I don't think specialists can achieve anything in this Work. It's necessary to have special knowledge to perform well within a profession in life, to do well your job in life, that's right. Next, particular lines of Work have their 'special details', needless to say. A Buddhist in Asia necessarily views this Work from another 'angle' than we do. Apart from that, specialization is another word for lopsidedness, and hence, an obstruction. What you need is a general knowledge of what life is, how people live, what they think, what they need, what they want, what they strive to achieve. There is a whole spectrum, for there are cultural, geographical, economical, racial, biological (gender) differences. (And it's not a question whether your place in the spectrum is a special place from where you are enabled to freely evaluate and judge what you see. But it's possible to determine your place to some extent and win some freedom from being determined by it in your outlook.) The spectrum also concerns differences between human beings, internal differences.
These differences concern valuation, effort, faith, possesion of magnetic centre, eventual contact with 'schools' and much more, in short: being. Also knowledge, of course. After some thinking, they are not less important than life differences. Now, to see the whole spectrum of the entities in this universe is more difficult, isn't it? For, there might be entities that belong 'lower' than you - inferiors. Then those close to you - equals. These both categories you can see. The trouble lies mainly in those who are 'higher' than you - superiors. How could you 'see' those?
Let's jump to a seemingly unrelated subject. Didn't you observe how underestimated simple logical thinking is in this world? Didn't you observe how extremely useful logical thinking is? How come? Does it not tell us (does it not enable us to calculate precisely, so to speak) that the main problem at entering this Work can be self-overestimation? In other words, thinking that we already posses that what we still have to attain? "But I'm full of self-love. Therefore I certainly know what is to love my Self." What do we have to attain? We've got to either find in ourselves or build in ourselves that which pertains to higher levels of the spectrum, don't we? "Of course, I'm conscious of that." How will we see something that we don't see in ourselves? "I don't know. How strange. Otherwise I know everything." Why do we see lower levels? Because they have something we know in ourselves as well.
Now, isn't this humility? Is it not so, that humility is not so much a quality of character, something that one has, than it is absence, being-free-of of some serious obstacles? Do not judge may well mean Do not underestimate. Logical thinking, for example. Then psychological or even esoteric thinking, about which we do not know that much yet. Then higher beings that are our only chance to pull us from the level we currently reside on. Here, does it all strike certain cords in us that could be called: heeroosmulka-groovnian (approx. meaning: similar-to-what-religion-teaches)? Is logical thinking not great help in seeing that it's extremely improbable that we are at the extreme upper edge of the universal scale?
We often want to cooperate with and communicate with lower beings. We often love and like them. Owner/dog. Parent/child. Wouldn't it be logical to suppose that we are not the highest crown of the Universe? Wouldn't it be logical to suppose that higher beings love us and want to literally serve us in the process? Would it be wise to underestimate simple parent/child that nature and life put before our eyes as an image and analogy of inner realities? Would that bring new light to the opening line of theLord's Prayer? (No, if one remembers that long ago there were gentlemen who seriously confessed that they don't know much about DO and SI notes of second cosmic octave. How seriously they were taken is another question. By people who understood it oh all so well. Knowledge is joy! The gentlemen must have alluded to certain Dominic they all knew and his pepperoni affairs with certain Mrs. S., but in a way that only those knowleadgable among us understood.)
What are rules and regulations and exercises and esoteric knowledge&instruction other than practices that help us find (or build up, as an alternative) in ourselves that which in more bountiful measure exists in entities higher up the spectrum? (Oh and I forget to mention book reading. Not exactly am I confident that beings higer up the inner scale have read more books as a rule, but some of them might.)
Do not these simple considerations so far, if taken seriously
1) show us that knowledge and means to develop oneself really abound around us? (B influences)
2) provide a basis from which one can 'take off' on one's own, without danger of being misguided?
What I understand by humility is basically what a child feels towards its higher counterparts. They take it for granted that those are simply higher and that's it. I don't see a trace of humiliation in it. . . what whispers: "beware, humiliation, humiliation" is inner pride anyway, the inner devil. (I'm going to leave out 'less perfect' masters/parents now, although they open interesting domain.) And what self-will suggests is to get angry because some strange 'freedom' that to child would be fatal is denied us. Run over the street without looking around. Play with bombs. Something like that. I want my mom NOW! when mom is doing her shift ten miles away. But where another big problem lies is that analogy here is not perfect. An atheist, a materialist, rationalist, a believer in blind fate or impersonal deity, simply denies that there is something higher. Of which we are much like children. All those types that one can see outwardly represent some serious blindness in us. Then idolatry would be a monkey child hugging his plastic, stone-dead mother desperately, an orphan holding its teddy bear tightly.
It all gets complicated. I can't think on well from here. (It's typical, by the way. A sign that we move on... out of accustomed landscape.) I'll just try to try to determine where 3) C influences come in in today's scheme. They come in when you can 'see' them. (Not that they have to come as if they were not there all the time.) And you won't see them if you don't see C-influence-in-yourself. And to see/find/build it in yourself is what this Work, the ABC of Christianity, is about.
We'll leave whether you have to build a soul or do you already have it, for some other time. Suffice it to say that probably those who 'built' it are probably convinced that they didn't build anything, that the soul was always there... I wouldn't wonder if it appeared to logical thinking as something paradoxical. I don't discern psychological method well, yet it's a kind of higher paradox, logical paradox, so to speak, that points rather to psychological than to irrational thinking. (Speaking of that, I am firmly convinced that those who actually attain salvation, liberation from sin, actually think there was never any such strange thing that people call sin.)
Now do me a favor and don't ask that stupid question WITWA again. Otherwise I'll begin to call you Witwa. What is this Work about? Witwa, would you like to have a glass of milk?
There are probably a thousand good sides to prayer, ways to use it, to profit from it, aims that it is used for. Higher intent with Jesus' Prayer probably lies in the meaning, not in the words. That is, it is probably a portrayal of establishing conscious contact, an image in words. So, what is this cup for? It is for me. Let it not pass by, but that I may drink it. I cannot drink it in self-will as I am used to do other things. Therefore Thy will happen.
Well, quite a mystery (mystery=too big for logical thinking). I feel inclined to repeat the advice. Don't underestimate logical thinking, what active reasoning can do within you. Practically it's the gate to psychological thinking. Don't underestimate psychological thinking either - but that's already an understatement. For it must be the royal gate to the divine and all those things people say but rarely understand.