Begin with the Possible
The more you know yourself, the more you know your being. If you do not know yourself, you do not know your being. And if you remain on the same level of being you cannot get more knowledge.
Begin with the possible; begin with one step. Try to do a little, and results will show you. There is always a limit, you cannot do more than you can. If you try to do too much, you will do nothing. But, little by little, you will see that right thinking, right attitudes are necessary. It needs time, because for so long people have been in the power of negative emotions, negative imagination, lying, identification, and things like that.
But little by little these will disappear. You cannot change everything at once. You must always think about the next step—only one step. We can understand the next step as being a little more collected than now. When we have understood that, we can think of it as being still more collected— but not completely, not finally.
Before you are able to judge the change, you must know your being as it is now. When you know most features of your being, you will be able to see changes. We can judge the level of our being by the instability of our ‘I’—what we call ‘I’—because one moment one part of us says ‘I’, another moment another part. If you observe well, you will find how different you are, even in the course of one day. One moment you decide to do one thing, another moment another thing. It is this constant changing even in the course of twenty-four hours that really shows the level of our being.
Adapted from ‘The Fourth Way‘, by P.D. Ouspensky, Chapter 2.
P D Ouspensky (1878-1947)
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