The 6 activities and the second conscious shock

I was thinking about something brought up in the recent exchange on the food octave. Something about prayer and the difficult mi12-fa6 interval that represents the second conscious shock. It reminded me of the Work teaching on the 6 activities.

Here is a post I wrote on that subject five years ago or so. I always remembered it as one of my more useful posts because the subject really was in need of being put in a practical context, and I think I was able to do that in a rather complete way:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/work_celestial/message/241

I also surprised myself when I reread it because as I was reading it I knew it was the activity of 'magic' that prayer and the second conscious shock fell in to, but I didn't think I hit on that five years ago, yet I see that I had a whole paragraph on just that (not prayer itself, but just how much of Work efforts fall into the category of the activity of magic).

Maybe I was hesitant to see 'prayer' connected with 'magic', but maybe the terminology 'magic' can be changed. The Work sources don't mean actual 'magic' anyway. Maybe 'cultivating' is a word that can used for it. After all, what activities of the six does the effort of a farmer planting crops fall into?

Creating
Building
Destroying
Inventing/Adapting/Discovering/Fixing
Magic
Crime

One wouldn't say or think 'magic', even though we could intellectually understand that connection. Cultivating, though, seems to fit, even as a broad category label for that activity. Doing something now for a pay-off in the future. It is different from building because what happens is not something we can so obviously do hands-on. We can build a house from foundation to roof, but a farmer can't make his crops grow. And we can't get through the Mi12-Fa6 interval on our own, using the same activity that got us there (creating, i.e. self-remembering effort, or building even, the more rote, getting-into-the-self-remembering state). For the second conscious shock effort we have to use another activity. Magic. Or cultivation. Prayer. Perhaps fasting, if necessary. Beforehand. Knowing what it needed. Knowing from Work experience and history what will inevitably happen and asking for assistance to get through it.

The main thing here is the necessity to use (or match up) the right activity for what you are trying to do. When you're banging your head against a wall you are, among maybe other problems, not approaching your goal using the right 'triad', or activity; which is a big part of it, if not most all of it...