Something Has Hold of You
Nobody is stopping you. So what is?
Free to read, in full, here. Twelve chapters in three parts, about two hours altogether, and the five pages at the back are the apparatus rather than more book.
It is a quarter to ten. This morning you decided that tonight you would not say the thing you always say, and about twenty-five minutes ago you said it.
Nothing has happened. That is almost the worst of it. Nobody is injured, the evening will be smoothed over by tomorrow, and there is no incident here worth anybody’s attention. You are just not free in the way you assumed you were.
Two explanations are usually offered and this book accepts neither. You do not lack discipline — you have tried harder tomorrow for about forty years and you have the results. And it is not nothing, or you would not still be sitting there afterwards, going over it.
Something has hold of you, it is not you, and it is countable. There are about five of them. You already know every one of their names, and you use those names constantly about other people and never about yourself — which is not hypocrisy and the book does not call it that. You can see the thing in your brother-in-law because you are standing outside it. When the same thing operates in you, you are inside it, looking out through it, and from in there it does not look like arrogance. It looks like being right.
Eight weeks. Nobody’s circumstances change, the difficult people stay difficult, and the grip comes back — the test was never whether it returns, but how long it has you when it does. If the eight weeks pass and nothing is different, the book is wrong, and it says so in its own pages rather than leaving you to conclude the fault was yours.
Before you start
- Before you beginThis book uses one picture the whole way through: somebody held, and somebody coming. There is another book underneath this one.
- What this book is aboutYou are free on paper. Nobody is stopping you. And you cannot reliably do the small thing you decided this morning to do.
- The evening you did not chooseIt is a quarter to ten. This morning you decided that tonight you would not say the thing you always say, and about twenty-five minutes ago you said it.
- Count themYou are expecting a list, and there is one, and it is shorter than you think. But the list is not the finding. The finding is what one item on it does in the space of a second.
- The one who is being heldAt a quarter to ten you felt flat, and that flatness is the most interesting thing that happened all evening — because somebody had to be disappointed, and it was not the one who said the sentence.
- It is not a placeYou have an exit plan. The reason it has never worked is not that you lacked the nerve to run it.
- The garden is not a sanctuaryThere is a sentence you keep. You produced it at about five to ten last night, and it made the evening survivable, and it is the last thing this book has to take off you.
- The one who is not in itMake a list of everyone you have ever asked about this. Then notice the one thing that is true of every name on it, and what follows from it.
- The line, and who waits just outside itEverybody asks why it took them. Nobody asks where they were standing when it did — and that is the only question in this whole business with a useful answer.
- The bridge is not built of stoneThis is a short chapter, and the reason it is short is that there is only one thing in it, and it takes about three seconds.
- The fire that does not burn youYou are still waiting for the reckoning. So is almost everyone who has ever told this story, and the waiting is the last thing holding you.
- Unimpressive peopleAn assumption has been sitting there since about the eighth chapter: that this is for other people. Let me deal with it, because it is the last thing standing between you and the car park.
- A secondEvery account of this agrees on how long it takes, and the figure is not forty days or seven years. It is a second — and that is the hardest sentence in the book to accept.
- The meetingThere is nothing to do in this chapter. It is a description of a man on an ordinary evening, and the whole of what is remarkable about him is that nothing happens.
At the back
- The namesThe book withheld some names on purpose. Here they are, for anyone who wants them, and a note on why they were kept out of the chapters.
- The seven and the eight, from the chaptersTwo chapters of this book were lists and did not say so. One described what the quiet party is; the other described a man on an ordinary evening.
- What this book does not claimHalf a page, because a book that quietly implies antiquity has cheated. This reading of these figures is not ancient, and it has named authors.
- Where this came fromThe practice underneath this book is Raja Yoga as taught by the Brahma Kumaris, followed by the author for more than ten years.
- The other booksThe Inward Singularity, What You Are Paying For, Who Was in It, and the rest — the same argument in different containers, and where each one can be found.