Q. I find that one of my greatest difficulties is irritation. \r\n\r\nA. This is one of the deepest features in people and it affects the whole mass. The most difficult thing in the world is to bear patiently the unpleasant manifestations of other people. People can sacrifice everything else, but they cannot stand that. Irritation is a particular emotion produced by the feeling of mechanicalness of oneself or other people. It does not mean that every mechanical thing causes irritation, but sometimes mechanicalness produces it. If we do not feel the mechanicalness of other people in some particular instance, they may be even more mechanical, but there is no irritation. We are irritated by other people acting as machines, because we are machines ourselves. If we cease to be machines, we shall cease to be irritated. This feeling of mechanicalness becomes irritation because we identify with it. If we manage to remove identification, the same thing that we know now as irritation becomes a very useful emotion, a kind of tentacle by which we can feel mechanicalness. You cannot imagine how different quite ordinary emotions become, and often how useful, if we do not identify with them

• irritation
• negative emotions
• the fourth way
• patience
• emotions
• mechanicalness
• identification
• conscious development
• emotion
• sacrifice
• other

A is not A,' Hagbard explained with that tiresome patience of his. 'Once you accept A is A, you're hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System.' I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn't grok. \r\n \r\n'What do you mean?' I asked, grabbing a wet handkerchief as some of the teargas started to drift to our end of the park. \r\n \r\n'Chairman Mao didn't say half of it,' Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: 'It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.' \r\n \r\n'Don't be so bloody patronizing,' I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. 'That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society.' \r\n \r\n'Not the ideology. The Reality.' He lowered his handkerchief. 'This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic.' \r\n \r\n'Just like the Enclosure Acts,' I said hollowly. 'One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords.' \r\n \r\n'And like the Narcotics Acts,' he added. 'A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the potheads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second.

• society
• time
• power
• will
• reality
• imagination
• criminals
• ideology
• public
• patience
• definition
• other
• the spectacle
• magick

The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Soĉi malorum, compagnon de miséres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life - the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fellow.

• humanity
• suffering
• patience
• love
• life
• tolerance
• peace
• light

The three tasks for which educators are required - One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speakandwrite: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see - accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgement, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to 'will' - to be able to suspend decision. All un-spirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inabilty to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse.

• education
• free will
• identification
• spirituality
• stimulus
• will
• culture
• control
• learning
• patience