn and know something that lying becomes so dangerous. For it prevents the proper use of that which one does know.

FEBRUARY 15, 1955 I've come to the conclusion that if we can't express a thing in the simplest possible terms, we haven't really understood it.

OCTOBER 22, 1955 I think the deep instinct to check everything, verify everything, seems absolutely essential. In fact it is this friction between the instinct to believe and the instinct to question which forces us to that state of self-remembering* where alone things can be truly assessed.

NOVEMBER 9, 1955 We cannot communicate understanding 'raw'; first we must purify it, then skim off the personal dross, and finally mint it into a form acceptable by others.

The beauty of a nice shocking series of questions is that everybody has to answer these questions for himself. Nobody else's answer is valid for him. A kind of half-belief, within strictly reasonable limits, is altogether too comfortable.

When the verification comes to what we believe, it always seems like a little miracle. And we have to demand verification for what we believe. Only, my verification and my little miracles don't mean a thing to anyone else, and they're not supposed to. This is sometimes difficult to accept. But it is arranged like that. If little miracles were valid for third parties, the Work would be drowned in a flood of superstition.

MAY 11, 1954 Things grow and unfold as they must. But each individual's opportunity seems to lie in how much he can see and understand the general growth as it takes place: the more he understands this process of big growth the more useful he will be.

DECEMBER 10, 1954 We were taught—and I understand it better every day—that understanding is not the product of one function* in man, but the resultant of several functions working in harmony. For example, if one appreciates something with the mind, one 'knows' it; if one appreciates it with the emotions, one 'feels* it; if one appreciates it with the external physical organs, one 'senses' it. But if one simultaneously appreciates it with the mind, emotions and physical senses, then one really understands it. This is very rare as we are. It can be developed. But in order to do so, something like 'self-remembering' is necessary—that is, one has to remember all one's functions and their relations to the thing in question.

Modem mathematics is a powerful tool of thought, not only in the physical sciences, but also in relation to life itself. Only, for this, one has to understand mathematics not only with the mind, but also with the emotions and the whole physical organism. 'Emotional mathematics' can solve any problem in the universe. After all, what else is the idea of the Holy Trinity?

FEBRUARY 12, 1955 I feel very vividly the knitting up of new understanding which is going on all over the world. For it is going on, far faster and far deeper than any of us dream, I believe. It really is the key of a new harmony which has to reconcile all things hitherto unreconcilable.

AUGUST 14, 1955 What relationships are living in the Work continue to develop and grow, whether near or far. We must not try to force understanding between group and group, but leave it to develop naturally between the individuals who are in sympathetic contact. It is, after all, the growth of individual souls that we are really interested in.

AUGUST 25, 1955 By understanding everything becomes simple. We see what is, objectively. Where we stand, objectively. What we can do, objectively. Understanding avoids useless friction, pointless struggle. Makes us steady, tolerant, kind, 'understanding'. Gives us weight. To reach real understanding we must study more, much more, verify in worldly terms all that has been said or felt.

Being open. Everything is available, waiting for us. We are bathed in cosmic radiations, all help. But we have to make ourselves open. Open our pores. Catch everything. What prevents us from being open, receiving what is going, is being preoccupied with ourselves, thinking of ourselves. If we forget ourselves, everything comes to us.

Polarities. Sun—Earth. North Pole—South Pole. Positive terminal—Negative terminal. Man—Woman. Everything real is created by the intervention of an invisible force in the field of tension between two poles. The two poles are reconciled by some higher current, something unrecognised. Then creation begins. If the third element is not present or not recognised, the polarity may turn to hostility, violence, destruction, hatred. The poles seem 'enemies'. Where the third force* is invoked, they are complements. Seeing the reconciliation of polarities by third force is the beginning of harmony. Ouspensky once said, long ago: 'There are ideas which could stop all quarrels; such an idea is the law of three.'*

OCTOBER 11, 1948 There is a state—like that of a small child or a shipwrecked man washed up naked on an island—when everything that exists must be accepted. All that you are is your body and the life-force which motivates it. So there is nothing with which you can feel negative emotions. In trying to answer the question: 'Who am I?', one may come to certain answers which produce almost the same effect.

From such states one knows that condemnation and negative criticism are always and everywhere wrong. They lead nowhere and can only spoil everything. When one has this understanding about negative emotions one is in one way very safe, and in another way very vulnerable. It is natural to believe the best of everything, and I think it is important to remember that there are also harsh laws connected with development—at least they may appear harsh through limited understanding.

APRIL 50, 1949 At one very emotional moment in those last days, Ouspensky said: 'People must not be afraid to take second step.' It seemed and still seems to have two sides. First of all, it seems connected with a quite new scale of attention, permanent attention, remembering all the time, as a continual state. We have to demand from ourselves. But it also seemed connected with the realisation that quite new things are possible, that higher influences are much nearer than we thought, and that with their help our ordinary self, the machine, can actually be transcended. These two sides are inseparable, each impossible alone, but each making the other possible.

Only one has to believe that it is possible. The slightest breath of doubt, not only of those higher forces but of oneself, immediately seems to cut one off from new possibilities. Perhaps one has not only to believe new things possible, but to be sure that they will come.

Perhaps all this is connected with third force* in the work of change. We may see and actually bring together first and second force, effort and mechanicalness. But it is third force which is so elusive, which can't be compelled or cajoled or even calculated, but if all is favourable, may suddenly and inexplicably descend. It once came to me that this can never be deserved. It must always be regarded as a gift.

Early one morning, shortly before his death, Ouspensky suddenly said: 'One must do everything one can—and then just cry to . . .' He did not finish, just made one big gesture upwards.

Unremitting efforts, the gradual development of will—this is creation of right active force. But always there is third force, unknown, incalculable. Is it reverence, is it faith, is it certainty, is it knowledge, is it love? I don't know. Perhaps all and more. But it can't be left out; and somehow it can make everything possible—even against reason.

JUNE 18, 1949 There is a level at which the devil cannot enter. The whole idea must be to get there. If we cannot, we must at least remember that such a level does exist. Crime cannot exist in the face of positive emotion. If we cannot have positive emotion, we can still remember that it is the one, the only safeguard in the long run.

MAY 1, 1950 I think faith is the same as that which Ouspensky called 'positive attitude'. And in my experience I know that was the first essential, whose presence made the impossible possible, and whose absence immediately cut one off from all understanding. During the last months and weeks of his life, when all was so strange, new, unreasonable, faith that what was being done had meaning, had purpose, immediately seemed to open the door to understanding of that purpose, however deep and unknown. While if for a moment that faith was lost, what was being done actually became for the doubter no more than the vagaries of an old man who had lost his mind. And so remained till faith returned. So certainly my experience is that what the Roman Catholic Church says about faith was at that time and since not a whit too strong.

DECEMBER 24, 1950 Some people have faith and others positive scepticism. By faith I mean a kind of knowing beyond one's powers. By positive scepticism I mean an intense questioning of everything until the truth is reached that way. Maybe it will be a long while before the two paths meet. But honestly followed they must meet in the end. And it seems to me to be as useless for one who has not faith to pretend to have it, as for one who has it to pretend he has not. Only if it does begin to dawn, and one begins to know things one could not know, then it is very important not to be afraid of it, or argue oneself out of it, or allow oneself to be argued out of it.

MARCH 18, 1951 If one can get near enough to the source, it is impossible to be negative. But even as I write that, I think— what a hopelessly negative way of expressing it! And how little this describes the positive understanding, the positive certainty, the positive love which fills the place left by the departure of negativeness! And what immense vistas begin to open up!

School, for instance. Once upon a time school meant a wise man teaching foolish men. Now one sees school behind school behind school. Big school seems now like the highest function of the earth; the mechanism of consciousness not only for mankind but for the planet. The rise and fall of civilisations are only the play of big school. And behind big school on earth, there is the greater school of the Solar System; and even —I am sure—connection with a still higher directing force on a certain star.

NOVEMBER 14, 1951 What is very difficult for people to understand about the case of a child with a handicap from birth is that it implies absolutely nothing wrong in the fate of either parents or the child. Without formulating it to themselves, people believe that it must mean there was a mistake, a wrong action, a 'sin' somewhere. On the contrary, often such children and their parents are much freer of negativeness than most families. To me, it seems that there are souls who, for certain reasons of growth, are required to pass through these very difficult forcing conditions of control and consciousness, and that families are chosen for them previously where there will be much more love, affection and understanding available than ordinarily. The love and belief of the parents and certainty in their children provides exactly the third force which can enable their 'inner selves' to use this special state of their bodies to achieve what is thus made possible for them to achieve.

AUGUST 20, 1952 One sees how a man who gives up everything — like St. Francis—has unlimited power. Nothing is impossible. Talk about positive attitude! When everyone else in Christendom was talking of the Crusades, he said: 'Why, it's quite simple—we'll convert the Sultan.' And he went and tried. He lay down on the bare earth and died, October 5, 1226.

DECEMBER 15, 1952 My own experience with people over these last five years is that even the best and most undeniable explanations why it would be an advantage to stop some unpleasant manifestation in themselves do not lead to change. Put like this, it is as though the true motive force is left out. On the other hand if logical explanations about the practical advantage of becoming free of negative emotions are combined with the super-logical explanations about the possibility of their transmutation into something quite new and incommensurable, then something really begins to move in people. In other words, without the idea of the miraculous the system does not work; but with this idea it can and does.

The miraculous in relation to negative emotions begins with the idea of second conscious shock*—the transformation of negative emotions into positive ones. It begins for me with Ouspensky's saying that if we had no negative emotions, we would have no chance of development, so they would have to be invented. They are our own inexhaustible raw material for transmuting into that divine energy which otherwise is incommensurable with our logical efforts.

I remember Ouspensky's saying that first and second conscious shock do not come in chronological succession; that in order to work on the first, self-remembering, you already have to be working successfully on the second, actually transmuting negative emotions. In my personal experience this is true, possible and essential.

AUGUST 9, 1955 I can't help looking back at all those years of Ouspensky's work between the wars as preparation—preparation for something that was actually conceived in the end, and by virtue of which all our work and possibilities were transformed. That was the time of sowing and cultivating the soil, this is the time of harvest. Many of the methods and attitudes of the time, it seems to me, had inevitably to be cold, harsh and even in a sense negative. Such methods and attitudes now seem to be outdated by the very achievement which they helped to make possible.

Two very clear examples were in the teaching about negative emotions and imagination. All the emphasis was on not expressing negative emotions, and on the dangers of imagination. Probably this was all that was possible at that time. But it is extraordinary how all our people here are unanimous in feeling that the transformation of negative emotions direct into affection and understanding has now been made possible for us. Also that intentional imagination, aided by laws and understanding, is one of our chief ways toward the realisation of new states and new possibilities, both individually and for the Work as a whole. Further, this very fundamental change of attitude has come to be linked in all our minds with the idea of 'abandoning the system' and 'reconstructing everything'. In other words, with the entry of the miraculous.

JULY 17, 1954 Loose talking always has bad effects—most of all upon those who talk. People should learn only to talk about our work when it is necessary, and then to talk discreetly; to do this requires understanding and more than a touch of self-remembering*. In general, the methods of the group, its intimate affairs and the work of its individual members should never be discussed outside the group. And if ideas are talked of, they should be put into the speakers' own language, not in the terminology used in meetings—for that will ensure that the speaker thinks at least twice before he utters. It is quite reasonable, quite normal. Only we have to become fully reasonable and normal to realise this.

JULY 17, 1954 One has to realise that the short-term misunderstandings and amusements to which our work gives rise are not so important as all that. We have to learn to act honestly and sincerely, and realise that the results do not lie in our hands. Things which look very unpleasant and distressing when seen against the background of a week, may appear very different when thought of against a year, ten years, or a century. And we are working in long time.

NOVEMBER 9, 1954 To talk badly about this Work is to separate oneself from it for a very long time, perhaps for ever. And certain opportunities don't repeat.

DECEMBER 10, 1954 There is so much doubt and self-doubt in the world that it is not easy to remain unperturbed in one's own vision of certainty. When we have certainty, we must actively project it to others, or they will gradually nibble it away from us.

MARCH 12, 195 5 Today the truth can be written more clearly and simply than has ever been possible before. And if it is really sincere and unpretentious it will not arouse opposition.

What we affirm we strengthen. If we affirm opposition and misunderstanding, we ourselves feed it. Our work must contain no internal hesitation and lack of faith which undermines its strength. We must be content to state with conviction what we know and believe. The way people take it is not our business.

DECEMBER 25, 1948 Perhaps the most difficult and important thing is to learn to wait. And when one asks oneself what one is waiting for, one begins to realise that it is for a moment of stillness, without attachment to the past or future. For in such a moment all kinds of exercises and perceptions become possible which are never available when one is hurrying into the future or out of the past.

It seems to us that the important times are those when much is happening, much is required, and one is hypnotised by motion. It may be quite different. Now I begin to feel that all that is important comes in quietness and waiting; and that activity should be only the working out, the digesting and putting forth of what one learned, so that one may become empty again to receive more.

FEBRUARY 18, 1949 Evidently many ideas and new perceptions can come to us, if physical and emotional strains and the motion of the mind are quieted. But it is not quite tension which is the obstacle. It is more than that— something like the whole momentum of life, identification with the rushing forward of time. Difficult to explain. Sometimes it happens that a great ordeal, or a long fast, or having a baby, breaks this momentum, and then all kinds of new impressions enter that could never catch up when one was tearing into the future like an express train.

I often think of the last years with Ouspensky. He would have two or three people sit with him, not doing anything, just sitting, smoking, occasionally making a remark, drinking a glass of wine, for hours on end. At first it was very difficult — one racked one's brains what to say, how to start a conversation, thought of all kinds of imaginary duties elsewhere. Many people could never bear it. But after a while, these became the most interesting times of all. One began to feel—everything is possible in this moment, let the past and future take care of itself. Some kind of momentum slowed down, and sometimes quite new ideas, a quite new connection with time and one's surroundings, seemed to form. One was shown what it meant to be more free.

Of course one cannot create such situations without an Ouspensky. One has to work hard, and play one's role in life, probably without much sitting down. But innerly I think it is possible to slow down this momentum, to accept what the present brings and live in that. From an intense sense of the present it is possible to feel certain connections in the past and future. If one is not established in the present, then one is nowhere and nothing is possible.

Really it is only involuntary tension which prevents this. Deliberate tension seems to be exactly what helps prepare for relaxation. The Movements* we used to do, some yogi exercises, probably some Indian dancing, are from one point of view based on intense deliberate tension of certain parts of the body, certain functions, which afterwards become relaxed and thus channels for finer energy which can never penetrate them in the ordinary way. It is the same with emotion. Involuntary emotional strain is only exhausting. But the deliberate undertaking of emotionally difficult tasks, understanding why, can certainly lead to a higher kind of emotional understanding.

All the difference in the world is between voluntary and involuntary. Two ideas were sometimes spoken of: First, 'Sacrifice your suffering', and then much later, the idea of 'intentional suffering'. The first refers to involuntary, and the second to voluntary. But one must get rid of the first before one can come to the second, and all that can be bought in that way.

Probably there is some similar principle in sex. But sex is so subtle, so delicate, so quickly influenced by other functions, that theory doesn't help much. I think one thing Ouspensky said covers everything else: 'Never let anything negative come near sex.'

FEBRUARY 16, 1950 'Food, air and impressions' were deliberately put together because esoteric physiology explains that these are in fact the three different kinds of food upon which man lives. And that each of these different kinds of 'food' is taken in and undergoes a process of digestion and refinement within him. Only whereas the full digestion of material food by the body is arranged mechanically by nature, the full digestion of impressions depends upon man's own efforts and particularly upon his learning to remember himself. The possible end-product of the digestion of impressions is a much higher matter than the final product of either food or air, and upon it, all balanced development depends. For this reason in our system much more attention is given to the use of impressions than to special diets or special breathing, which by themselves may even be dangerous and harmful. In our way it is said that all work must begin from normal conditions, from what is most normal and natural for the man in question.

MARCH 21, 1950 It is extraordinary what doors the abandonment of talk, or words, seems to open—doors that talk prevented one from ever suspecting. First one has to get everything one can—and that is very much—from the right use of words; then when one has got from them all they can give, one must be brave enough to throw all that overboard and begin again in quite a different way.

NOVEMBER 16, 1951 Sometimes, by 'letting go' we allow some 'grace' to enter by another channel, which all our mental efforts have hitherto kept out. Stillness is a quality of the heart. We must not expect to find it among the doubts of the mind— it is the mind which must make way for it.

AUGUST 24, 1952 I think participation in life is very right and part of a pattern. While a new direction is being formed in one, one must feel oneself pulling away from life all the time, even one may have to live out of life in some special circumstances. But when the new direction is really established, and one's inner life is permanently magnetised to a new pole, then I think one has to go back into life— really in, without reservations, much more deeply and intimately than one ever did before. For it is in life that the Work is done, that results can be measured, objectively, at any rate in the fourth way*.

And gradually, without quite knowing how it happened, one begins to see everything—one's own life included—against a larger background. Cause and effect ceases to be a question of before or after, and becomes a kind of leavening of the whole mixture. And the more one lives in relation to one's whole life, the less any part of it—past or future—can be kept separate from any other. The town to which the traveller goes for the first time always lay at the end of that particular road, but after he has visited it, he can send back the news from there to every village and inn along the road.

AUGUST 24, 1952 Assisi is certainly presided over by St. Francis, but a pretty tough Francis, with a power proportionate to the fears he was freed from.

Looked at from here and now some of the traditionally saintly things look less extraordinary, others more so. All this about the birds and animals seems simply like the reaction of a man who has become normal against the background of an age which regarded the whole animal kingdom as rather diabolic. But the fact that nothing seemed impossible to him and the more impossible things looked, the more urgently they had to be done—this has the genuine ring. Embracing the leper, yes.

NOVEMBER 15, 1952 People who have a particular kind of sensitiveness have their own special advantages and their own special disadvantages in this Work. All of us have to grow more balanced, more normal, in preparation for work to become supernormal. In the general work towards more balance between the different sides of ourselves any special difficulty will fit into its proper place. I doubt if it can or should be. dealt with as something separate in itself.

JUNE 10, 1955 One must not try to cling on to opportunities which have come, however pleasant and comforting. For that is the way to kill them. Let good things go without regret. Then better ones may come.

MAY 31 1955 There must always be Friday evenings and Monday mornings and we must slog along through them as best we can. I don't think there is a world in which it is always weekend in any dimension, except perhaps in the seventh!

It seems to me that one is never depleted by real contact with others. When something can flow through one to other people, one feels full of life. It is when something grows stagnant that exhaustion sets in.

AUGUST 1, 1955 To smoke or not to smoke can be an interesting experiment. In discovering the enormous power of motor mechanicalness we discover a great secret. At a certain moment at the time of Ouspensky's death I felt, among many other experiences, that I was like a mechanical toy condemned to go on moving till the spring had run down. Then immobility, death. Moving centre seemed to me to be the root of our mechanicalness, and I realised that all beginning of consciousness depends upon a certain 'stop', as described in In Search of the Miraculous.

At this same time I noticed one day that Ouspensky was showing us an exercise that would demonstrate this mechanical-ness, and give us the means of overcoming it. But he did the exercise without words or explanations; it was almost invisible.

The exercise was as follows: One sits comfortably in a chair. Then for a definite time—say half an hour—one moves, slightly and naturally. But without stopping for a single moment. For example, one puts out one's right hand to take a cigarette, one lights it, crosses one's legs, rubs one's cheek, turns one's head, knocks the ash off the cigarette into the ashtray etc. etc. But all in slow hut continuous movement.

After half an hour of this one begins to realise the true nature of movement. And at the end, for a short time, one has the possibility of remaining completely still, without any movement at all. From this immobility further realisations can come.

FEBRUARY 11, 1955 Contact with the earth and with simple people is necessary for us. Apart from what they receive, their contact refreshes us, gives us rest and security. And when people begin to work seriously, and begin to feel the tremendous strain of what has to be done, it is very important that they learn to rest in a new way. In order to work with all one has, one must learn to rest with all one has, too. 'Earthing' has something to do with rest. But we must learn to work with all kinds of people — particularly worldly people, people who have come to decent values through struggle with worldly conditions. For they are better prepared than many dreamers.

AUGUST 16, 1955 When we are ill, our first duty is to get well — and we do that by resting, doing the things we like, opening our pores to what is natural and beautiful, and avoiding boredom at all costs.

OCTOBER 24, 1955 It is true that the pressure of new experiences, new demands and new efforts makes us 'explosive'. But we must realise that this explosiveness is only a physical phenomenon, and treat it as such. It is the body adjusting itself to a new rhythm of life—so we have to give it the opportunity of getting rid of its bile in ways that are not harmful, by exercise, dancing, shouting at the sky from the top of the nearest mountain, or whatever. In any case, we must never imagine that it is ourselves that are explosive, never imagine that there is anything wrong with our soul, when it is only the body. Everyone must find his own personal way of resting, by his speciality, his hobby, the movies or other more mystical ways of escaping from mental or muscular tension. He who does not know how to rest cannot carry on. It is important.

MAY 1948 To impose our own feelings or ideas on others is absolutely wrong. There can be no right relation to others but bringing out their own real and deepest purpose and understanding.

JUNE 22, 1948 I saw the other day that the phrase 'One cannot do', which became a blasphemous denial of all possibilities, is really only half of an aphorism, which expresses many laws in a compressed way. The full aphorism should be: 'One cannot do, but it can be done by three*.'

AUGUST 15, 1948 It is probably the pressure of other people which pushes one forward and shows clearly what one has to do. And it seems very important to learn not to shirk this pressure, even in the smallest things, but to respond to its indications and lead those who exert it into the fulfilment of a larger plan. It is always important to remember that this pressure, although it may often take foolish forms, represents the desire to grow of a certain body of people who have already been sorted out by a higher test than we could ever arrange. And it is this total desire for growth, if it can be rightly harnessed, which can raise us to the point where we make contact with direction from above.

Afterwards, it is the contacts that one failed to make or respond to, when it was possible, that one regrets, realising that these omissions can never really be repaired later. If we leave the contact till too late, the moment will have passed and in a few weeks all the pawns have moved and stand in a quite different relation to each other.

One can never absolve oneself when someone takes a wrong course through one's own omission. I feel very strongly that the negative attitude which became attached to and perverted the idea that '0ne cannot do' has to be countered by the idea that 'it may be done through me'. Anyone who has really felt the idea that one can do nothing in the same realisation must see that very great things are required by higher powers to be done through whatever instruments are available. And that this idea requires much more from individuals than does the ordinary belief that they can arrange their own destinies.

JANUARY 31, 1950 I now see very clearly that not only must one give to people what they ask, but also that one must not give them what they do not ask for, nor before they ask it. The attempt always defeats its own end.

FEBRUARY 10, 1950 There are two complementary laws in our work. The first is, what a man asks sincerely, you must give him, if you can. The second is, only what he asks and only when he asks can anything be given at all. Any attempt to break this law always produces wrong results. That is why I also have to ask: 'What do you want to know?' And you have to find out. For nobody but yourself can answer this question, and if anybody else tries to answer it for you, run from him as fast as you can.

FEBRUARY 22, 1950 The beginning of a new attitude, a new understanding of the world seems to lie in the feeling that we are an integral, an organic part of it, that it pervades us, and that all that we can see or study or imagine outside is also contained in little within us. I think this feeling, when it really penetrates, of itself begins to melt this strange false feeling of 'I', of separateness, of exclusion, from which we suffer. If we are excluded from the best things in the universe it is because we choose to be, because we imagine ourselves like that—not because it is so.

MAY 18, 1950 More and more I become astonished how similar ideas—which seem to derive from big school*—are expressed simultaneously by people who apparently have no connection with each other or with anything and yet the timing of the release of certain ideas at many different points and in many different forms is so beautiful that one can't but suspect some school planning behind it.

To me this is the natural outcome of the understanding that one cannot do. When one really begins to feel this one comes to a kind of dead stop—one can't do anything of oneself, and one knows that everything one tries to do of oneself can only end in fiasco. Where to turn? One begins to long for school and to fall in with school aims and school laws as the only certain security, the only meaning, the only escape from the hopeless effort to do when one knows one can't do.

AUGUST 28, 1950 There are some people who can go straight there, and quite suddenly see how everything works—in themselves and in everything. But then they return with a bump and have to continue in ordinary life, amid ordinary resistances and ordinary densities of matter, and among people who have ordinary capacities, but not that one.

How to make what you perceive there comprehensible here? How to introduce it sufficiently quietly, reasonably and undeniably into ordinary life that people will not run away, but will be attracted and convinced? That was what Ouspensky knew so supremely well. He said you have to move in a certain way with cats, or they'll run away, and in a certain way with bees, or they'll sting you. That's how it is with human beings too. You have to learn how not to startle them, particularly if you've seen something they have not seen.

It's most unsatisfactory to be here one moment—then hey presto—you're there, and hey presto, you're back again, without quite knowing what happened. And very irritating for your friends. So the whole thing is to build a bridge between here and there, a good solid one.

So listen quietly to what everybody says, and see how much fits in with what you've seen yourself, see what expands it, explains it from another side. Gradually, the bigger picture will emerge, the picture of the whole bridge going up. When you see that, many difficulties with people will vanish.

There is something which may sometimes seem like fire, fire which cleanses without consuming, unites without destroying, which licks upward through everything and yet is never seen—but we have called it electronic* matter, which sounds much more respectable, and is just as accurate. It looks as though we have to learn to tell things in ordinary language, which won't frighten people, which won't look too fantastic and unreasonable.

It is not so much that it is forbidden to refer to certain things, but that one must not refer to them in language unsuitable to those one is talking to. One must not describe something intellectually to a person who lives in instinct. For you will only discredit what you speak about, and get your head broken into the bargain. So one has to learn to speak in the language the person one is talking to can understand.

NOVEMBER 24, 1951 We used to talk very much about the idea' one cannot do' and it came to me that this is only half an esoteric axiom, the other half being: 'but all can be done by three'. The great freedom seems to lie in giving up the idea that one can do, that is, produce all three forces from inside oneself at will, and understand that it will he done, if we rightly play our part as one force in the triad and learn how to evoke and acknowledge the hidden presence of the others.

DECEMBER 12, 1951 I believe that at a certain point healing others, physically, emotionally, mentally, or all three, becomes obligatory on anyone who wishes to develop, and that if this element is left out a wrong turning can be taken.

DECEMBER 12, 1951 I have no wish to prevent those who so desire from reading any book, because I believe that a healthy judgement, given all evidence, will form its own conclusions. And that any prohibitions or suppressions must either warp this judgement or make it work on incomplete knowledge.

JANUARY 24, 1952 Each person who tries to take part in school work has to develop his own method, has to find in himself his own inner law, and work with others according to that law. My own inner law will not permit me to demand of others anything that they do not desire to do of their own free will; my own personal 'way' does not permit arbitrary rules. It is connected with trying to make people see all sides, in the belief that if they do, healthy judgement will draw its own right conclusions.

JANUARY 27, 1952 If one tries to explain to other people what one has learned, one finds that such explanations are only right and successful if they are the result of what those people ask of one, demand of one, really want to know of themselves. If one explains something to them before they ask, they will not hear it, and one will be disappointed.

Everything happens by right combination of three forces—active, passive, mediating. In the first stages, it is he who wishes to learn who must be active, who must force the one who knows a little more to explain. If he who knows more is active, that is, if he tries to explain first, the wrong result or no result is produced.

Only one must answer by what one understands, from principles certainly, but according to one's understanding of them—from one's own experience, one's own examples.

JULY 16, 1952 There always remains the problem of how people can communicate with each other accurately and hand on tradition about the relation of ideas, about cosmology and technique. What Ouspensky used to call 'the problem of new language'. In recent months it has appeared to us more and more that the best means might be by symbols, provided that they are true ones and rightly organised. People have a great resistance to accepting a new and exact meaning of an old word, and quite new words are unpleasant in that they have none of the overtones and associations which enrich old ones. But symbols could be their own argument and explanation. It always seems to have been arranged like that among schools which left traces in architecture, painting or poetry.

JULY 16, 1952 The reaction of simple people, peasants and workmen, to a direct expression of certain laws and ideas and harmony interests me very much. They learn by physical work and loyalty, and they teach one in the same way.

AUGUST 6, 1952 There is intentional and recognised hypnotism and accidental and unrecognised hypnotism. It is the absolute duty of everyone who attempts to guide others to abstain as much as possible from producing these effects, and it is equally the duty of the apprentice always to struggle against fear and fascination in himself. Ouspensky never allowed us to become fascinated, and his mere presence precluded fear. But there were circumstances in which we had to judge for ourselves on the basis of these principles and with the memory of his example. Such circumstances constituted a test of our understanding.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1952 I think the most important thing, when people ask, is to be sincere, as sincere as possible. Not hide anything, not invent anything. Say the answer which comes unhindered from the heart. People recognise simple sincerity, when arguments don't touch them, evasions annoy them.

NOVEMBER 10, 1952 The best way to learn is to teach, provided that the one who teaches is the deepest 'I' that really knows.

JANUARY 5, 1953 I remember Ouspensky speaking very interestingly once in New York about sincerity. We think we have only to decide to be and we can be. But sincerity has to be learnt, slowly and painfully. Takes long long time. And when one finds sincerity on one level, one realises that there is another completely different level of sincerity hidden beneath. At Ouspensky's last meetings at Colet Gardens in '48, he reached the deepest level I ever met in living man.

JANUARY 3, 1953 New life streams down on us, is all around us, we drown in it. All that is necessary is that we become empty or porous, for it to permeate us. As long as one really remembers this, I think one may speak to others, if it seems right. The moment one forgets it, danger enters.

FEBRUARY 25, 1954 It is clear to me that one of the conditions for development is to learn to work selflessly and with understanding for the general good. Those who do so, begin to become free, whether they are in organised school or not. And in turn this selfless understanding work—to improve material conditions, to make education available, to heal, mentally or physically—creates conditions where more people can meet the chance of real school. It all fits together on the biggest scale. The process of healing is necessary preparation for the process of regeneration.

OCTOBER 11, 1954 It is true that energy can be connected with the idea of giving and receiving. He who learns how to give away wisely all he has received will never have to worry about shortage of energy. In order to make a big jump, it looks as though we have to bequeath all our possessions—of knowledge, skill, understanding, habit, loyalty, affection. But as in making a will, one has to give away each quality to someone who can receive it and use it. Then one is free for new tasks. Ouspensky did this completely before he died. We have to get the habit now. Then we can begin receiving on a different scale.

FEBRUARY 25, 1955 No one need worry about fondness for the human race. Only we must make it always more real, more our own. We mustn't let it become second hand. Would the Saints be Saints, if they hadn't been much more fond of the human race than the rest of us, first hand?

OCTOBER 1, 1955 There are so many ways in which fundamental laws can be expressed. But for me the one thing important is that we go on and on, penetrating always deeper and higher to more simplicity, more sincerity, more honesty. We must never give words and forms and theories time to crystallise around us.

'Move, move, you must move from the place where you are.' To me those words of Ouspensky's last week become constantly more urgent. For I know that it is now made possible for us to move, and that we are helped to do so if we really wish it. We can be given the answer to any question if we ask it innerly and sincerely and are prepared to abide by the answer we receive.

OCTOBER 5, 1955 We must teach people by asking them, not telling them. Then there will be no resistance. We should try to draw the truth out of them, not inject it into them. If they do not respond, it is not our fault; but if they do, we will learn much.

OCTOBER 12, 1955 If people do not express their deepest doubts and speak sincerely, no one can help them. They must change their impulse to run away into an honest effort to overcome their obstacles. Otherwise they are preferring their doubts to freedom from them.

NOVEMBER 2, 1955 We must learn to speak more and more simply. That is good for the people we talk to and good for us. We must be simple, honest, sincere, and open to what others bring us. The rest is not in our hands.

People are very preoccupied with words. One tries to describe something freshly, in different words, and they think the bottom has fallen out of the universe. You say: 'You must eat to live,' and they say they understand. Then you say: 'Come and have lunch' And they exclaim: 'What! I thought we were supposed to eat!'

JANUARY 11, 1956 We must try to be kind and sincere and truthful. It is no good to be kind without being sincere. It is no good to be sincere without being kind. And neither are any good unless we try to connect them with truth. It means one has to be much more simple and open, remembering oneself and forgetting oneself in one.

FEBRUARY 10, 1956 My experience is that one can say anything to people, provided one says it simply and straight, not critically, but with affection as a statement of fact. They react immediately to sincerity and warmth, curl up and go dumb at anything like irony or criticism if it contains the slightest intention to hurt. I think one can say things that touch people very closely provided one waits for the moment when there is warmth and confidence, and then does not say it de haut en bas, but simply as another poor devil like themselves—only a poor devil who has learnt to take neither his own reactions nor the other's too seriously.

MARCH 19, 1956 Our work is to accept and not to impose. Everything that fills us with ourselves is not work, but vanity. It is better to do nothing than to act from pride and call it work. We have to attain harmony. This means to be oneself. But it also means to accept others, respect them, learn from them, become connected with something higher.

APRIL 6, 1956 Our work is the development of whatever is positive and constructive in ourselves and in our companions. But how? By demanding that others be positive inevitably provokes a wave of resistance and negativeness. It is nobody's fault; it is a law.

We must remember the action of three forces in different order. If the active force begins, the passive force unavoidably reacts, and the result of the struggle is a meaningless average. This happens in all ordinary life. This process has nothing to do with the mysterious order of forces that bring regeneration, which begins with the third—with understanding, with tolerance, with invisible help. When we know the taste of this other order of forces which begins not by imposition but by acceptance, we will find that by it everything becomes easy. And the positiveness that we are trying to demand by force already is there.

AUGUST 10, 1948 It is clear that the attainment of some higher level by Mr Ouspensky at the time of his death released a very great energy which could touch and affect all those who were innerly attached to him, and which was independent of both space and time. If it is possible to throw aside our very weak and distorted view of time, we may understand that those who have been affected by such energy and such a level of man may continue to draw understanding and direction from that connection though circumstances may separate and isolate them.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1948 Any esoteric work should grow in all dimensions, including time. As the teacher penetrates into higher dimensions, his influence gradually 'spreads' in time. Think of Christ's influence since His life, and also of the strange 'foreshadowing' of His drama, cast into earlier times. How strange it would have been for His disciples, after the crucifixion, to join Apollonius of Tyana because Christ was 'dead'. Their business was to make His work grow in time, to prepare people to come to Him 'through time'. And one of the strangest things about it is that to those who think with ordinary ideas of time, all this must appear 'imagination', 'fantasy', and so on.

OCTOBER 27, 1948 The other thing I feel is absolutely essential, is that we must make every effort to break our usual ideas of time. Sometimes it seems to me that this is the chief illusion of all, and becoming free of it our chief preparation. Try to think of different speeds of time, of time passing faster and faster, or slower and slower, of time going backwards, of parallel times, of time coexisting or standing still, of all these different motions of time going on simultaneously in different parts of the universe. I mean, actually think out the effect on our perception of different motions of time, how they would affect our values, ideas of cause and effect, and so on. It may sound theoretical. After some time it ceases to be theoretical and can become very emotional. One's attitude to many things may begin to change from it.

JANUARY 20, 1950 It is strange how the idea of reversed time and different kinds of time is beginning to turn up in the most unexpected places. As though knowledge of time were the special way through which this age can come to esoteric ideas. Certainly the world is stuffed with inventions which make possible quite different impressions and observations of time from those ordinarily available in other ages, if people only stop to think what it is all about. Quite a good name for us all would be 'Time Exploration Company, Unlimited', don't you think?

MAY 1, 1950 The idea of reversed time is very interesting. For me one of the most striking things about it is the way it shows the actual working mechanism of certain principles of human conduct, which usually we only guess at in a vaguely ethical or philosophical way. And it shows why it is imperative to review all the relationships of our life, and put understanding and right attitude back info them now, while we are still alive. For in this way only could we really affect that unrolling of time. To put understanding back into the past—this seems the practical possibility to which the idea points.

MARCH 22, 1951 I know that there is a part in us which, if we can find it and appeal through it, can know and do the impossible. The logical mind does not know these secrets and cannot know them. But there is a place hidden in the heart which does know and can tell us. Only one has to listen very deeply to hear it, and after it has spoken one must not let logical mind explain it away or tell us that it is unpractical or imagination. I have known people lose very big understanding that was given them, by explaining it away afterwards as imagination.

Later, one will find that all the things one understands or that are required of one in this way do accord with the laws and knowledge that were given to us. Only one must not expect them to tally with our interpretation of those laws. On the contrary, such new understanding will reveal laws in a completely new and unsuspected light. For instance, all the literally miraculous things that happened at Ouspensky's death, and everything that has developed since —both for me personally and in relation to his work as a whole —convince me that he did not die as ordinary men die, but that he reached a level where a man becomes immortal*, or at any rate where he is not confined to time as we know it, but can act and make connections through time. I would have come to this conclusion through my personal experience. But I find that of all the extraordinary, miraculous and even fantastic things that happened and continue to happen, there is not one the possibility of which he did not explain to us in full detail while he was alive.

Further, if he did so become independent of time, or if he acquired fourth body* (if you like to be technical), then he is accessible now to anyone who desires his help with sufficient urgency and belief.

The lectures, the whole system as he explained it, was indeed the explanation of how to do the impossible, of how miracles are achieved. How then should we be surprised that Ouspensky himself actually put this knowledge to the use for which it was intended, and evidently expected those who followed him to take it in the same way? Looking back, I am appalled to remember how we took it all as a method of making slight adjustments to our personal psychology, and even judged the ultimate possibilities and him too on this level.

The ideas he explained do refer to the objective world, and if we think about them and work on them, we do prepare to orientate ourselves in that world when we get there. They are a very accurate map of that place. But to get there, we must go through ourselves and get out the other side.

'Believe in the impossible, for then you will find it possible.' Make yourself quiet, ask your heart what you are to believe and do, then cling to that and do it with all the force you can muster. And never let the voice of logic and probability prevent you.

JUNE 1, 1951 The question of actual contact with Ouspensky —through time or however it is—seems to be the key question, and no longer for a few lucky individuals but on a larger scale. We need to think much about the possibility of change through right appeal to higher powers or higher man, the conditions under which this can be done, and the laws to which such appeal and contact would be subject.

MAY 1, 1952 The idea of different times is extremely illusive, and probably has to be so, because if it becomes logical and obvious it means that it has already degenerated to the level of our ordinary mind and ordinary perception of time. For me, the key to the understanding of this idea up to a certain point lies in Ouspensky's theory of six dimensions1—the first, second and third are clearly the length, breadth and thickness of space; the fourth is the line of time that we recognise, the line of individual life; the fifth is infinite repetition of this life and all it contains—the 'eternal now'; the sixth must be the dimension in which all exists everywhere, all possibilities are realised, and all is one. The fourth dimension is 'time', the fifth 'eternity', but what shall we call the sixth? For us it is Divinity itself.

Many philosophies have failed because they tried to jump directly from the fourth to the sixth without taking into account the strange overawing nature of the fifth dimension. On the other hand, to study the fifth—eternal recurrence—without taking into account the glorious possibilities of the sixth means to lose oneself in a blind alley of pessimism. We must search unremittingly for a crack through which we can pass to the sixth, or through which the sixth can enter directly into us.

MAY 20, 1952 Some time ago it seemed to me that each 'new renaissance' produced by school is based not only on the whole body of esoteric knowledge but specially on a new understanding of one particular part of it. For example, all sides of the Italian Renaissance seem to have been coloured by a new attitude towards three-dimensional space and its laws, the basic principles of which were formulated by Pacioli in The Divine Proportion. Even geographically, with the discovery of America and the Indies, space changed and the world was revealed as having a different and immensely greater shape. Astronomical space too was revealed in a new and more complete way by the studies which sprang from this first key idea. For example, Kepler's proof of the true shape of the solar system was a direct result of his study of the Platonic solids and Pacioli's interpretation of them. The development in nearly all fields up to the middle of the nineteenth century seemed elaborations of the same line.

¹See note on Dimensions for R's later correction of this idea. J. C. S.

All this particularly interests me in relation to the question, What comparable key have we been given at this moment of renaissance in our tradition? The more I think about it the more it seems to me that our key, given to us by Ouspensky, is the idea of the three dimensions of time, and the period of shifting dimensions* for different cosmoses. It seems to me that this key has the possibilities of resolving all the problems of our age and connecting them with the central idea of man's development and his relation to the universe, in exactly the same way as Pacioli's ideas about space and the divine proportion contained the possibility of resolving all the problems of his time and relating them to this central idea.

Everywhere you look, experts seem to have reached the point of the idea of six dimensions with all its implications, and this idea alone can crystallise out the solution.

DECEMBER 12, 1952 No one felt the tragedy of Russia more acutely than Ouspensky. But he knew or found something else. He knew and proved that while on one line of time — that to which the newspapers refer—everything decent, everything true is being and will be corrupted, both for our dying civilisation and for individuals, on another invisible line all possibilities actually exist, all can be remade and redeemed, both the past and future, personal and historical.

The joke is that those different dimensions of time, about which the mathematicians now begin to pose and solve questions like the ones about nuts and oranges in the algebra-books, have actual existence. And that while some are indeed filled with inevitable tragedy, corruption and crime, others contain very different lines of development indeed.

SEPTEMBER 20, 1954 The present moment is the point of escape from our three-dimensional prison of space and time. For in this present moment, remembering oneself, one can put oneself in contact with a place outside time, and with the help of eternity, where all possibilities in their fulness are already waiting. We must squeeze all its contents out of each moment.

DECEMBER 51, 1951 I think every living cosmos—whether planet or civilisation or man or school—must have spirit, soul and body, must live in three worlds and three vehicles simultaneously, since this is the great universal pattern. And that school* must externally create form, organisation and monuments—even though these are not the essential. For without them it cannot really touch this world, in which we and all men live after all.

NOVEMBER 14, 1952 All men have the birthright of a soul in embryo. But this embryo must in some way be fertilised to start the process by which it can become conscious and develop its full stature.

I myself connect this 'fertilisation' of the soul with school. But this is a very big word and the fertilising influence of school may take many forms, as did Zeus in the Greek myths. Nearly always, I think, it must manifest through a living man or woman, one's master or something like that. But now I would not like to rule out other possibilities—though if they exist the principle must be the same.

I suppose it can be said that one can hasten the growth of conscious soul. Yet sometimes I wonder if that is putting it quite right. Can we do anything but what we are impelled by our own inner hunger and need to do? And again, at what stages is it necessary to be active, and at what stages passive? It all remains very mysterious really. We must remember that.

SEPTEMBER 6, 1954 Our work is to realise conscious harmony. First in oneself individually. Then in one's group. Then gradually between groups and so projected infinitely out into the world. Individually, we must realise harmony between all our functions, all our interests, all our duties, all sides of our life—dedicating the harmonious whole to God and to the Work. This is what our studies are preparing us for. They have no other purpose.

Each person has to recreate the whole System intellectually for himself and in himself. This is the scaffolding of his new creation. Nobody else can do it for him, and what he finds is his own.

At the same time, the construction of one's own intellectual 'model of the universe' is only scaffolding. This is the skeleton. A new kind of living flesh must grow upon it, a new body. What does this mean? It means learning to live in the soul and from the soul.

When one does this, all the complicated structure of ideas which one has created resolves into something very simple, very direct.

What is our work all about? It is to enable man to live consciously in three bodies, in three worlds, and so realise the Divine Plan. A physical body was given him by Nature at birth. Somewhere exists the original Divine spark launched from God and which, refound, will be his conscious spirit. But ordinary man has no feeling for that body which was created to connect the two—the soul.

The soul is the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and Heaven. It is there, but you have to become aware of it, you have to feel it, you have to live in it.

You feel the soul by opening your heart to people, by accepting what is. The soul grows through the heart. The heart is the door of the soul. But with all ordinary man, this door is blocked with fear, prejudice, doubt. His heart is not open to the world. He only takes from it what he wants to take, in the way he wants to take it. If he could just be himself, be his whole self, without fear and without self-protection, he would already live from the soul. So learn simply to be, to be your whole self.

First you must live in awareness of your physical body. Then in awareness of your soul. Then in awareness of your spirit.

There is one thing more. Everyone who goes far in this Work must learn how to rest. The tensions which he meets will be too strong for him otherwise. In fact there is only one true kind of rest—this is in the thought of God, in the remembrance of God, in God.

There are two visions of the Universe. And we have to earn to cultivate them alternately. One is the vision of the Hierarchy of Beings, of the ladder up which we and all others must struggle by labour, sacrifice, service, understanding. This is the way of School. The other is the direct vision of God, of a Divine vibration which pervades and sustains all beings everywhere, from rock to Christ, from moon to. sun. These two visions are the day and the night of our work. We labour in the one, we rest in the other. It has to be like that.

This is why our Tradition is not a substitute for religion. It is the complement of it. Every man needs a religion, and probably a Church, to sustain him in the vision of God.

FEBRUARY 25, 1955 The whole thing lies in the relation of body, soul and spirit. Body vibrates—more in some than in others, but it vibrates. Spirit vibrates—somewhere. But the soul is very inert, it usually quivers only on the surface, not deeply. We have to make it vibrate throughout, right to its deepest part. It is shaken by joy, pain, loss, discovery, hard decisions, payment, all kind of things. By self-remembering this vibration is carried deep, the whole soul vibrates with it. When the whole soul vibrates as strongly as the body and spirit, then the three vibrate as one. We are one. We are real. We have integrity.

So really we have to be grateful for soul-shaking, though God knows it may be uncomfortable enough at the time. Perhaps our mistake is that we want peace in the wrong place. People ask for peace in their souls—they should ask for turmoil in their souls, so that they may find real peace in their spirits.

Conscience is the voice of the spirit penetrating through the soul to the body, when the three are vibrating together. Self-remembering brings this about—body, soul and spirit are momentarily aligned. The body is connected through the soul to the spirit, which is outside time, immortal. That is why in moments of self-remembering there is no time, nor fear, nor doubt—only pure consciousness, silence, and the voice of conscience. Lose self-remembering, and time, fear and doubt immediately return.

A lot of the austerity and suffering which the System* entailed in the old days was because Ouspensky staked everything on the spirit. He would accept no rewards in the world of the soul, either for himself or his people. He staked all the winnings on spirit, and won. He became free spirit. Then everything changed. Because if we wish we can now allow his spirit to act on our souls, make them alive, make them vibrate. Then through this vivification of our souls, by self-remembering, we can feel our own spirits. In them is absolute certainty, security and truth.

MARCH 14, 1955 We all have good qualities and we all have repulsive features. On the level of qualities, good or bad, nothing can be done. But we have a spirit which is immortal, and all our efforts at self-remembering are to make a conscious connection with it. One can think of the body as a beautiful and marvellously ingenious instrument—or as an old bag of bones, whichever one likes. In either case it only has meaning if it serves the spirit, through the intermediary of the conscious soul which we are trying to make.

So we must look up, lift our longing, try always to feel up, in space. When we get that sensation we will never lose it. And all that is repulsive will remain below us.

SEPTEMBER 28, 1955 Reach the invisible by the visible—the spiritual by the physical. The soul is the bridge. But can you distinguish between those three worlds, those three qualities? When you have established contact with the spiritual you will have confidence in that which has to be done.

NOVEMBER 15, 1955 The soul is the bridge, the connection, between body and spirit. Those who live wholly from the bodies* impulses and vanities—you can say that they have no soul, or that their soul is asleep; you feel it. Those who live groping for the truth, trying to obey conscience—their souls are growing, their souls are waking; you feel that too. Really everyone has a soul, but one has to become aware of it, live in it, make it vibrate. When it really vibrates, the connection between body and spirit is completed. What makes the soul vibrate, and so allows the whole man to act as one? Struggle, faith, effort, will, pain and joy and memory and compassion and sacrifice. All these belong to the coming alive of the soul.

We recognise the spirit by conscience, which is its voice; we recognise the body by taking thought for it; we recognise the soul by will—will by which man makes his body obey his spirit, and so unifies himself. The body has its emanations and the spirit has its emanations. Each effort of will, by which a man makes his physical action accord with his conscience, fuses an atom of body with an atom of spirit to form a molecule of soul. And just as atoms of hydrogen and atoms of oxygen can exist side by side for ever without forming water till fused by the shock of electrolysis, so spirit and body can exist indefinitely side by side till the shock of will makes of their fusion the new substance soul.

The body lives in space and time, subject to matter, illusion and sense. The spirit lives in eternity and truth. The soul must unite the two. So all that is certainty belongs to the spirit, all that is struggle belongs to the soul. The spirit knows God, the soul has faith; the spirit knows God, the soul has hope;
the spirit knows God, the soul has charity. This is how the soul is made to vibrate, and man becomes one, becomes himself.

MARCH 25, 1952 The subject of the Rome school is very interesting. My feeling is that as time goes on, those who study this line will find that more and more of the vital influences of the nineteenth century derive from that source.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1952 It was most interesting while in Florence to find how every creative line, every skill and understanding of the Renaissance, can be traced back to the actual Medici household—to one particular group in one place. And also interesting that the whole thing—the bringing of scholars from the East, the backing of Donatello, Michael Angelo, Fra Angelico, the building of churches, collecting of libraries, foundation of the Platonic Academy—was all paid for and made possible by the Medici banking business. For those who are interested in the role of business in relation to esoteric influence, there's the classic example.

JANUARY 22, 1955 Fabre d'Olivet's cosmology is curiously reminiscent of some of the ancient American sacred books, like the Popol Vuh and the Chilan Balam. After magnificent cosmological beginnings like the Book of Genesis, they turn into bloodthirsty epics about races of giants and dwarfs who eat each other, cut each other in pieces and bury each other alive—all rather terrifying until one realises that they are talking about geological processes and epochs.

APRIL 4, 1954 I see our way as the great harmoniser of all previous esoteric experiments, as it is of all sides of human nature. Now everything must be Drought together into consciousness, nothing left out. A supreme effort is being made to reconcile what before had to be divided. Understanding, love, will, unified by consciousness, make it possible.

MARCH 2, 1954 Of all the Oriental ways, Zen Buddhism seems nearest to Western mentality and outlook. But personally, with every year I live on this continent, I become more convinced that the Oriental ways are not for us. Here in Latin America particularly, those who dabble in them seem to get into a backwater, cut off from all that is real and living in this time and this place. I am sure that a new complete way is being created for the West, and that before the Oriental traditions can be absorbed into this way they have to go through a deep transformation.

Now one begins to realise the tremendous scale on which Ouspensky was seeing, when, after abandoning the System*, he said:* You must reconstruct everything. Everything must be remade from the very beginning.' It now seems to me that this reconstruction is something which is being launched from Great School*, and that it is connected with a crossroads in the history of humanity as important as that represented by the coming of Christ.

It was always said about the Fourth Way* that it had to be followed in life, and that it consisted in developing consciousness simultaneously in all centres*. Yet all that has been known about the Fourth Way till now seems only a prelude to the way which is now gradually being revealed by Great School to the West. For this new way seems to be based on the science of conscious harmony. It means creating harmony between all man's functions, and between all sides of his life. It means creating harmony between the different types* in a group. It means creating harmony between all the traditional ways—and beyond that, on another scale, between peoples, races and ages.

Somehow, compared with this complete vision, the traditional Yoga and monastic ways, which leave out or amputate so many sides and triumphs of modem life, seem out of date and artificial. I know now that we have been shown the beginning of this new way, and that the more we realise what we have been given, the more will be revealed to us. The new way couldn't come fully fledged into the world, because it is based on understanding, and understanding must grow.

But it is being released at a tremendous speed and through many different channels simultaneously. One has to learn to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. And this depends on being able to put one's own inner jigsaw puzzle together— all of it, without leaving any pieces out.

Even so, perhaps all that we can now bring to realisation of this new way is but preparing the ground for a great demonstration which will be made from above at the critical moment. Somehow many seem to recognise this and focus their eyes past the apparently insoluble present, to some tremendous and miraculous hope in the future.

OCTOBER 4, 1954 I believe that all the moments of rebirth in history have the same quality and stem from the same truth. It is only in their degeneration that ideas seem irreconcilable.

NOVEMBER 3, 1954 In Rome we found very many clues about the nameless nineteenth-century circle which launched so many creative currents into European life. It was founded by Cagliostro just before his imprisonment in 1789. Goethe was strongly affected by it though at a distance. Among the French who belonged to it in the first thirty years were Ingres, Chateaubriand, Ampère père et fils, Champollion, Madame Recamier. Among the Germans, Baron Bunsen the chemist, who devoted his life to understanding between the Catholic and Protestant churches, Mendelssohn, the painters Cornelius, Shadow and Overbeck, the historian Niebuhr. Among the Russians, the painters Kiprensky and Ivanov, Gogol the writer, and Stukovsky who became tutor to Alexander the Second. Among others the Danish sculptor Thorwaldsen, the Hungarian musician Liszt, the English poet Shelley, the Danish archaeologist Zoega and the Italian composer Rossini. In a later generation came Browning, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Stevenson and many, many others.

Their centre was round the Via Gregoriana and Via Sistina. For a long time they worked in the French Academy at the Villa Medici. They restored the churches of Santa Trinidad dei Monte and San Andrea delle Fratte. Ingres formed a parallel group in Paris, which developed on its own, independent yet connected. These groups were, I believe, the real inspiration of the nineteenth-century culture.

We were also looking at the early Christian churches of the third to fifth centuries, when such an effort was made to reconcile the ancient Graeco-Egyptian wisdom with the new Christian revelation.

DECEMBER 10, 1954 It is fascinating when we see patterns, traditional patterns in which we at the moment happen to figure, but which were there long before us, and will go on repeating long after us. More and more the repository of all patterns seems to be the Gospel Drama. If one understands the way different types and levels reacted then, one will recognise those reactions always and everywhere.

Why does the story of the disciples going to Emmaus seem the original performance of our work? Perhaps the two disciples were really disillusioned after the Crucifixion, they were going away because they thought it was all over. But as they went out into the world, Christ appeared to them. Even then they did not recognise, until they invited Him to stay for a meal and a drink. Then their eyes were opened. It was their worldly kindness and hospitality which woke them and revealed Him. When they awoke and recognised, then they had to rush back to try to wake the official disciples at headquarters, who were busy making a policy out of their own uncertainty. Of course they were not believed. But as soon as those who had gone and those who stayed were together again, Christ appeared to them all, welded them into the new beginning.

I think the way to Emmaus is the Fourth Way. In the Fourth Way people have to be disillusioned at home, to go out bravely into the world to find truth, to be illumined there, and then bring light home again.

DECEMBER 29, 1954 I wonder why the Sufi experiment managed to hit such a pure ecstatic note? It seems to me that something went very right, and at a certain point negative emotions were transmitted into love on a very big scale.

In The Whirling Ecstasy* there is a place where Jellaledin sends his son to look for Shems, saying: 'If you find him, throw 2000 gold ashrafi under the feet of the Sultan of Tabriz.' When will we understand this attitude? When will we see that this is the royal road to freedom?

MARCH 21, 1955 There is still much to be found in the Middle East— Syria, Egypt, Palestine and Persia—the traces of many early experiments of the Fourth Way. I believe all these clues have to be gathered together while there is still time, to be incorporated in this great culminating demonstration of the Fourth Way which belongs to our time.

JULY 20, 1955 Last year we went looking for the traces of schools in the past—Early Christian schools in Rome, Gothic cathedral schools in France, and that nineteenth-century school in Rome again, from which came Peer Gynt and so many other wonderful things. We did find a lot, and in a way difficult to describe, one seems also to make a living connection through time back to those experiments.

Later we began to see how the study of past schools draws one more and more strongly towards that greatest and most perfect demonstration of school on earth, the Gospel Drama and the Passion of Christ. One sees that that is the focus and example of all school work in all ages, and that every experiment is an attempt to reflect it in one way or another.

Although we didn't fully understand this when we started, it is now clear that this last trip was a journey in search of the Passion. In Holy Week in Seville we saw how men have tried to re-live it for themselves. In the Egyptian temples and on the Greek islands we saw how for thousands of years schools were preparing men to understand what was to come. In Jerusalem, of course, we saw the actual scenery and the soil against which the Drama was played, and one was made to visualise in a very vivid way the struggles and hopes and betrayals and liberation of those actual men and women. In Jerusalem, too, one sees everything that men make of higher influence—it is a complete world, full of inspiration, superstition, cruelty, fear and faith.

Then we moved on to the Eastern countries, into the Moslem world, to Damascus, Baghdad, Teheran and Isfahan. I was quite unprepared for the sensation that the very air changes when you leave the Christian world. Something is missing which we take so much for granted that we don't even think of it. It is something to do with individual hope, recognition of the value of each individual soul. In the East, of course, there are wise men and good men and religious men, but I have never felt in the West this strange apathy and hopelessness among poor people, as though they have nothing to expect but death. Evidently the coming of Christ changed the whole nature and possibility of all levels of beings on the earth. Where this is not recognised, there is a curious stagnation. From this I understood in a new way what the "conversion* of a country meant to the Apostles or to medieval missionaries. However imperfectly it might be done from a human point of view it meant an actual transmutation of human possibilities in that area. It was really a miraculous process.

Visiting dervishes and sufis in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, we felt that their work was to bring in a kind of disguised Christianity where a country was not ready to accept it openly. Perhaps their role was to try to redeem some mistake Mohamet made.

Flying so quickly from country to country, and from one ancient site to another, one began to see history as a tremendous play of school influence, building, teaching, creating, disappearing from one place and appearing in another. One saw that school influence is life; where it is, there is hope and creation; where it disappears follows hopelessness and corruption. We also saw that the whole work of schools in the ancient world was to lead up to the coming of Christ, and the whole work of schools since has been to reveal what Christ actually brought.

This is our work also, in fact it is the only Work. But it is so big, so strange, and so many-sided that we had to come to it through a teaching where the name of Christ was hardly mentioned, lest it be taken on too low a level.

Evidently our work will be measured, not by what we say or write, but by the degree in which we can manifest charity. When it is present, there is happiness, understanding and harmony. When vanity and sleep take its place, everything becomes confused again. If things go wrong, as they certainly do, one knows that it is because one has failed to project conscious harmony. In so far as things go right, one realises that one has been helped to do so.

AUGUST 6, 1955 The whole thing is that people should search, search, search; try to be sincere; not imitate each other, me, Ouspensky, or anyone else; and respect the truth everywhere. The ones who won't imitate are much harder to handle, but infinitely more rewarding. In fact, they are the people we are looking for. Higher men* are those who have become completely original, unlike anyone else in the universe. Who have found their own way of being completely themselves, offering their whole selves to the Work, and accepting the consequences. It is not comfortable, because there are no precedents. As there were no precedents for an Ouspensky or a Gurdjieff.

I want people to study—study something, almost anything, deeply, from all angles; try to do original research, using what we have been given as the key of understanding. The system is too big to waste indefinitely on classifying the uninteresting contents of one's own mind. That's all right for a while. But then it must be used to project understanding into bigger fields.

Visiting those ancient sites—Karnak, Jerusalem, Damascus, Isfahan—one felt what tremendous concentration of knowledge they contain. Those places have such pressure of knowledge—more pounds per square inch than anywhere else. That is what attracts the tourists, though they do not know why. And we, who see ourselves in that company, are so ignorant, so uneducated. We haven't understood that being familiar with principles is one thing, harnessing knowledge to them is quite different. It is so important, in our time, that all knowledge be related to these principles and put safely in its place, not left loose and inflammable. For that is the way of disaster.

Skipping so quickly from one country to another—from Italy to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Persia, Turkey, Greece—one felt that all the human history which lies there so richly, like a deep fertile soil, is history of schools and school influence. The coming of school, its growth in one place, its transfer elsewhere, the spread of the temples, philosophies, arts and symbols which it leaves behind, the golden ages of its triumph, the great figures which represent it, the destruction which comes at the end of its cycle, the corruption which follows its betrayal—this is human history, there isn't anything else. And we have to collect all that, make it feed the present.

All through the trip the feeling grew that the drama of Christ is the centre of human history. Earlier and later times flow out from there like ripples from a splash. There is only one hierarchy*, one Inner Circle. Before Christ they were preparing men to understand what He was going to bring; since, they have been preparing man to understand what He already brought. But it's all the same work.

At the time of Christ a tremendous break was made: it was something like reversing the current. Everything that had gone before had to appear wrong and evil. But now, as part of today's work of harmony, we have to re-understand the ancient world and its mysteries, show that it all belongs to the same work, all points in the same direction.

I think that if people could understand that there always had been one and the same Hierarchy guiding man, that Hercules and Buddha and Solomon, the disciples who physically surrounded Christ, and still others who have created the modem world in which we live were all part of it, then many things would be much clearer and simpler for them. They would understand that fanaticism, fear, contradiction and persecution is something ordinary men have introduced into all this. There cannot be contradiction in the original impulses of school, because they all came from the same place and were part of a single plan. But in order to understand this, people must study, work, investigate, experiment. Then they will prove it to themselves and to others.

OCTOBER 5, 1955 In Egypt, especially in Luxor, one saw all the wisdom of the ancient world locked up, waiting to be rediscovered. But one also saw that then the chances were only for a few, and that all that was but preparation for what Christ was going to bring. The Egyptians themselves knew it. In the Ptolemaic temples, 100 years before Christ, suddenly appears a chapel of the Nativity, the Mammesi. And there it all is, in Egyptian style, the Annunciation and everything else that was going to happen.

There is something parallel in Peru and Egypt—they have the same root—perhaps Atlantis, and the same ancient wisdom. But Peru is rising, and Egypt falling. Is it because Peru is making the bridge between the ancient world and Christianity, and Egypt not? Or is it something to do with the unknown destiny of the New World?

FEBRUARY 10, 1956 We have been studying the history of culture and art as trace of School. We had one evening on the Egyptians, their gods, their architecture and their hieroglyphs. Then there was one about the Phoenicians and the Jews, about the dances, the meaning of the alphabet, and Solomon's Temple. Then about the Greeks, how they discovered freedom of individual conscience, and felt the laws of rhythm and harmony in everything they did. There was another about the situation in the first century before Christ, the corruption and prostitution of the old ways, and the intimation of something new to come. We talked about the profound contrast between the old ways, among a closed priesthood for selected initiates, who were taught in darkness and mystery, and who tried to make the form immortal with their mummies and tombs and temples, and Christ's teaching in the open air on the highroad to any who wished to hear in the daily circumstances of their lives. Strange that there are so many physical traces of Egypt, none at all of the first three centuries of Christianity—no tombs, no temples, no art. But a path had been opened in a completely different dimension. Art and physical symbolism only enter with the wise men from Alexandria, St. Clement, Origen, and the others who had been brought up in the old tradition.