Something Has Hold of YouBefore you start3 min
Before you begin
This book uses one picture the whole way through: somebody held, and somebody coming.
There are two other books underneath this one. The Inward Singularity makes the same argument in the language of physics, and What You Are Paying For makes it in the language of an ordinary bank account. Same argument, three vocabularies, and you do not need either of the others to read this. If you ever want them, the back of this book says how the three line up.
The picture is not imported. It is the oldest story most of the world knows — somebody taken, somebody who could not get out, and somebody who was not in it coming for her. Every figure in these pages is you. How old this way of reading it is, is a separate question, and the back of this book answers it honestly rather than flatteringly. That is the only thing you need to know going in, and the book does not keep reminding you of it.
A warning that belongs at the front of this one more than any of the others.
These symbols are beautiful, and that is the danger. I have watched many sincere people, in several traditions, spend thirty years admiring the pictures of their path — reciting them, arguing about them, loving them — while the thing the pictures were for went unpractised. This story in particular invites it. It is magnificent, and a reader can spend a lifetime being moved by the rescue without ever once turning in a car park at half five.
The story in these pages is a raft, not the shore. Use it to get to the practice in chapter eight, and then put it down. Every chapter but the last ends with something to do, usually tonight, usually in ten minutes, and that is the part that matters. If you find yourself explaining the ten heads to somebody at work but not doing your two minutes in the morning, close the book and do the two minutes. That is what it was for.
And one thing the picture must not be allowed to say. That because something had hold of you, nothing was your fault. It does not follow and this book never argues it. The ninth chapter is explicit: being held has never once made anybody not responsible, and the worst possible use of these pages would be somebody explaining to their family that it was not really them. If you take one sentence into your house, do not let it be that one.
And one reader this book is not for, this month. If you are frightened of somebody you live with, this is the wrong book for you right now, and I would rather say so at the very front than have you work it out in chapter four. What is in here is about a condition that no move will cure. Being in danger is a different problem, the answer to it is to get out, and it is more urgent than anything in these pages. This book will keep.
The fourth chapter says who to go to, and how to find them, under the heading Tonight. There are no telephone numbers anywhere in here, for a reason it gives on the same page. It is the one part of this book worth reading out of order.