CHOICE:

A Talk By Eugene Halliday

…He’d come to the conclusion there isn’t any choice. And he’d thought that a sage is, by his wisdom, completely circum-standing action. Of course, that corresponds with what lots of mystics have said about the wise man: that he is the most circumscribed of all men, that he has no choice, because he knows too much. Like every other statement, this could be true, and also could mislead an individual into thinking that he himself has no choice and is therefore merely a mechanism. If an individual is merely a mechanism, whatever he does, he does, including breaking down or running on indefinitely, and if it is perfectly true that men are mechanisms only, then the combination of the letters C, H, O, I, C, E, isn’t a word, at all, because a word, we have defined as a sound with intended significance. The word (if it is a word) ‘choice’, must refer to some concept we have, and if it refers to nothing at all, it isn’t a word. So we have to say either that that combination of letters constituting choice is not a word, or if it is a word, it signifies something and therefore it has a reference, and therefore there is choice.

We then have to decide just precisely what choice is, and we consider it a little, in the form of a triangle (like Karl Marx might have been) and we’ll say (drawing a diagram) there is ‘A’ here, and ‘not A’ here on the base line. Now let’s imagine a [beam?] for the moment, like a billiard ball, that [revolves?] entirely ‘X’. X is an unknown quality which we won’t define, but we will say that this being is entirely ‘X’. Absolute X throughout; essentially totally X. There is no ‘nonX’ in it. (2’ 28”)

Every being knows only the modifications of its own substance. It cannot know anything unless its substance itself can vibrate in that manner. So if this is totally X, it can only know X, and is its whole being is being X. So if there is an entity nonX, it must remain forever unknown by X. So if we get a perfectly unific being – a being totally X, and there is another being (we’ll do noughts and crosses, we’ll call it ‘O’). This other being, with its characteristic vibrations, could never convey to X precisely what it was. So for X, there can be no choice. So that for any being which is essentially a unity throughout itself identical, choice is impossible, because choice means determining between alternatives, and an essentially unific being has no alternatives. It is simply being itself.

As soon as we introduce duality into a being, and we’ll give it a quality ‘X’, and another quality ‘O’, then straight away, this being can respond to a stimulus X by sympathy, by resonance, and become aware that there is a like entity outside itself, and it can respond to O in the other part of its being, and therefore the whole being has two things presented to it at once. But again, the ‘X factor’, the X part of its being has no choice but to respond to X. And the O part of its being has no choice but to respond to O. So it is a peculiar being. It is a being, the parts of which have no choice, and yet which itself, as a whole being, has alternative courses of action which constitute choice. Nevertheless, when these stimuli come to the order X and O, to this complex being, when the stimuli come they force a reaction in the substance, and thus the content of consciousness is, again, mechanically determined. So there is no choice about whether you receive, or do not receive, the stimulus. (5’16”)

Choice is determining between alternatives, and we’ve seen that if a being is totally X, it cannot choose at all, and if it is X and O, then it cannot choose X with the O or O with the X, and yet it has the possibility of responding in two ways, which is the ground of the possibility of choice.

If we were to try to solve the problem in this way, we could not solve it, because we would circumscribe our attention; we would be fixed on a finite. Every finite is necessarily a machine. That is to say that every finite that we can consider, by the fact that it is finite, circumscribed, limited, can be determined in some way by an external stimulus. And the way it will react to that stimulus is determined by the nature of the stimulus and the nature of the finite being stimulating it. So the reaction is mechanical. So, as long as we are considering finites in this manner, we can never solve the problem of choice. There can’t be any, because the stimulus and the receiving body (reaction) are determined by their own qualities. So if we make a finite analysis, choice is impossible. No matter how big we make the circle, it is still a machine. (When we find the mystic – Jakob Böhme, talking about the universe as a watch made of parts, springs, wheels and so on, he means that. And nevertheless, he knows that free, spirit also is considered by human consciousness.) So when we draw a circle, we pretend it’s the biggest circle there is. The fact that it is a circle means that it is closed, finited. And beyond that finite there is the infinite. And as every finite is a machine, choice cannot be in the finite. But choice is always between alternatives.

(Drawing, again, on the paper) So if we make this point of the triangle ‘A’ centre of the circle, point ‘not A’ centre of another circle, then we have two circles here: the zones of influence of ‘A’ and ‘not A’, and somewhere on the line, there between them, is a zone which is neither ‘A’ nor ‘not A’. Obviously this isn’t Aristotelian, because, according to Aristotle, everything must either be ‘A’ or ‘not A’. And every finite must either be of a certain quality or not, so that as soon as you confine yourself to the finite, you are pinned in a mechanism and choice becomes impossible. But because choice is always between alternatives, then we must go between finites to find the ground of choice.

We are going to put at the top (there is ‘A’ there and ‘not A’ there), and we are going to put ‘A’, ‘not A’, simultaneously at the top. And we’ll use this top point of the triangle (the apex of the triangle) so as to focus ourselves, so that we can go down to right and left, to consider ‘A’ and ‘not A’ in separativity. In the absolute, beyond the limiting factors, whatever it is at the level of finite that we call ‘A’ and ‘not A’, must be asserted simultaneously. The Absolute is ‘A/not A’. This is what we mean by non dualism. It isn’t one, which is either ‘A’ or ‘not A’. And it isn’t two: namely ‘A’ and ‘not A’: the dualism. It is neither ‘A’ nor ‘not A’. It is prior to the designation ‘A’ and ‘not A’. ‘A’ is already a form for consideration. ‘Not A’ is another form which negates the first. To become free, we must become completely uncircumscribed. To become free, we must identify with nothing whatever. In order to get to that point, we must first have a concept of freedom, which itself is a finite, because every concept is finite. (10’10”)

What we find, in fact, is that, at the level of human beings, some human beings push other human beings about. Babies are picked up, put into prams, inverted and dusted, generally maltreated by other beings called adults. Now they are not, is actually able to do this on the baby. Forces to the higher and forces to the lower, and the higher forces act on the lower, and the word choice means this: with a force from above is applying itself to some forces below. The mere fact that this can happen starts an infinite regression. If we find a baby in the pram, which is not yet very able to sit up and tear its ribbons from under its chin, and just lying there all goo-eyed, we may find another baby, four or five years old, big enough to come and hit him with a bat when its mother’s not looking. Then we find, perhaps, a larger boy to hit the boy with the bat. Then perhaps that larger boy has a father who comes and hits him. And this gives us an idea that somewhere above, there is an ultimate big power that can hit everybody.

This ultimate big power is moving in the direction of an infinite regression. So we can say the term of the concept is infinite power itself. This infinite power must be able to determine the behaviour of all finites, and nothing less than the infinite can be free from the finite. What is bound in the finite is a machine, in so far as a man identifies with a finite body, he is determined by the law governing that body. In so far as he refuses to identify with any finite situation, he remains free from it. So to be free, one must not identify with a finite.

So, in the pursuit of choice, we have to, in practical terms, practise non-identification with finites, and if we wish to identify at all, do it with nothing. (Nothing being equatable with the free.) If you identify with the dome, then you are circumscribed. And according to the characteristics you invest in the dome, so your behaviour will be determined. If you wish to become free, you must learn to control dome. Dome is another way of saying definition. A governing concept, once it is inserted in your mind, if it is of a higher order than the existing concept, it will begin to push about, those concepts in the mind. An idea is not nothing. It is a modal power. It is an operation of the absolute within the absolute. And every idea has a certain amount of power, is a certain amount of power, is itself sentient (remember we must not be dualistic: the absolute is intelligent power, sentient power, causative power). So a concept is not nothing. A concept is a definite amount of spiritual energy, intelligent and sentient. Therefore it will push other ideas about of a lower order.

So if you put an idea in a man’s mind, even through the ears, once that idea is in, it will battle with other ideas of a lower order whether you like it or not, because to be non dualistic, that idea is itself describable, therefore finited, and therefore a packet of sentient energy pursuing its own purpose. So to liberate an idea is to liberate a force, which will fight against other forces to establish itself. And the higher force in operation, ordering the lower forces, is said to be the choosing force, and the lower forces are chosen. (14’34”)

One of the things in Christian […] is difficult, is this idea of the election of grace, of predestination and so on. It is said that men, of themselves, can do nothing, and therefore they cannot save themselves, and therefore they are entirely dependent on grace. Misunderstood by people identified with their gross physical bodies, this means that no man could possibly help himself. He has got to wait for grace to come to him. But if he waits for grace to come to him, he is being a dualist, because he is postulating there is a force called grace, other than in himself.

Grace is the same as grease and free. It isn’t the devil, it’s the free. The man who wishes to have grace must first realise that he has it, and he must use it. Grace is the free in himself. There is the highest concept he has, which is ordering him about, is actually the grace that frees the others, and it frees them from false associations with other low level concepts and binds them simultaneously to other concepts, in a proper context. Freedom is bondage.

(To a listener) Were you going to say something?

Listener: I was going to ask you about this question of grace. It’s appeared to me, when I’ve read about men that have produced theories and things like that, that they have used up all the energy of one particular level before the higher level has come in, which appeared to be grace. Is this so? For instance, Einstein said that when he got his original ideas, he’d work them until he could work no longer, then it suddenly came to him. It occurred to me that he must have used up one level of energy before the other level of energy that gave him what he would describe as grace, came forward. Would that be so?

Eugene: Consider it this way: Einstein was identified by his education [at a given?…] He had a number of finited concepts of physics given to him by his education. (He wasn’t a Hottentot. He was a Yiddish gentleman with a certain education).

Those ideas mechanically work themselves around, and because of the nature of finites, they worked in a circle, so that they could not possibly discover, for him, the idea he wanted, because all logic is [taught?] logic. His education determined the direction of the problem, and also the fact that it could not be solved. You know that if you take any substance whatever – we’ll take a little kiddy’s circular railway (The first one you get that annoys you when you’re a little boy: one four piece circle of track, and you put the train on it and it goes round and round and round, and bores you in about four minutes. Then we want a bigger track with more bends in it.) If you put the train on the track, keep winding it up and letting it run round, it will wear the rails out. And when it’s worn the rails out, then it will drop. In the same way, any substance whatever, if you run energy through it, will gradually wear itself out. You can actually wear out, in the brain, certain associations of ideas by simply repeating them over and over again. At a certain point they become meaningless. You can try this with your own name, or with anything whatever Suddenly the thing becomes quite meaningless; the stimulus has gone. This is like the train running round the rails then wearing the rails out, then falling through.

The kind of process that Einstein and other thinkers goes through is precisely that. They have this idea, and this idea is searching for another idea. It is searching in a circle on a track, and it runs round and round and round, looking for that marvellous invention, and it exhausts the person who’s doing the thinking. It literally wears him out, and then it falls through. Now, this is the point, when it falls through, where the grace operates. Another concept, of which he was totally unaware is now seen to be there, and it is related to the problem that he tried to solve, because it was the governing concept that set that problem up for the human race. Einstein is the end result of a lot of thinkers. I say end result up to now, because there will be more Einsteins in the future who will tear to bits what he said. Nevertheless, he’s the- or was, up to his death a couple of years ago, the end result of a long evolution of ideas. He didn’t determine the problem: the problem determined his behaviour. That problem wore him out, for when he was exhausted and cut to pieces with the problem, then the problem fell through and left a hole. Through that hole, light shines. Suddenly, he sees a relation that he couldn’t see before, because he could see the particulars on the surface. (20’10”)

Listener: Is that the process of grace?

Eugene: That is one of the processes of grace. That is what you might call the hard way. First assume that it is possible to solve the thing finitely, and you are deceived. Then you will work very, very hard, until the bottom falls out of your market, and then you will suddenly see a bigger idea than the one you started with, and you will say “Why didn’t I see that before? It’s so simple!” Einstein’s unifield theory is very, very simple. Why hadn’t people seen it before? The answer is, people cannot see anything by definition. People can’t. Mystics had seen the unifield long before Einstein, but they were called mystics. Logicians had seen it long before Einstein, but they weren’t called empirical scientists. Philosophers saw it, but again, they weren’t scientists. And as it happens to be a period of science, only scientists can think correctly. Actually, they are completely circumscribed by the historic evolute of the period.

It is the zeitgeist, the time spirit, that determines the next problem for science, so they are entirely mechanical about that. Then the higher force that suddenly presents itself when the rotating energy has cut a hole in the substance of that man, appears to him as grace.

But that higher force is part of a higher mechanism, right up to the top - the big circle. And on the outside of that there is only immediacy, which is spirit itself. That spirit itself, penetrates all the things that can possibly be discovered by man, and it penetrates them immediately. But most of the things it has to say are anachronistic. They are to endure for a time, because the people at the level of the time process can’t see further than the historic evolute allows them to. So to tell them a certain thing: that there is something beyond, say, the speed of light as a top constant - to say that, is to stagger most minds. (22’ 27”)

Some scientists […?] are beginning to nibble: they think there may be something of a totally other order to the physical world where light is not the top energy of the universe, but the bottom energy of another universe above it. The light is a substance, but it is a substance belonging in the spiritual world, standing in relation to the free spirit, as the gross body does to the mind of a man. The light is substance. That would be considered today, by most people, mystical. There are a few scientists, the avant-garde, who actually feel ‘think’. That is to say they are aware of deficiencies of the existing thought process. They feel there is something wrong with their thinking and they have a general direction that, somehow, we are living in a universe which is inside another universe. The gross universe is inside a subtle universe, all the elements of which are ‘idea events’. And beyond that, there is another universe: a universe of causes, which is pure powers, and these powers are driving in to formulate the subtle universe, which precipitates the gross universe.

The absolute itself contains all these, and only this infinite absolute is free, absolutely. But all the others below it are free, relatively, to the ones below, and they are bound to the ones above.

When we talk about necessity, we are talking about the not-ceasing-ness of characteristic motions. (Suppose we say necessity means not ceasing). So we say a thing is necessary which is not ceasing in its characteristic mode. It is an unceasing motion which we cannot conceive ever for it to be other than it is. A power is behaving in a certain way, and it is behaving unceasingly in this characteristic way and this unceasingness is what we call necessity. (24’41”)

The general idea of necessity would be opposed to the idea of choice, so if there is anything necessary whatever about the absolute, then there would be no choice in the Absolute. Supposing we look at the Absolute and consider it as power with the essential nature of which, is motion: absolute motion. Not relative motion, because relative motion is the motion of finite bodies to each other, measured from a certain view point. Absolute motion is that which you approximate to when you try to conceive all finite motions simultaneously, and then make an allowance for your incapacity to conceive them. This absolute motion therefore, is not finitely characterised at all, and therefore is not finitely determined, and therefore is able to choose, in the field of the finites. All the finites are below it. Itself, is pure dynamism; pure intelligent, sentient motion-power. It determines (sets the end term) of its own operations. There is nothing other than it to constrain it. So that what it does, it does from itself… (26’12”)

(Break)

…not from something else. Because it does it from itself and not from something else, we say it acts immediately (that is, without mediation), and when it acts immediately, to produce a form, as soon as it has produced the form, it has produced something finite, and therefore immediate. Because now, when it tries to operate through that finite to make another one, the first finite is the mediator between the Absolute and the second finite produced.

Listener: When you get these concepts between the modalities of power, and you’re getting new concepts handed down to you, you’ve already had contingent relations and there are already certain ideas in your mind, and new ideas coming in are bound to create a battle inside them for a time, wouldn’t they?

Eugene: Necessarily. By the unceasing motion that constitutes those ideas. as soon as you put two ideas together, a conflict starts. If you don’t know that, you can become crazy, and I mean crazy!

If you do know it, you merely recognise that two ideas are now re-orientating themselves to each other, and you can say “How very amusing. How fantastic. I must write a poem about it, or a novel.” But if you think for one moment, being identified with them, that they represent you, you must be confused. You must be at war with yourself. And this is to be dualistic, because you cannot be at war with yourself unless you are a dualist. If you’re a non-dualist, whatever war there is, it doesn’t belong to you; it belongs in the conceptual realm.

There was a little under-grown bull on the TV last night – I don’t know whether saw it. Because it wasn’t big enough, they said “We must destroy it. It doesn’t conform to government speculation for bull size.” The interviewer was discussing this and the man with the bull was saying what he thought about it: what the government think about bulls, is not proper bulls, and so on. And the bull itself just looked like a bull. It wasn’t bothered by this exchange of concepts. But it was aware that there was some slight feeling of agitation on the part of its owner. And when there was the suggestion that as it was such a little bull it should be destroyed, or if not destroyed, emasculated, so that it couldn’t get into government stock and make small cows, it felt something of the agitation of its owner, and it did a few little head shakes and it pulled. But it didn’t know what, formally, it was pulling about. (29’27”)

People as such, are at the level of being aware that there is something to be solved, without being able to define what it is. In the old testament it says “My beloved turtle-doves are the people.” […?] for a turtle dove. And the dove is the figure of the reproductive element that goes about cooing all day long. So the people who supply the bodies, or vehicles of experience in the world, are said to be beloved by God, because they keep the machinery going. They provide vehicles of experience, and they are doing a good job. They are like the proles in 1984. They endure themselves. The bosses endure themselves at the top, because they know the ropes, but in the middle level, they don’t endure themselves. They are terrified of being mistaken for turtle doves, and they haven’t got enough savvy to belong to the top lot. They don’t drink beer – they drink martinis and that. Whatever they do, is conditioned by fear of falling below and inability to climb above, so in that mid region there is a perpetual scramble for security, for stability, for recognition.

If beings are to gain freedom, that is the ability freely to determine their own modes, they must get hold of this non-identification with finites. To identify with a finite is to go under the law governing the finite. If you think you are an Englishman, and you go abroad (perhaps you go into the Congo or something) and you are recognised as a white man, at a certain moment in a certain time, you might get punched in the nose simply for identifying yourself as a white man from Europe. If you had enough savvy, you would make friendly gestures and represent yourself as one who had always fought [for an ego?] freedom. And if you did so, you might escape; you might even get a decoration. The important thing is, if you have a higher concept than the people with whom you deal, you are free from the things that determine their activity. (32’)

This repetition for the necessity of non-identification, we hope is boring, because what we want to do is bore a hole like the little train running round its track, that wanted to bore right through so the whole bottom drops out of the necessity for identification with finites and leaves the man free to dome himself.

So far, every child that is born into the world is conditioned by its educators; by its environment. It’s something to be born an Englishman and not a Hottentot. It’s something to be born a Russian and not a member of the U.S.A. Conceptually, the man is determined by it. You’ve seen how concepts in New York recently made some very disgusting behaviour in the […?] An apology is made and said “That bad behaviour is the product of refugees, and not of Native Americans.” This isn’t strictly true. Nevertheless, there’s a certain measure of it. But those refugees have been conditioned, conceptualised, by experiences they’ve had in Europe, possibly in Russia, so that when they think of Russia, certain passions arise in them, and they are determined mechanically by these concepts and they hit out. If you saw any of them in the news recently, you saw a purely animal expression, ready to destroy what, in effect, is a man come over to talk business. That kind of thing won’t do. The business of the statesman is the business of the man who understands the states into which people get, geographically, politically, socially, psychologically, is this: he must manipulate those states, and he can only do so by a higher concept. There’s a difference between a politician and a statesman. The politician is concerned with managing the affairs of the city. (Politics is to do with the city.) But the statesman is concerned with managing the affairs as conditioned by states. In its very widest sense, the states of the earth, seasonal changes: those are states. States of the different latitudes and longitudes of the earth: those are states. National states and so on, are simply the resultants and the index of geographical states which determine them.

If the earth were a perfect sphere with a perfectly plain surface, the water now on it would distribute itself equally all over it, and there would be no land and therefore no land animals. The fact that through shrinkage and earthquakes and so on, the earth is wrinkled so that mountain ranges, and these occur on certain latitudes and longitudes according to the stresses and strains on the original sphere of them. This fact determines, from the mountains, when the rain falling on the mountains runs down the courses of rivers. That determines in its journey to the lowest level, the sea level, where the deltas will be: the mouths of the rivers. This determines the carrying down of the mud and the creation of fertile plains in the region of river mouths, and this determines the possibility of agriculture. This determines the growth of cities, of men, so that the collection of men in specific places is again a result of states of natural elements, states of the earth. Men that understand those things are statesmen. Men that don’t understand those determinates cannot be statesmen, but they may be politicians. The essence of a statesman is he’s not governed merely by temporal expediency born out of topical events, whereas the politician is governed by such things. (36’11”)

To become free, we have to get this concept that freedom itself means the determination of a mode from within that being, instead of from without. If we try in any other way to get it, we will fail. If we don’t know what it means, we can’t have it.

You’ve seen them running about in the Congo: lots of black people hitting each other, scrambling for power, rather behind the time, because this kind of scrabble identical with, was done in Europe a thousand years ago, and in the scramble for power, we see no evidence of careful, reasoned thought, with not a smooth transition. Britain was very capital: it trained a lot of negroes as lawyers, as doctors, and in the various professions for many years to get them ready, so that it could put those men in position before it turned over the government to the country. The Belgians, who hadn’t thought so far ahead, suddenly became afraid that the African states who’d been given their liberty would inspire other African peoples to demand liberty, panicked and then threw the ball to the Africans who had not been trained (there were no lawyers there, no doctors in sufficient numbers, and so on) to take over the country. The result is a kind of civil war.

You cannot be free, except from something: free from. So there must be some finite situation from which you free yourself, and this finite situation, you must define properly, and this you can only do by climbing above it and looking at the finites in the light of a higher concept.

That triangle of relation is similar to the pyramid. There is a hierarchy of concepts on the very lowest level: sense-percepts - the action of your five senses giving you data. On the next level, those data are grouped together to produce what are called general ideas. If we get a percept of a dachshund and an alsatian and a great dane and a whippet and so on, out of all these, we produce a general idea of dog. This general idea enables us to control the dogs in a certain way. We know that the ‘Tail Waggers Association’ is determined by the wagging of the tail of the dog. Those who worship wagging tails that wag and show signs of pleasure, are really dependent on the tail waggers: they are not free. So the large numbers of people who belong to the tail waggers are really determined by this wagging tail: the doggy runs towards them, wags its tail. The owner of said dog feels immediately valuable: “The doggy is recognising my value. Therefore I will buy it a medal.” This isn’t free from tail wagging, but it may be free from cats who don’t wag their tails. (39’38”)

So in order to determine free, you must determine from what. It will always be a finite situation. The more accurately you define it, the freer you will be from it, because of this fact. Consciousness itself can never become a finite. The man identified with a situation is a machine. If his consciousness is considered by him to go only so far and no further, then he will respond at that level. If he is aware really of the defined situation, he immediately becomes aware that he is not the situation. You see this perfectly obviously in emotional people, in children at a certain age: when they are emotionally identified with a situation they cannot, logically, stand back from. This is one thing that young love doesn’t like: a young fellow introduced me to a girl a few years ago. He was 18; this girl was 17. He thought she was marvellous; she was terrific. He asked me what I thought about her. And I said I would rather not say. She looked like a girl to me. He was injured when I said she looked like a girl. She should have looked marvellous; she should have looked terrific. He was in a certain state of un-definition. Now, a few years have passed. Already he has had defined for him, certain little characteristics she did not first show. And as these definitions sharpen, so he becomes freer from the object. (Not that he wants to be free. He says he is disappointed). The object is becoming progressively clearer. As it becomes clearer, the circle around it becomes tighter and harder. And consciousness cannot consider itself identical with a properly, clearly defined concept, because it can always see beyond the edge. Consciousness can only be confused if you rub out the edges. So at the feeling level of consciousness, identification is easier to fall into, and more dangerous. But at the intellectual end, where definition becomes progressively sharper, identification becomes less and less. And this is why people in a romantic mood don’t like to have the situation defined. If you define it (those people will admit this, having gone through it), if you define it, the emotion dies down. Then the emotion was so pleasant: why kill it? But if you allow the emotion to run on, it runs on with your your head in a noose.

Listener: How do you define, and still retain the value of the feeling, then?

Eugene: Initially, you can’t, of course. First of all, you start as a little baby, you are dependent, somebody feeds you. And you believe, funnily enough, that you have magical power over the food supply. The baby that screams when it wants feeding and suddenly finds a nipple in its mouth, believes that it has caused the nipple to appear in its mouth by screaming magically. And so, if it isn’t disillusioned of this, it will scream its way through life. When it goes into these emotional conditions, it will require experience, pain, punishments, before it will gradually realise that it wasn’t the screaming that caused the feeding. It was an instinct in the mother, from the same source as its own suffering-instinct, that caused the mother to supply it. Gradually, it is abstracted from the feeling level, but that feeling level was an undefined sub-intellectual. And when it comes to the intellectual level, it discovers it has lost its feeling. Sometimes, it doesn’t even like its mother. It may say “I didn’t ask to be born. You paid for my education, my clothing, and you did it because you didn’t want the neighbours to think you are a rotten mother!” and so on. It will analyse all the intellectual reasons why it could be so. And in so doing, it becomes progressively colder and colder, until at the tail of intellectual definition, it feels completely isolated and out of relation with other beings. At this point, either it discovers the real meaning of feeling above the intellect, or it becomes neurotic.

The object of the exercises we do is to regain a feeling level, but not sub-intellectual. It must be over the intellect. It must discover that feeling is field consciousness above the intellect, but at the level of the baby, it is impulsive from genetic sources; it is heredity from a long line of developing parents pushing their characteristics through, comes out a feeling disturbed from an impulse, as when we throw a pebble in the pond, the ripple, although it’s manifesting in the pond, as in the field, is actually arisen from an impact of the stone (45’07”)

The characteristic impulses of [coming?] babies come from lines of parents, because the instinct in a human baby isn’t like that of a chicken. The baby doesn’t, as soon as it’s born, start rustling about the carpet, pecking, picking up seeds like a chicken does. So it’s instincts are specific; derived from particular ancestors. They are like stones thrown by the ancestors into a plasma, which then responds. And a feeling is produced by this ancestral stimulant, and that feeling is a field state produced by a finite. This is sub-intellectual. Above the intellect is the field itself which actually makes the stones that are thrown, and this higher feeling, this higher field consciousness, is the one to be aimed at, because it is that higher feeling that enables you to choose the correct act in a lower situation. If you can feel at the higher level, you can anticipate what somebody at the lower level is about to do, before they know about it. And you could utter a magical word which would divert their thought process and they’d suddenly say “I was going to say something, then, but it’s gone.” This happens mechanically all day long, but it can be done deliberately, perhaps he’s on the edge of discovering something very momentous which would drive him round the bend, and a kindly word in time, and he doesn’t know what he was going to say, then he’s diverted.

The hierarchical structure of the universe is such that it has a series of veils […?] We’ll say there are seven veils and the Absolute, corresponding with the meaning of the symbolism of the days of the week and the planets of the zodiac. These veils successively obscure the reality of the Absolute so that lower level functions will be carried on, and so that nobody from a lower level can break into a higher level prematurely.

These seven veils exist in the human being. They have their points of correspondence in the nervous system, at certain levels in the spine, and they have their psychological values at the subtle level, and they have their volitional values at the causal level. They can be discovered only by progressive non-identification. The man who identifies himself with, say, the labour party, and thinks that anything not labour is necessarily wrong, cannot comprehend the arguments for conservative, hardly at all the liberal. And this is because certain veils are on him in his mind, because he is not yet ready to integrate higher concepts into his lower system, because he hasn’t yet cut the bottom out of his lower system by work. To get to a higher level safely, one must work on the lower level until the bottom falls out of it. (49’20”)

Listener: This is something that I wonder about, those who get these ideas presented to you and you work with them, so this is, in itself, must precipitate at some time, a situation which is going to cause you to battle through one of those breakthroughs. Is that so?

Eugene: Oh yes.

Listener: It means to say, if you’re working in this way, you are, in actual fact, creating a situation which is going to give you the chance to either get up to a higher level, through the situation establishing the concept in you, or else fall back and have to carry on again. Is that so? (49’58”)

Eugene: Yes. This means that there’s a way open for you to take the veils off. That is, deliberately, to try to see the how, that means the mechanics of the situational level which you then sound. Try to penetrate to the how. What is working the situation at that level? If you do so, you will cut the bottom out of it, because logic is [taught?] logic. It goes round and round and round and at a certain point you will see that you are defining the intended itself. And at that moment, it will simply fall through. And simultaneously, you will feel that you have not been damaged by it. And that occurs when you are on the next level. And you can’t get on to a next level unless you actually work to see the truth, the mechanical how of the situation in which you find yourself.

Listener: I’ve often thought that this higher level comes in some peculiar way from a desperate need to […?]

Eugene: Your desperate need is a disparate need. You see, you are working very hard before you become desperate. How can you become desperate unless you have two disparate ideas? You’ve got an idea that there is something valuable, and another idea – the fact – that you haven’t got it. What it is, you don’t know. When you struggle to get to this higher level, if you don’t struggle to the point of desperation, you can’t get it.

Listener: That’s what I’m thinking. For instance, what you’ve spoken just a short time ago, about there might be an English man, or something like that, that goes to another country, but to a certain extent, most people are very identified with their nationality, aren’t they? And if this is something suddenly swept away from them, they’re going to have a very unhappy time of it, and they would be driven to the need for something else and this ‘something else’ can come and help them to carry on, or it can move off that thing.

Eugene: Go native.

Listener: Go native, yes.

Eugene: ‘Going native’ is a piece of mechanics. A man goes out from one society into another. And the stimulant situation of the previous society is absent, and the new society stimulates him, and piles up, and it’s simply a matter of adding impulses, one on top of another, until the new situation has more impulses determinant in the man than the old, and that [monty?] goes native. And this is mechanics. He’s identified. To become free, one must not identify with any finite. So if I want to become free from the possibility of going native, I must already be free from the idea that I’m an Englishman.

Listener: What I want to ask you is that supposing you have been shaken in this respect, if you come to the concept of: you’re just a man, and you can’t be one thing or the other, you’re a man and that’s all there is to it. Is that a higher level than the national identification, or not?

Eugene: If you understand what man means and make it of values: yes. If it’s simply a sound – man – no. If you say man means a creator of values. So all the values of the Chinese, and the North American Indians, and the Eskimo, and the Englishman and so on, they are created by acts of will, by beings called man, that is: value makers.

Listener: What I’m thinking about is that, if your idea of your nationality has been swept away from you, you’re forced to go back and assess yourself aren’t you, of what you are?

Eugene: It depends on the nature of your organism. If you get your nationality swept away, you may become a stateless person and just be swamped completely by multitudes of unassimilable stimuli, and then you become neurotic.

We’ve got to deal with concrete people. Outside this room there are- how many millions of people are there? Too many to be bothered to count. Those people, we can have nothing to do with, at the moment. We can’t do anything for them, or to them, except in so far as we can modify ourselves now, here. And the concrete fact is: do I, as an individual, understand that man means a creator of values? The primary appetite: ‘mo’, is substance (M), and energy (A), and emotion (N). Man is a substance actively moving. In this motion, he is creating values. He is counting – man. He is numerating. He is making value judgements. This is man. So I don’t care two hoots if a man comes in and says “I am a Chinese delegate.” I say “You’re a man, so you are defining yourself as a Chinese delegate. I define you as a ‘chop-suey joint owner.” You see? (54’37”)

All definitions are valid to the men who make them. And the big fight in the world today, in politics, for power, in world affairs, is by men who define situations and impose their definitions on other men. This is the point […?] and everybody else are busy talking like mad trying to impose, by turns, on fellows’ smaller vocabularies, and so on. And they will win, factually, because there are men with smaller vocabularies. So that, individually, here, we have to work here in a certain way. It’s no good for us to say “There are how many…say 600 million Chinese: we should consider them.” Why should we consider them?! They are making values. Along time ago, in the fifth century B.C., they made values. They said “Don’t let’s make a machine that will improve the situation, otherwise we’ll find we’ve got a job, eight hours a day.” That was their value. They had another idea. They have paid the price of that idea in lack of development. In Europe, they took the other way: “Let’s dig the place up and blow it up. Seize power!” Suddenly, they’ve seized responsibility. And there’s always the back-wash. Now, they are terrified of the people who chose the other way. Because whether you choose high or low, near or far, in a non-dual absolute, you’ll be driven into the opposite, if you take any finite; any one of the pair of boxes.

So it is for us, as individuals, to find out where we stand. Or for myself, as an individual, to find out where I stand. And for you to find out where you stand. You have to say “Do you understand that you are a man (that is: a creator of values)? Are the values you are creating good enough for you? Or are they values of an inferior order imposed on you by somebody else for their benefit? […?]” You’ve been educated. Why?

When Luther opposed the Roman church, he threw out certain beliefs. And he put in their place – they were religious beliefs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Why? Simply because business was going to expand. More people had to be able to read and write and do arithmetic, and so on. So that under the guise of religious change, factually the ground of an industrial revolution was being laid. It doesn’t matter that the opposite camp were equally biased in their definitions. The more intelligent ones said “If you throw out that Roman dogma about works, as far as faith, then people won’t think they have to work.” The fact is, to throw it out at all is to throw men back in the Bible, and to say that men can interpret the Bible is to say that any man may think what he likes about it.

All men are unequal, therefore their thoughts about the Bible are unequal. So for one man, like Montgomery, or Napoleon, the Bible is a text book of military strategy. The battle cry: the Lord mighty in battle. Favourite book: Joshua. For another man, it’s full of pacifistic ideas. If each man interprets the Bible in his own way, in a very peculiar way there is no Bible, because it becomes individually, finitely subjective. There must be a level of interpretation where the most intelligent man will see its highest application. But that most intelligent man is either the cosmic intelligence itself, Christ incarnate, or at the temporal moment, now, an abstract idea that is not incarnate, not existential, not present. (59’ 07”)

You are man, therefore you create values. How do you value the Bible? How do you value the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and so on? Some people throw them away: it’s rubbish! The Chinese are in process of practically throwing away everything they’ve ever thought valuable, simply because of the success of heavy bombs The fact convinces, and yet it may convince wrongly. It may give a total inversion of values, which, in the end, may turn out to be quite false.

There must come a time when intelligence will have to arrange everything without much noise (which means without the Big Bang.) Meanwhile, within the hierarchy within an individual, the individual has to do something in himself. Is he miserable? What is misery? What does it mean: it is M.I.S. and it is E.R.Y. The Y at the end is a condensation: an integration of certain forces – ER – erroneous forces, by miss-apprehension. You misapprehend a situation; you run about – you find yourself in misery – inefficiency. If you are miserable, you are being inefficient. When you’re being miserable, don’t try to justify the misery: that increases the inefficiency. Just say “Misery arises from inefficiency.” The only cause of sorrow is the realisation of individual, personal impotence. Accept that! Penetrate to the meaning of it. If I become dejected it’s because I couldn’t handle the situation. It’s myself I’m talking about: “I cannot handle the situation, therefore I am miserable.” Is that a good enough reason? This should be a spur to get to know more about it, to be able to handle it, and the misery will go. And not to wish that 10,000 eskimo should be made happy by creating an icy welfare state for them. Charity begins at home. Home is HO-ME: behold myself, and there is no home for anybody other than that place where he can actually say without the police knocking on the door and knocking him up “Behold myself: lord of my domain.” That’s home. And the more abstractly you talk about the work that might be done by other people not present, the more time there is wasted. The more we can persuade ourselves that there is work to be done now, in us, here (and the here is always HR) where e’er that power differentiates itself, creating a now, right on the moment, immediately, then the more rapidly we transcend the lower level. It is done by energy being inserted from above. The energy scatters the situation and dissembles it; breaks it up; disintegrates it; blows it to blazes; destroys your then security, and leaves you looking at the bits. There is you, looking at the bits. You’ve not been blown to bits; the bits have been blown up. And it’s this realisation that whatever comes at you blown to bits, you were untouched.

The other day, I was talking to a gentleman about to leave home; leave his wife. He had a very long face, and I said to him “You’re very, very sad.” And he said “I am. I’m wondering if I did the right thing. What do you think?” And I said “I’m thinking that this house hasn’t got central heating in it.” His own house is very big, very posh, and centrally heated. It was October, nearly, and suddenly there is a nip in the air. Is it correct to rush out at this time of the year, into a non-centrally heated house with a gap that big under the door? And he thought that he was thinking morally, but really, there was no central heating, and it was as simple as that. There are more men that get driven back by the need for warmth than there are by ethical considerations.

The ability to penetrate in your own mind, into your own motive, and to know that the consciousness in which you absolutely are not different, cannot in any way be destroyed. No matter what else is destroyed, that cannot be. The Bhagavad Gita says “flames cannot burn it. Swords cannot cut it.” It’s talking about the continuum: the stuff that I’m wagging my hand in now, which you can’t see. But my hand is a modality of it. The sentiency in myself doesn’t belong to the body. It has created the body. If that attention withdraws, sentiency is withdrawn with it, now a seizure results. If I identify too closely, I get a pain if you look at me. So let’s focus, as far as possible, on ourselves as individuals; see what work we’ve got to do and know what the work is. The work is always to take the level that we believe to be valid, and deliberately try to work it out; make ourselves think our position out, clearly, to its logical end, and it will cut a hole in us. Then the bottom will drop out of that world and there’ll be a hole we can look through. A nice free hole. And through that hole will come grace; spirit. But not if we don’t carve it by work. (1hr 6’ 10”)

Remember: inertia would make us very comfortable. If we can get the body adjusted in temperature, adjusted with input of food and output of excrement and so on, if we can balance it in perfect equilibrium (the if), if we could, we wouldn’t need philosophy, we wouldn’t need anything, because we would be totally unaware of any event whatever. An event is already a sign of a disequilibrium in this absolute force, so that perfect equilibrium would be the same as non-existence, and yet men try to get it. They are trying to get it when they are trying to balance the body temperatures, by going home when they’ve had a row, and it’s getting nippy. If ever they get it, they are dead. The thing is, to abandon the pursuit of equilibrium as comfort, and instead of that, penetrate to the meaning of everything you do, in order to understand yourself; to see what your potentialities are; to bring them into actuality; to discover every aspect of your own being in every situation - to make that the aim.

Listener: I’ve noticed that other people appear to circumscribe their lives to a great extent, gradually getting smaller and smaller, and drive themselves towards comfort, and they appear to still have extremes of emotional change in relation to very small situations – smaller and smaller situations […?]

Eugene: Can you see why that shouldn’t be so? Mechanical?

Listener: The only thing I can think, is they still have to utilise their energy they have.

Eugene: They have a certain amount of energy derived from food, cosmic radiation, all sorts of sources. If they have a very large field of interest, the energy pans out over a large area. If they cut it down and start pursuing domestic bourgeois equilibrium - the smaller the circle - the more work that energy does within it. It must start niggling. It must move towards internal disintegration, towards neurosis. So the man of very, very wide interest is free from this problem. And the man of no interest, like a village idiot, is free from that problem. But the man who deliberately pursues a finite, closed security is really circumscribing his own energies, and forcing them, within that circumscription, to cut him to bits. So we know exactly where to look for our best psychiatric patients, namely in the field where people pursue finite security, because their own energies are cutting them to bits.

So if I was a psychiatrist and I wanted to stay in business a long time, I would actually encourage people to pursue finite security, knowing that their own energies would make them uncomfortable within it, then they’d have to come to find out why. (1hr 9’ 5”)

Listener: When you were speaking earlier on about developing the concepts all the time, so that you have you have a clear view of everything on this concept, making it clear in the processes, making you less emotional about it, is the exercise of seeing what is in the spaces in between developing that feeling at the same time as you’re conceptually working on it?

Eugene: It must be, because relation is between. If you were to concentrate on that which is totally X with not other than X, you would become [monoleistic?]: the mind would set in the one form and relation would cease. If you get two things and look between them to see their relation, you are forcing yourself to become field conscious.

Supposing you are in conversation with somebody: you’re a man, supposing you are talking to a woman and she wiggles her eyebrow in a certain way, now supposing you try to think of the relation between that wiggle of the eyebrow and the immediate stimulus that hit her at the point of wiggle, knowing that you may have said something, or a car may have gone by, and at that moment her eyebrow wiggled. You are going to try to find the relation between these things. See if you can discover whether it was merely a coincidence, or whether there was a thought process of her own caused it, irrelevant to the external situation, or whether you caused it, and so on.

Work the mind to see if you can feel the relation between these different [elements?]. And so doing, you sharpen field consciousness, and then you discover that the space between is full of form that you didn’t previously notice, just as between the two walls of this room, with the appropriate apparatus we could show that sound is reflecting across it in a certain formal manner, so that what is apparently an empty space is really full of form.

If we look at that light and then focus the eye not on the light, but a little nearer, and look very carefully at the air, we will see certain motions that we were not aware of beforehand. It’s this betweenness that confers understanding, because betweenness is the key to relation, and if, all the time, you make yourself seek for the betweenness, that is: between two terms, you become progressively not identified with the terms, but with the field. The formal content of the field then confers ideas of the relation. Now again, you may just say “Yes, that’s a good idea.” and forget all about it. The thing has to be made practical. It has to be put into practise. Even better, it has to be put into PRAGtise.

Listener: It immediately occurs to me in that case, if you want to withdraw yourself in a situation, you’ve merely to conceptualise it, so it won’t go in, you really start to work on it – the ‘space’ principle.

Eugene: Remember the ACE in space means spirit. When you are trying to become ‘space conscious’ at the level of Einstein’s physics, you are trying to become aware of the unifield. If you actually believe that there is a force there, you begin to become conscious of it. The gross materialist (and there are gross materialists in the world) exists who would deny that there is anything between that wall and that. And if you said “Well there’s air between them.” He’d say “Ah yes, but you can’t count air.” And if you said “Well, there is not only air between, but that wall and that wall are really made electrical charges: there is a field here.” “Well, you can’t count a field.” You see, if he’s biased in a certain way, he will disallow anything whatever, determinate, between these two walls. And yet we know, as a fact, we could register with the appropriate instruments, all sorts of electrical and other phenomena between these four walls. If we can be aware of them we can begin to devise an instrument for perceiving them. (1hr 13’ 43”)

We already have an instrument that can perceive them in our physical organism. If we become aware of the possibility of it. If we lie on a bed in a dark room and say “My sense of feeling is not confined to the surface of my skin: I can actually feel the whole room.” And then try to – try to feel it. Apart from people who are a bit scared, which is very frequent with a first result, you will find that you can feel it; that you are aware of densities within the room, where pieces of furniture are, and furthermore you will increase your sense-perceptual power. Your hearing will become more sensitive and so. You will become more light sensitive. You will become aware that you are able to see things with your eyes closed.

Probably something like a blind person who is aware, roughly, of the shapes of things - there are some congenitally blind people who can tell me the height of a building. Some do it by listening to characteristic motions in the air, and some actually immediately feeling it. Some can actually walk about in a dark room without banging into furniture and without touching it. This is simply awareness of characteristic motions emanating from those objects. This kind of thing, the human body has already. We used to have it in the stage called ‘Adamic Pre-fall’. The human being had it. He could feel through any circle or solid and be aware (cognise) what was on the other side.

By concentrating on the gross material world, we have fallen. By concentrating on the gross material world, a whole host of forces lapsed in consciousness, and then they had to be very painfully discovered over a few thousand years by science. So Einstein’s unifield was actually experienced by men thousands of years ago as an immediate fact that the place where a body is has peculiar forces which are highly curved where space concentrations occur, and that the ‘sensi-men’ can feel those bodies in space by, possibly equivalent to the curvature of that space: a curved dynamism; the modal behaviour of space around that object would bring to consciousness that.

By concentration up on the gross material world by banging the hardest parts of the body – the bones – against the gross material objects of the world, that consciousness began to identify with the gross body. Once it had done so, it had gained a point. It had gained freedom from magic. And you know that the early church believed in magic, and there are examples in the bible of magic. And this magic was deliberately, by the church, gradually denied. It was said to be non-existent, because when people believed in it, it worked, because they were aware [of the?] willed intention of the people. They could feel good will; they could feel bad will, and therefore there was perpetual panic and the wearing of symbols and totems and defensive talismans. You see? And a running to the priest for protection against the man with a strong evil-eye. (1hr 17’ 20”)

By teaching that the gross world was the only world that existed, then all the panicking people gradually began to scoff at these forces; they became like […?] they are still there. They are still determinate. And now people don’t believe in it (officially). But you find that the slightest scare, and they do believe in it. And as soon as there’s a scare, they begin to operate it. And you can see why a veil is on; why a veil is over the world of the will, which could change everything immediately, because people have no self control. When they have no self control, they have no defence against the volitional intention of other beings, but if we can train them to believe in the gross material world – the stone rejected by the builders – then we can focus there attentions so that everything else goes out of tune, and they become totally ignorant of a world of subtle and causal forces, and they can then no longer operate them.

And so a kind of social material stability is conferred by this deliberate teaching by the church that these forces don’t exist in the world. But that stability destroys the very ground of relation, because once you focus people on the gross material world, the gross material world then becomes their treasure – where the heart is, there is the treasure also. Then they begin to fight for possession of the gross material world, and it doesn’t matter any more that the subtle forces that might have harmed them are no longer in consciousness, because now gross forces harm them, which is the dialectics of the situation. So then they must regain this higher sensitivity that there is magic, PLUS self-determination: the conscious realisation that man is a creator of values. And if someone tries to make bad magic on me, I say “I, also, am a man. I make good magic. I’ll go further: I’ll even forgive your attempt at bad magic, because I know that the concept of my forgiving you is more powerful than your attention to harm me. So I can actually affect you with my intent to forgive you for your black magic, more powerfully than you can affect me. So my white magic is better than your black magic. And the pursuit of efficiency alone would make me prefer to be a white magician rather than a black one, because forgiveness is more powerful than revenge […?]” It is actually more powerful to forgive, because it releases more energy. When you revenge, you contract. In so doing you find that your own energy is like the ‘pursuit of comfort’ [destiny?]. So the black magician, concentrated on his individual, private purpose is tightening energies in himself which will disintegrate him. But the man who doesn’t want any revenge can relax. His energies can operate easily, freely, and more effectively, because then he’s functioning at a higher frequency. (1hr 20’ 35”)

Listener: When you say that the ordinary people who concentrate on the theory will, and therefore awakening these forces, it means that they are actually protected by the fact that they are now […?] in this manner

Eugene: Of course they are. Remember the fact – it was only a few years ago - that there was a little outbreak of black magic in a certain village. Just one man was supposed to have overlooked somebody’s cow and turned the milk sour. Somebody believed it and immediately everybody in that locality began to have trouble, and if the beak had not come down with a heavy hand on it and said “There’s no such thing as witchcraft”, it would have spread very rapidly throughout the country. Either that beak was intelligent and knew that there was such a thing, and it wasn’t expedient to say so, or he himself was a victim of the gross material education. The point was, that as soon as one case was raised, sensitivity in people increased. The gross material world was not the thing they concentrated on anymore. Suddenly they concentrated on the feelings emanated from people: “Has she got the evil-eye?” “Has he got it?” “Has he leant it to him?” and so on.

As soon as you let go of the gross material world, if you haven’t got reflexive self-consciousness, you are at the mercy of the forces between the gross bodies. And therefore gross materialism is a protection for non self-conscious reflexive beings.

Listener: It appears to me as though you are putting yourself in constant danger by attempting to develop.

Eugene: Well, we hope so.

To avoid danger, absolutely the only safe way is to be dead, because life is change, and the A, N, G in change means fear – angst, anxiety, anger. So if there is any change at all, it disturbs an equilibrium. Anybody identified with equilibrium is going to be thrown into a state of anxiety and fear. And the alternative to it, if you don’t like it, is death. Just don’t exist. The thing is, to recognise this and not to identify with equilibrium. Identify with the absolute dynamism, which never for a moment of time does two things identically. So it is essentially insecure – that is ‘internally secure’. It is the creator of its own motions. The motions are not imposed on it from without – there is no without. The …in-powers generate their own motions. They are self generated. There is nothing to be afraid of. Do you impose on yourself. Has somebody got the evil eye? They come to you and point it at you. Do you believe it? Is a man who is saying, as man – evaluator “I have an evil eye.” You are another man. Do you accept his evaluation? If so, you are a bad evaluator. You will go down. That’s certain. So you have to decide whether you are going to evaluate properly or not. If you do you can say “You’ve got an evil eye, you say? So what! What are you going to do about it? Have you seen a doctor?” and so on. You can completely disarm him by completely re-evaluating the situation. And if you can’t, you’ll go under to him. That’s certain, because there’s a hierarchy of powers. (1hr 25’ 04”)

Listener: If forgiveness is greater than a feeling of revenge, how can a person feeling forgiveness help release the person feeling revenge, from the effects of their thought processes?

Eugene: By a large amount of patience. Because one of the first things that happens is, that if you start forgiving a person who isn’t forgiving you, then really, for the time being, the amount of energy that they have ready to hit you with if you didn’t forgive them, is looking for a target. If it doesn’t find one in you, it must start working in them.

This is why Christ says anyone who will heap coals of fire on their head. Which means that the brain gets on fire. Because it’s got to devise a method of reducing you to the level of enmity. If it does, it has won: “You’re no good. You only said you were. I win my point by reducing you to an enemy level. And if you are tremendously patient, you can, after the coals of fire have burned a hole in my brain, still talk to me. And rather than lose face, I must accept your friendship.” It just takes a bit of time.

The tendency is, when you forgive someone who is not forgiving you, is that they know what you are doing – it’s a filthy trick: forgiving them. So they work like mad to unseat you, to provoke you, to anger, to revenge. And as soon as you lash out, they smile quietly. They gain their point, because they know underneath that if you’d remained at that high level, they’d have to give in, and that they don’t want to do, because of their egotism. So you have to persist in the forgiving and not make the forgiving into a weapon; actually to concentrate and say “This person is in a dark hell. Their brain is overheated, seeking methods to unseat me. Poor dear.” And not to condemn this […] method, because it is volitional/mechanical. It is mechanical, determined by the stimulus situation, that there is a will behind it to gain the ascendancy of it. For it is certain that if you don’t lose it, it will have to parley with you. And if you do lose it, it’ll jump on you.

So you have your choice. It requires a terrific amount of patience. And a continuous regaining of the patience you just lost which you told yourself you were going to keep.