There are four aberrations of your soul's helmsman which you must constantly guard against, and suppress whenever detected. Say to them one by one, 'This is a thought which is not necessary,' 'This is one which would undermine fellowship,' This is not the voice of my true self' (for to speak anything but your true sentiments, remember, is of all things the most misplaced), and, fourthly, when you are tempted into self-reproach, 'This would prove the divine element in me to have been discomfited and forced to its knees by the ignoble and perishable flesh with its gross conceptions.

• temptation
• invavsive thoughts
• resolution
• struggle
• self-control
• stoicism

Put from you the belief that 'I have been wronged', and with it will go the feeling.  Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.

• stoicism
• taoism
• self-control
• magick
• conditioning
• emotion
• negative emotions
• will
• belief

The problem of being oneself has a particular and subordinate solution in terms of a unification. Once one has discovered through experiment which of one's manifold tendencies is the central one, one sets about identifying it with one's will, stabilizing it, and organizing all one's secondary or divergent tendencies around it. This is what it means to give oneself a law, one's own law. As we have seen, the incapacity to do this, 'the many discordant souls enclosed in my own breast' and the refusal to obey even before one is capable of commanding oneself are causes of the disaster that may well end the path of a being driven toward the boundary situation in the world without God. There is a relevant saying: 'He who can not command himself must obey. And more than one can command himself, but is still far from being able to obey himself.

• self
• situation
• soul
• law
• permanent "i"
• self-control
• the fourth way
• aim
• many i"s

Q. Are vast amounts of internal friction and discomfort always a necessary preliminary to new development? \r\n \r\nA. That depends on people. For some people more may be necessary, for some less. Again, it depends on what you want. If you just want to study, it is enough to see, but if you want to change something it is not enough to look at it. Looking at a thing will not change it. Work means friction, conflict between 'yes' and 'no', between the part that wishes to work and the part that does not wish to work. There are many parts of us that do not wish to work, so the moment you begin to work friction starts. If I decide to do something and a part of me does not wish to do it, I must insist as much as I am able, on carrying out my decision. But as soon as work stops, friction stops. \r\n \r\nQ. How can one create useful friction? \r\n \r\nA. You must start with some concrete idea. If you produce no resistance, everything happens. But if you have certain ideas, you can already resist identification and struggle with imagination, negative emotions and things like that. Try to find what really prevents you from being active in the work. It is necessary to be active in the work; one can get nothing by being passive. We forget the beginning, where and why we started, and most of the time we never think about aim, but only about small details. No details are of any use without aim. Self-remembering is of no use without remembering the aims of the work and your original fundamental aim. If these aims are not remembered emotionally, years may pass and one will remain in the same state. It is not enough to educate the mind; it is necessary to educate the will. We are never the same for two days in succession. On some days we shall be more successful, on others less. All we can do is to control what we can. We can never control more difficult things if we do not control the easy things. Every day and hour there are things that we could control and do not; so we cannot have new things to control. We are surrounded by neglected things. Chiefly, we do not control our thinking. We think in a vague way about what we want, but if we do not formulate what we want, nothing will happen. This is the first condition but there are many obstacles. Effort is our money. If we want something, we must pay with effort. According to the strength of effort and the time of effort—in the sense of whether it is the right time for effort or not—we obtain results. Effort needs knowledge, knowledge of the moments when effort is useful. It is necessary to learn by long practice how to produce and apply effort. The efforts we can make are efforts of self-observation and self remembering. When people ask about effort, they think about an effort of 'doing'. That would be lost effort or wrong effort, but effort of self-observation and self remembering is right effort because it can give right results. Self-remembering has an element of will in it. If it were just dreaming, 'I am, I am, I am', it would not be anything. You can invent many different ways of remembering yourselves, for self remembering is not an intellectual or abstract thing; it is moments of will. It is not thought; it is action. It means having increased control; otherwise of what use would it be? You can only control yourselves in moments of self-remembering. The mechanical control which is acquired by training and education—when one is taught how to behave in certain circumstances—is not real control.

• struggle
• conscious development
• work
• conflict
• laziness
• identification
• imagination
• the fourth way
• negative emotions
• self-observation
• self-remembering
• will
• aim
• knowledge
• self-control
• stoicism
• react vs respond
• thought
• time
• emotion
• education
• change
• observation
• emotions
• money
• circumstances
• self
• strength
• control
• how to
• ideas

It is very easy to distinguish these three parts when we begin to observe ourselves. Mechanical parts do not need attention. Emotional parts need strong interest or identification, attention without effort or intention, for attention is drawn and kept by the attraction of the object itself. And in the intellectual parts you have to control your attention. When you get accustomed to control attention, you will see at once what I mean. First the character of the action will show you which centre you are in, and then observation of attention will show you the part of centre. It is particularly important to observe the emotional parts and to study the things that attract and keep the attention, because they produce imagination. Study of attention is a very important part of self-study, and if you begin to observe this division of centres into parts, in addition to the division of centres themselves, it will give you the possibility of coming to smaller details and will help you to study attention.

• centers
• conscious development
• control
• how to
• identification
• imagination
• magick
• self-control
• self-observation
• will
• self
• attention
• character
• intention
• observation

At present we have no control over instinctive and emotional functions, and only a little over the moving function. External influences move them. We cannot be glad or angry without cause, and a cause means something external. Later work must be in the emotional centre because the chief energy is in it. Intellectual centre is only auxiliary, but at present it is all we have.

• external causes
• influences
• magick
• self-control
• the fourth way
• transactional analysis
• work
• control
• functions
• energy

It is a great sacrifice not to see the things we are accustomed to see. We are accustomed to think that we live in a more or less comfortable world. Certainly there are unpleasant things, such as wars and revolutions, but on the whole it is a comfortable and well-meaning world. It is most difficult to get rid of this idea of a well-meaning world. And then we must understand that we do not see things themselves at all. We see like in Plato's allegory of the cave only the reflections of things, so that what we see has lost all reality. We must realize how often we are governed and controlled not by the things themselves but by our ideas of things, our views of things, our picture of things. This is the most interesting thing. Try to think about it.

• conscious development
• magick
• mechanicalness
• self-control
• self-observation
• shadow
• the fourth way
• narrative
• meaning
• sacrifice
• reality
• plato
• ideas

Now it is of great interest that we cannot effectively think about self-control without making a separation between the controller and the controlled, even when - as the word 'self-control' implies - the two are one and the same.  This lies behind the widespread conception of man as a double or divided being composed of a higher self and a lower, of reason and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, voluntary and involuntary, angel and animal.  So conceived , man is never actually self-controlling...The problem is well illustrated in the Christian theory of virtue, which for centuries has put an immense double-bind on Western man.  The greatest commandment is that 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God' - and, note the addition - 'with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind.'  How can such a commandment be obeyed?  The addition implies that it is not enough to think and act as if I loved God.  I am not asked to pretend that I love.  I am asked really to mean it, to be completely sincere.  Jesus' whole condemnation of the Pharisees was that they obeyed with their lips and hands, but not with their hearts.

• christianity
• control
• self
• soul
• love
• god
• self-control
• lies
• reason
• instinct
• virtue
• spirit
• jesus
• theory
• body
• separation
• matter
• note

The problem is this: man is a self-conscious and therefore self-controlling organism, but how is he to control the aspect of himself which does the controlling?  All attempts to solve this problem seem to end in a snarl, whether at the individual level or at the social.  At the individual level the snarl manifest itself in what we call acute self-consciousness, as when a public speaker frustrates himself by his very effort to speak well.  At the social level it manifests itself as a loss in freedom of movement increasing with every attempt to regulate action by law.  In other words, there is a point beyond which self-control becomes a form of paralysis - as if I wanted simultaneously to throw a ball and hold it to its course with my hand.

• facism
• humanity
• self
• self-consciousness
• society
• self-control
• freedom
• consciousness
• control
• law
• public
• loss
• other

In the end, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains control of things.'

• control
• ideal
• plato
• reality
• self-control
• thucydides
• courage

...In comparison to fanciful love, active love is a cruel and frightening thing. Fanciful love thirsts for a quick deed, swiftly accomplished, and that everyone should gaze upon it. In such cases the point really is reached where people are even willing to give their lives just as long as the whole thing does not last an eternity but is swiftly achieved, as on the stage, and as long as everyone is watching and praising. Active love, on the other hand, involves work and self-mastery, and for some it may even become a whole science.

• love
• lust
• roles
• self-awareness
• self-control
• work
• self
• science
• eternity
• other