People often speak of the difficulties they have in formulating their aims. That is because they start from idea, from thought. Aim is not an idea, though it has thought in it. Aim must be feeling - plus - thought. Start from a picture - from feeling.

Aim has to start with wish - with what you essentially wish to be.

Wish has a magic ingredient....it ...reach(es) a higher level from which it can receive help and strength.

Gurdjieff says we are not doing anything Nature is not doing also, but we are trying to do it consciously. ...try to find an analogy within our own experience of something stirring in us, perhaps just beginning to develop in our dawning consciousness. How do I sense that hard shell that has, up to now, protected me, sleeping as I have been in a dream world? ...now something in me is stirring, my dream world begins to be troubled and I am no longer satisfied, but shut in.

Whichever way I stretch I come up against that inflexible prison. Sometime I call it my personality and sometimes I call it my mechanicality, but by whatever name there seems no way to escape from it. I am surrounded by all sides. I perceive that although, yes, there is a real wish to escape, there is also ...(an impulse) to remain safe, protected, and to continue to dream calmly and peacefully. I cannot change ...unless I cease to remain as I am. Again and again the disturbance returns - Life is knocking at my door; it is the time to awaken; there is a task to be done.

This is where a man needs to establish an aim - an aim founded on the wish ...a conscious aim.

There is a lot that could be said here, but only one thing perhaps can really help. Direct your aim to what is above, to what is ahead. ...You are the sum of all your experiences. ...Start from there.

Bringing it down to practicality, how does one go on from day to day? Try, for a time, to have an aim of aspiration. First ponder: What is aspiration?  ...How can I relate my aim to this in a real but small way? Small enough so that it can be realizable.