Part One

Ezekiel:   I found something in me, Mr Adie, which is very egotistical and full of considering, always telling people either that I’m dying and that’s not too slowly or else that there’s nothing at all wrong with me –

Mr Adie:   Wait a minute. You found something egotistical, and full of considering, and then I lost it.

Ezekiel:   And this inside me always had one of two stories. The one story is that I’m racing away. And the other story is that I’ve made a miraculous recovery and not to worry about me. At first, I thought that only the first I thought that only the first one was egotistical, but then the second one was also just as much a game as the first, really. It wasn’t reality at all. But I found that I’m able sometimes to stop that and simply state the truth when appropriate. With that, I was surprised at the amount of imagination and daydreaming which simply didn’t go on. I was getting used to living in a perpetual haze of it. I thought that it was terribly strong. I’ve discovered that this thing inside me, although it keeps cropping up all of the time and any chance association might bring it up again, isn’t nearly as powerful as I had imagined it was and really can be stopped. And also, it-

Mr Adie:   How is it stopped? What is the secret?

Ezekiel:   Well, simply by the fact of having some presence. It’s simply a mechanical –

Mr Adie:   Yes, but what is the secret? There’s a mechanical actual action which takes place. What is it?

Ezekiel:   The separation of myself from it.

Mr Adie:   No. It’s denied energy.

You have a certain inner intentional degree of integration. Call it self-remembering or call it what you like. This fades because it hasn’t got the force. Every process takes energy. It requires energy, all these fanciful dreams and so forth. They eat our energy. Now I want to be able to go further than that. So, I need to know, really, why does that suddenly cease to have its power? It’s my power all the time that is being sucked out and destroyed. So, I can’t afford it. Surely it adds to the understanding of the position. If you wish to escape more from that dream, you need to come to yourself. Don’t start fighting the dream, you’ll only make it more. And so, with all the other mechanical processes, with all of which I identify, more or less. The less I identify, the better things go.

Philomena:  I started out well on Monday morning, but I’m still not sure what happened to me. I seemed to have some degree of fluctuating presence from about 8: 30 in the morning to about 1: 30 in the afternoon; I took the same exercise exactly that we did on the weekend of stopping every half an hour and the first 10 minutes and the second 20 minutes. I was at work talking to patients, writing reports, and I seemed to be able to do the work and do it at the same time. The work, if anything, went a bit better than usual. Then I had my lunch break, and I went to the local park, and I felt quite open to the people and the impressions in the park. But then something went wrong. I think I probably started getting smug. Because the afternoon went much worse than my normal afternoon. I seemed to have less control than I ordinarily do. It was a big contrast between the morning and the afternoon. I still don’t understand how that happened like that. I still had memory of what I was supposed to be doing, but at that stage, it was just a memory. The following day, I decided that I must have been trying to continue this thing for too long.

Mr Adie:   No, it’s true that being here won’t help all the time because other people are making the same effort in the day is planned for that particular object. When you’re out there, there’s nothing corresponding to that. All the forces and arrangements are not aimed at you becoming being conscious at all. They don’t have that aspect. Then there’s another thing which is true and it’s very difficult to come to, and that is that in my initial idea of what I’m going to do, I am already divided. I’m already not single-minded. Things are taking part in that. But what can I do? I can only try my best.

But I have the experience occasionally of being undoubtedly present seemingly without that.

For a flash.

I have to use that if I can. I’m not to be gulled into thinking I can do this for hours on then. Try to make my effort and then go in to do the job properly. I have to plunge into life. Willingly: it is no good my pretending.

After the lunch break, there is some  part which is unwilling to take part in the effort you’ve been making, sees a chance in the first gap in your attention, and it starts off. Then you accuse yourself and say it’s the worst and so on. But you have to start anew. Every moment is a moment of beginning. But I can connect it: if I do not lose the influence of the Weekend Work, then I have followed a  line of meaning. It doesn’t mean I’ve been conscious all the time, but maybe I have a little more purpose.

I’m bound to have wrong and inadequate ideas about what I have to do. But because I’m making an effort, I see that I don’t succeed, and if I’m not negative immediately, I see why I didn’t. This is what I need to know. Like Ezekiel, from his observation, how is he going to cope with this if he does not know that this thing is taking his energy? He will turn and give it more! But if he knows he can use that energy for the inner integration, and then this thing bleeds to death, lacking force. My question is always; how can I avoid becoming formatory about it? How can I avoid just having an absence of any feeling? It’s gone to my head too much already.

It’s very important when I make up my plan not to make it too big, because already their non-understanding in a certain wrong thinking, which will lead to egotism, is already present. So, I’m planning my own downfall at that point. So, I have to see that element. Certainly, the work is very difficult.

Part Two

There is much valuable material here, but I wish to emphasise one matter: that the energy going into negative emotions and so on can be re-routed, as it were, so that it goes into “inner integration,” to use Mr Adie’s words. That, he said, is the secret.