These two questions are interesting, not least for how Mr Adie gently helped the people along with questions, comments, and supplements.

Mirelle:   The exercise, finger exercise, I found it gave me moments of awareness, very vivid impressions. I found that I was aware for some moments of seeing myself, remembering myself, being able to look at myself.

Mr Adie:   It’s simpler than that, in a way. But all right, that’s acceptable. You observe yourself. Yes.

Mirelle:   And with the exercise of “I am” …

Mr Adie:   The key is you observe yourself relatively impartially. It’s like that. If it’s bad, it’s bad. If it’s good, it’s good. You are there Not involved, as it were.

Mirelle:   It was very still.

Mr Adie:   For a second. You see the involvement, but you aren’t involved at that second. You wonder what, because you are not involved. “Where do I go? What do I do?” There’s nothing to be done.

Mirelle:   These moments were the same in my appointments for the “I am” exercise, in that I come from a completely different state. There’s an otherness that I go into, and the impressions are very much brighter, and the main thing I noticed was that there was an absence of thought.

Mr Adie:   Absence of thought?

Mirelle:   Thought. That made it quiet. I think that that may be the first stage. I’m not sure how to formulate exactly what the effort is involved.

Mr Adie:   The first stage of what?

Maura:   Of remembering myself at these moments.

Mr Adie:   Yes, I would say it’s definitely a stage of remembering yourself. Whether it’s the first or the third, doesn’t matter. The important thing is it still leads to a further completion.

When you say it’s a first stage, it means you have the idea there’s further stages, further degrees. You include more, you can divide more. There are such things as inner octaves, where each note is a whole octave. And again, each note of that can be further … and that is finer and finer, and the finer it is, the more impressions can be included. But my work is here. I can’t go rushing around picking up impressions. I’m here, the impressions are there already. Am I receiving them? If I’m here, I receive them.

Gerard: I planned to come to myself just very briefly every ten minutes. And I found that through the morning, this made a very big difference. It kept a thread. I had a thread of myself.

Mr Adie:   Certainly, you would.

Gerard:   At the end of the day, I’d been working quite hard, And I’ve noticed, as I’ve noticed before …

Mr Adie:   You’d been doing your ordinary work?

Gerard:   Ordinary work. I’ve noticed this before that I tend to get rather tense, then just when I’m finishing, I’m in a vulnerable state, able to become negative. And I saw this this afternoon I’m only seeing how I get into that state, how the tension amounts up for some time. It’s been suggested often to try and see how it came to that state. I knew I was in that state, and just as I was leaving, I thought of something, and I became negative. I felt myself closing up. This was connected with the thread, because I had some inner centrality. And in a moment, I just became present and felt very strong. And I was present.

Mr Adie:   You received the energy, which was available, but you received it.

Gerard:   I was bigger than that thing. And it was still there. But It didn’t take me.

Mr Adie:   It was there, unable to operate.

Gerard:   It’s still close to me, that inner feeling of strength at that moment. I think if I hadn’t been working through the day and had some centrality …

Mr Adie:   You wouldn’t have had that experience.

Gerard:   Even if the vague idea had come to be present, I would have been too far gone. And the negativity would have swamped me. Yeah. And so. That’s what …

(Pause)

Mr Adie:   How to understand that properly? My ordinary faculties are not enough to understand it. They might remember it in words, but it doesn’t have a force. So how? Perhaps I realise that that only happened because I had a plan, and I actually made use of the plan. Not perfectly, I didn’t remember every time, but nevertheless, there was a certain continuity. So it shows the tremendous value of that. But my ordinary past, my different I’s, they don’t know anything about this feeling of strength. They don’t know anything the impulse to stop every ten minutes. So I am part of that situation. I can’t expect them to just disappear, but the more I work, the less they will interfere, they will become adapted to stop. Gradually, they won’t affect me in the same way.

But I have to try and make it new each time. Realise it’s going to be different. I seek to know what stops me. Why, tomorrow, will I feel less inclined to make this effort? Something says, “Well, you’ve done it once. It can’t be the same.” I don’t have to listen to these voices. I have to be quicker I’m not listening in that way, not allowing it. I have to notice the characteristics of the voices that talk to me.

Gerard:   I know that  I is not really there, I was able to realise that something was there that was enough, but it wasn’t as strong as what’s here now. It still wasn’t real I, but it was.

Mr Adie:   Yes. In order to justify the entitlement to say, “I am,” I need my feeling. I need the connexion. I need the reverberation. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t, if I can’t be sure about it, at least I remember that I need it. As he said, I imagine I have it. So I have that amount of connexion. And with that, I return to the question, what’s is needed now? Our work is immediate. I go to that and then I’m there, available. I can trust more if I have that connexion.