Any thought or feeling that wants you to identify with something in yourself is dragging you down. You’ve just never known that, because it feels like it’s picking you up when you identify with something.

Your work begins by becoming aware of these totally conflicted states — where at last (because something is becoming present in you) you can recognize that there are certain contrary forces that begin to pull on you that you never knew were pulling on you… because there was never anything there present to the pull.

Now you begin to feel the pull of these thoughts and feelings. You begin to feel the pull of a world that is outside of you, not inside of you. Your thoughts and feelings are not inside of you. You begin to feel their pull, and you start to recognize, “This thing is dragging me down.” At first it feels like a negative to realize that something wants to drag you into something and intuitively you don’t want to go.

Gradually you’ll be able to see that anything that wants to pull you out of your interior life and into an exterior world is where you get into trouble… and that the problem is not so much what you do in the exterior world, but that you’ve been drawn out into it in order to accomplish the task of something that is not only not for you but that is dead set against you.