There is much to be learned from what may seem to be a lost opportunity. Whether it was lost or not depends not upon what we did then but on how much understanding we can get out of it now. What looks to us like our mistakes can give us far more understanding than what we count as our successes. Perhaps if one can find a perfect method of expresssion it is not necessary to say anything. I think of Ouspensky, who for years explained in greatest detail the whole theory of change to a higher level of man, then gradually explained less and less, and finally became silent and performed the miracle.
Performance is the perfect expression and transcends every other.
As Ouspensky always said, this is the way of understanding . Everything must be understood, and being understood, everything from the popular to the esoteric, from the Tango to Catholic prayers, can reveal interior connections. I think the deep instinct to check everything, verify everything, seems absolutely essential. In fact it is this friction betwen the instinct to believe and the instinct to question which forces us to that state of self-remembering where alone things can be truly accessed. Ouspensky used to say that people were divided into three kinds, those whose chief difficulty was negative emotions, those whose chief difficulty was imagination, and those whose chief difficulty was formatory thinking.