This continues from the meeting of September 1985. Mr Adie is reading his pieces, and adds a few comments. His prepared writings are indented.

The first ideas that were given to us by Mr Ouspensky were the ideas of identification. When one finds oneself in difficulty, in all sorts of different moments, we tell ourselves: “This has happened because if she hadn’t said that, or he hadn’t spoken like that, I wouldn’t have done this.” We never realise that this is identification, and that it’s going on all the time. This is identification in thought. When I find myself frustrated, disturbed, puzzled, mystified, at a loss, and generally dark in colour – in a negative state – I need to realise that all this is a result of identification.

I am identified on this level, on this ground of so-called ordinary daily life. So what do I need, what kind of action?

I need to seek a higher level. I remember the psalm: “I lift up my eyes to the hills from which cometh my salvation.” I lift up eyes to receive a certain light, and to experience the understanding that comes with it. This is a positive self-awareness, a self-aware position. It includes study, effort to understand, and effort to suffer intentionally, to reconcile the negative. There is a lawful ground, a place in life for my conscious appearance, but I am obliterated and obscured.

But by intentional suffering, I can appear upon my lawful ground. It is always new, always an internal self-engineering for being. Let me be serious and innerly able to be open outward, to emanate the love of truth, and not lies. On the one hand identification, on other is the lawful ground of my life, and the wish for being makes it possible for I to appear on that ground.

Here’s another one to do about a different stage. It is headed: “I Find Myself.”

It is essential for the reality of self-experiencing that I do indeed work. I must have the intention to work and a will to carry out that intention. If it is absent, there can be no action: there is too much opposition from the incredible complications of life, the enticements and the attractions of sleep.

How are we to become conscious and understand? It won’t be just given to us. We can only come to it through work. And for that, I have to know the wish to work without the words. I have to know it in my posture, I have to know it with my attitude, and know it in my feeling and sensation. I can never dispense with it, otherwise I am lost, one way or another.

This is a colossal concept. It seems frighting because I have to depart from all customary things that have steered me. The great difficulty is to be able to orientate myself so that I know some degree of certainty and understanding just what is possible and required now, any moment, in the present. Something can be brought to overcome the negative impulse when passing to a balanced self-experiencing from the external life, with all its different attractions repulsions, its lures; all forces in form of seduction, imaginary doing.

Just in this dilemma, this threat, is my possibility. Life conducts the threat but life also conducts the possibility of opening. To accept all the impacts of life is an intentional suffering. I am called to remember. I look for resistance and opposition in the doings of the so called daily life. I look for something which “it” wishes not to do, wishes not to face.

In the truth of experiencing the resistance, my being-consciousness finds life. And now it shines clear and certain with all its freshness. I place the order of self-experience first and life-doing second.

This is ordinary life, life according to an objective order, not random, not accidental.

In the truth of experiencing the resistance, my being-consciousness finds life. And now it shines clear and certain with all its freshness. I place the order of self-experience first and life-doing second.

I act to re-experience the force of the resistance. In daily life, I select that which “it” wants, and either deny it, or place it second in order. I now can experience the experience of choice. “Choice” is the great action, the manifestation of real will. With the aid of the third force, I move into being. I know with certainty that I AM.

I experience myself doing-for-being. That is a tack at sea. It is the flashing of a higher message.

There are great difficulties about this question of intentional suffering, the intentional denial of what “it” wants. How is it possible to feel grateful for some really painful or external event, something which I could not possibly desire in the usual way?

Because I know this as material. I know that it is there for transformation. It challenges me to that experience of definite resistance which is essential in the actualisation of the positive self-will effort to be. These big disappointments allow me to confront the negative impulse, to attain entry to the representative of the representative of real I.

Now, in the triad of my balanced state, I understand that the disappointment only passed through me, but this being-gratitude exists within me, and is expressed in the certainty of my acceptance of suffering, free from negative reaction.

I AM. That is, I AM THAT: gratitude … impartiality … acceptance.