A second

Here is the figure you are expecting.

Years. A long apprenticeship, properly served. Forty days at minimum, seven years for anything serious, a lifetime if you are honest about it, and probably not completed in this one. Everything you have ever absorbed about this subject agrees: it is slow, it is hard, and the people who have got anywhere have been at it since they were young.

Every old account of it gives a different figure, and they all give the same one.

A second.

I know what that produces in you, and it is not hope. It is a small hard resistance, and it is worth saying out loud what the resistance is made of, because it is not scepticism.

You wanted it to cost something.

Forty years of this ought to be worth more than a second. Somebody who has paid for a thing believes in it; somebody who was handed it stands there turning it over, looking for the catch. The ninth chapter found this appetite already — the wish for a reckoning, for something proportionate — and here it is again, in its final form, objecting that a price this low must indicate a worthless article.

And the cost really is nothing. Not reduced, not subsidised. Nothing. No money, no renunciation, no qualification, no years. Nothing has to be left for it, as the fourth chapter said, and nobody has to become anything, as the tenth did.

Now be precise about what takes a second, because this is where a book like this becomes dishonest, and I would rather be exact and less exciting.

What takes a second is the change of position. Not the consequences.

Think of somebody let out of a cell. The door opening takes a second — less. There is no sense in which the door opens gradually over seven years, and nobody has ever served an apprenticeship in doors.

Then he walks home, and that takes a long time, and on the way he flinches at every gate, and for months he will wake up and spend the first four seconds working out where he is. He will go back into the building by accident more than once, because it is where he knows the furniture.

None of that means the door did not open. It means habits outlast circumstances, which is not news to anybody.

So: a second for the position. The rest of your life for the walk. Both of those are true at once and most of the trouble in this subject comes from people insisting on one and denying the other.

There is one figure in the old accounts who is always produced as the example of this, and he is a strange choice, which is why I trust it.

He is not the hero. He is not a holy man, not a renouncer, not one of the ones who sat in a forest for a decade. He is a king — a working man with a kingdom to run, a court, administration, people waiting outside for decisions.

And he is the father of the one who was taken. His own daughter, carried off, somewhere he cannot reach, while he holds a position of enormous worldly power that is of no use to him whatsoever in the only matter that counts.

He did not do a practice. He did not withdraw, or fast, or study. What he did was recognise something, once, and the accounts are unanimous and almost offhand about the duration: it took him a second.

I find the choice of him more persuasive than any argument. If this were available only to the unencumbered, the example would be a man in a cave. The example is a man with a job and a family emergency.

So what, exactly, is on offer? Say it without the vocabulary.

Not an afterlife. Not a better cell, which the fifth chapter took off you. Not an improved personality, which the first chapter did.

Being out, while still here. In this kitchen, at this age, with the same job, the same mortgage, the same difficult brother-in-law and the same face in the mirror. Nothing around you is rearranged. What changes is that you are no longer being held — and since the thing holding you was never your circumstances, your circumstances were never going to be in the way.

That is the whole claim of the book, and it is time to let you hold me to it.

The timetable

This book has made claims for eleven chapters and it is now going to commit to a schedule, in writing, so that you can find out whether it is true rather than deciding whether you believe it.

Assume you do the two minutes most mornings and the three seconds when you remember. Not perfectly. Most mornings.

Within a week. You will catch one crossing while it is happening. One. The faint lowering, noticed as the lowering, in the car park or on the landing. You will almost certainly cross anyway. That is the first thing and it is not optional — if after a fortnight you have never once felt the lowering, you have not found your line and should go back to the seventh chapter rather than continuing.

Within a month. Two things. You will be mid-objection, four or five heads in, and a quiet part of you will think that's four — without shame, which puts another head up. And one evening that would have happened will not have happened, and you will not notice it at the time; you will find it a week later, in retrospect, and feel briefly unsure whether you are making it up.

Within eight weeks. Somebody will remark on something — somebody who lives with you, or, if you live alone, somebody who sees you most weeks. Not on the book — they do not know about the book, because the tenth chapter forbade you to tell them. A remark: you're easier to be around lately. You didn't bite. What's got into you? They will not know why, and you are not to explain.

That last one is the test, and it is the only one that counts, because it is the only one not produced inside your own head. The first two you could talk yourself into. This one requires another person to have noticed a change in you without being prompted, and to have said so unasked.

So: if eight weeks go by, you have done the two minutes and the three seconds most days, and nobody who sees you regularly has remarked on anything at all — then this book is wrong. Not you. Put it down and do not give it a second eight weeks out of politeness.

What will not happen, at any point

Your temper will not be removed. It is not being treated. You will have it at seventy.

The thing will not stop coming. It waits at the edge and it will go on waiting. The test was never whether it comes; it is how long it has you once it does, and that is the only quantity in this book that actually moves.

You will have a bad week. I cannot tell you which one, and anybody who gives you a week number for this is making it up. It will likely follow a good stretch that made you confident. The whole thing will appear to have gone, the mornings will stop, and you will conclude it was a phase. It is not a phase and the bad week is not evidence. Begin again on the Monday without a reckoning about it, because a reckoning is the ninth chapter's trap and you now know its face.

Nobody else changes. Your brother-in-law is exactly as he was. The difficult people at work remain difficult, and some of them will take your new calm as an opening and push further.

Nothing gets repaired that needs another person's agreement. This book has never offered that and does not now. What can be put right is still to be put right by you, in the ordinary way, and some things cannot be put right at all and no amount of this will alter that. Putting something down and putting it right are different operations, and only one of them has ever been available to somebody on their own.

And there is no feeling to rely on. Not tonight and not in week six. There may be a quietness in the chest, or there may be nothing at all for a long time, and nothing at all has never meant failure. This book does not predict sensations, because it cannot.

Tonight

Ten minutes, with a pen, and this is the only exercise in the book that is for somebody else: it is for you in eight weeks' time, who will not remember what you were told.

One. Write today's date at the top.

Two. Count forward eight weeks and write that date underneath it. Use a calendar; do not estimate.

Three. Copy out the three things above, in your own words — the one crossing within a week, the that's four and the missing evening within a month, and the unprompted remark from somebody who sees you regularly, within eight weeks.

Four. Then write this line, in full, and sign it if you are the sort of person who signs things:

If nobody has remarked on anything by ———, the book was wrong and I will stop.

Fold it and put it somewhere you will find it and not look at it. A drawer, a passport wallet, the back of something. Do not pin it up. A thing on a wall becomes a programme by the third week.

Then go to bed.

What this is worth:

You have just made this falsifiable, which almost nothing in this field ever is, and that matters more than any sentence I could write to persuade you. In eight weeks you will not be deciding whether you found it convincing. You will be reading your own handwriting and checking.

If the dates come round and nothing has happened, you will have lost eight weeks of two-minute mornings and no money, and you will be entitled to a poor opinion of this book and to say so.

And if they come round and somebody has said something unasked — then you will be standing in your own kitchen holding a piece of paper, with the fact that the door was open the whole time, and it did not cost a penny, and nobody made you pay for it, which is a difficult thing for a proud person to be grateful for and the last chapter is about what that looks like on somebody.

One chapter left, and there is nothing in it to do. It is an evening in somebody's house, hour by hour, and the whole of what happens in it is that nothing does. You may recognise him.