This is from the meeting of Tuesday 28 March 1989.

Rachel asked the second question at the meeting of Tuesday 28 March 1989. She said: “I think I had a terrible week.”

“A terrible week?” Mr Adie asked. “That means you’ve been very identified.”

“Yes, I have been.”

“Yes, well, there it is. Now we have to be very practical. Start again. Start now. There’s some energy available when we’re all together, because each reminds the other in a way. Pick up some force, and then see if you can connect with it during the coming week. Follow each question as your question. That is the reality: everybody’s question is my question, I have all the same difficulties and hurdles. What are your feelings like now? What are you feeling?”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not aware of your feeling?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then let me ask you: what would a person with no feeling look like? Before you say you have no feeling, know what you’re saying. Take a set of photographs, perhaps of friends or relatives, anything. What can you see? When you look at the photo, and you’re thinking he’s like this, or she’s so and so, making some idiotic remark, what are your comments based on? Surely when you look at photographs, you are looking for some kind of a feeling, some kind of emotion, and when you look at the people you can identify it. If a person just looks like a blank wall, it’s a bad photograph. If you can read feeling in everyone you look at, why can you not read it in yourself? Perhaps you have conflicting feelings, and in the storm of emotions you can’t find the feeling that you’re looking for.”

“Yet, that is the state of your feeling, and you responsible for your feeling. Ask yourself what it means not to be responsible for your feeling? It is a valuable question.”

“You see, you emanate some sort of feeling. Even when you are just sitting on a chair you are emanating something. Can you sense what? Everybody is emanating something, and if we are trying to work seriously, I will be prepared to accept whatever it is that is there, and not just what I wanted to see.”

After a short pause, Mr Adie added: “This relates to the advice I gave you three minutes ago. This emanation which I have been referring to is an energy, an energy to be picked up. This is a very, very practical perspective. It’s an energy.”

“If I abdicate my responsibility for my feeling, though, then I allow this energy to just keep running out of my boots. If I am unaware of my feeling, then I have nothing for anybody I look at. I look at him, but it might be the back of a door I was looking at, instead of a human being.”

“The quality of real feeling is sacred, too. It brings me to myself and to a sense of the goodness of existence. This is simple, it’s too simple for us because we’ve all been allowed to take ourselves into dreams, all fantastic dreams about doing. Because it’s simple, we’ve overstepped the reality of my feeling, we’re quite unused to it, we’re at a loss. We come here to study ourselves, so we cannot afford to sit here and just say that we are without any feeling. You have to be able to say what is happening: what is my feeling? You have some feeling, or you’d be dead, so what is it?”

“Ask yourself, a thousand times a day, am I approving, or disapproving? Am I trying to sever my relationship, or trying to make contact or what? There are all these different movements. But if I am not responsible for my being, then none of them are chosen, all of them are by association. My emotions then, are clashing, they are the blind result of what has happened to me, what I’ve learnt to like or think I like, what I dislike, all my thoughts, all the traces of impressions of every kind. There are outer impressions, and – very importantly – inner impressions coming ceaselessly, and I am just jolted go from one to the other just like that. A train of thought connects with one centre, and for a moment there’s a bit of movement there, it’s not real because it’s only partial. Then something else happens and it changes.”

“That’s what it means to be a sinking man. Of course there are different degrees. Occasionally, maybe, you see someone on the pavement walking along muttering, talking to themselves (he imitates a person speaking to himself), and the impression can be quite shocking when you see someone completely lost, in a complete dream. We’re like that quite a lot, the only difference is degree. It’s the normal condition of man, rather sub-normal, but I mean it’s our so-called normal, our acquired normality is just that.”

“In the course of a lifetimes, it sometimes occurs that after years and years, someone sees themselves as they are, and has a reaction against it, and this can lead to some maturity. But we can’t afford to take years, we need to learn a great deal in one year. A week is a long time, and you can’t afford it. Insist, do the preparation, insist.”

“Take these words, try and find out what they mean.”

Joseph Azize, 12 February 2020