Excerpts

Book 2
Tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work to together… To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

It can only ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out. The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. It’s silly to try to escape other peoples’ faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.

Leave other peoples’ mistakes where they lie. That kindness is invincible, as long as it is sincere, not ironic or an act.

[…]

Have a constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and to make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants and children? Go deeper. Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it; still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return. People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them. You participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension. To enter others’ minds and let them enter yours. A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community. The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off -through hatred, through rejection- and don’t realize that they’re cutting themselves off from the whole civic enterprise… We can reattach ourselves and become once more components of the whole. But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect, and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that’s been cut off and grafted back.

[…]

In the ring, our opponents can gouge us with their nails or butt us with their heads and leave a bruise, but we don’t denounce them for it or get upset with them or regard them from then on as violent types. We just keep an eye on them after that. Not out of hatred or suspicion. Just keeping a friendly distance. We need to do that in other areas. We need to excuse what our sparring partners do, and just keep our distance—without suspicion or hatred. If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Is my intellect up to this? If so, then I’ll put it to work, like a tool provided by nature. And if it isn’t, then I’ll turn the job over to someone who can do it better—unless I have no choice. When faced with people’s bad behavior, turn around and ask when youhave acted like that. That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It’s to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant.