This is, I think, a significant exchange, short but powerful. By way of background, Ben – the name I use to hide the identity of the speaker – pulled me up once and angrily cross-examined me about a private conversation I had had with Mr Adie. He had been in the group for many years, and I was new. What he did was completely against ordinary standards of decency, let alone of the Work. Not long afterwards, he was speaking with someone else saying that Australians did not know how to do physical work, let alone raise a sweat, whereas he, given his national background, which I change to “Arcturus” did work hard.

Ben:   The last two weeks I haven’t been working well. I haven’t done anywhere near the minimum required. It hasn’t been because I haven’t wanted to do it or wished to do it, even. Sometimes there was quite a strong wish, but there has been no real substance to the effort.

Mr Adie:   But you don’t accept the suffering. You don’t accept the intentional suffering. In other words, you’re not so readily willing to pay.

Ben:   Well, I think I do, you see. I think I’m very good.

Mr Adie:   Yes, but you have to try and see that you are not. For instance, you come at weekend work, and you work horribly. You upset other people’s work, you don’t do the work as instructed, it causes a flurry and a flutter, and that’s how you work—really upsetting the work, which you have no intention of doing, of course.

That’s connected with what you’re saying, because increasingly there have been bad examples of work. Always there’s a lot of talk, always there’s noise, always there’s argument, and in the end the job isn’t done as was agreed. Now, this isn’t subject to contradiction-that’s fact.

It’s not your intention, but you can’t push this monster from Arcturus away. He’s just going to go on. You have to bring your heart into it and pay. You know how it is, you have generous impulses, but just at the moment in comes something and, “Well,” and it doesn’t make an effort with the work.

That’s very strong. But you have to be more and more prepared for this opposition that’s going to come.

So, you have to come to yourself and maintain that wish. You say you had wishes, well, you clearly need a different quality there. You want a wish that is willing to pay, and willing to see and suffer, intentional suffering. It’s so difficult to understand, it sounds almost absurd as a way to the ideal we are aiming for.

The only way to understand intentional suffering is the absolute need to be faced with this opposition. By this means, I’m given my own force. I can feel it coming in as I face that – I come. But without that opposition I could not. This is the Son. This is Christ sent down, the sacrifice, just in order that, as it were, real self-will could be in man; and so, something returns.

Remember the tremendous diagrams in the early chapters of In Search of the Miraculous, the four sections, the example in which the body dominates the feeling, the feeling obeys impulses and the mind follows suit. And the other way round, where there is real I, will, and this influences feeling, feeling body and so on. This is a picture. Ponder that and try and come nearer to that.

The diagrams Mr Adie refers to are 1 and 2, pp.41-42.

When Ben said “I think I’m very good,” that was true – and it was also the problem. He thought he was wonderful, when in fact he was, like all of us, only an ordinary person.

Of course, the reference to the sacrifice of Christ offers an approach which can bring that cosmic reality (or archetype) into our daily lives (our types). But what stunned me was his saying how intentional suffering gives me my own force.