Books by R.V.C Bodley

Biography

ADMIRAL TOGOTHE MESSENGERGERTRUDE BELL

WIND IN THE SAHARAINDISCRETIONS OF A YOUNG MAN

THE WARRIOR SAINT

Fiction

YASMINAOPAL FIRE

THE LILAC TROLLTHE GAY DESERTERS

Travel

THE QUESTALGERIA FROM WITHINA JAPANESE OMELETTEFLIGHT INTO PORTUGAL

INDISCREET TRAVELS EASTTHE DRAMA OF THE PACIFIC

And

IN SEARCH OF SERENITY

In Search of Serenity

In Search of Serenity

R.V.C. Bodley

Little, Brown and CompanyBoston Toronto

COPYRIGHT 1955, BY R.V.C. BODLEY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK IN EXCESS OF FIVE HUNDRED WORDS MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FORM FROM

THE PUBLISHER.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 55-5851

FIRST EDITION

The author wishes to thank Doubleday & Company, the owners of the copyright, and Messrs. Hodder * Stoughton Ltd., for permission to quote from HOW TO LIVE ON TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY

by Arnold Bennett.

Published Simultaneously in Canada by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ToMy Mother

whose encouragement when I was very young led me to become a writer

Sayings of the Serene

As the wheels of the cart follow the heels of the ox, so happiness follows good actions.As the wheels of the cart follow the heels of the ox, so sorrow follows wrong doing.

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

JESUS CHRISTAccording to St. John, Chapter XIV

And God hath spread the earth as a carpet that you may walk thereon through spacious paths.MOHAMMED

According to the Koran, Sura LXXI

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.GEORGE DE SANTAYANA

Introduction

It matters little whether we live in an age of chivalry, or in one of atom bombs, men and women want that happiness which is bred by Serenity. The complaint that peace of mind and the rush of modern civilization are incompatible is no more than an evasion by those who will not take the trouble to delve into themselves and discover what constitutes this means of meeting problems. It is the indolent attitude of those who want something without working to get it. Everything in our lives has had a logical purpose and is offered to us to use advantageously or discard improvidently. Degrading trials as well as exhilarating successes have some definite design. In fact, until we can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same there is little chance that we will achieve anything approaching spiritual Serenity. It is, nevertheless, extremely difficult for the average human being and especially for those young in years to appreciate this. I certainly did not until I was middle-aged.

From childhood, I had been nurtured on a few truths and a great many fallacies. When suddenly the fallacies began to intrude, I decided that I must do something about it, I must divorce myself from my fraudulent way of reasoning, I must find peace. So I went to look for it and, after an exceedingly long quest, found it. I found it initially among the nomad Arabs who pasture their sheep on the arid uplands of the Sahara, due south of Algiers.

This is not to suggest that Serenity can be acquired by merely going to live away from towns and human beings. This will help, but it will not automatically and miraculously give one relief form the trials which are the inevitable lot of men. For, as Seneca declared some twenty centuries ago, Though you may cross vast spaces of seas and through lands and cities are left astern, your faults will follow you wheresoever you travel.

What the Sahara did give me were the formulas for a serene approach to life and the foundations on which to build happiness, and that is a great deal. But it was not until much later that I reaped the full benefit of those seven years in the desert and appreciated that, above all, I had been able to see myself as I really was and understand that true Serenity comes from one's deep, unexplainable inner being.

For this reason, I believe that anyone who sincerely wants to find what I did can do so by conscientiously following the elementary principles which I am going to set down on these pages, without necessarily leaving his home in the process. I do not believe that it will help those who feel they are sufficiently enlightened to conduct their lives harmoniously, for for any who have discovered truth. These happy few need a more advanced philosophy than mine to comfort them.

There are a number of quotations in this book from the writings and sayings of great thinkers, which have been inserted to show that everything I advocate in these pages is as old as reason. Neither race, nor creed, nor time alters the ideal which so many have preached and so few have observed. I take this opportunity to thank Miss Emily Scott, who unruffled acceptance of life's trials and constructive thinking on Serenity did much to promote the writing of this book; to Eileen Garret, who first encouraged me to press on paper what, up to then, I had confined to lectures; and to Harriet, without whose co-operation the bringing of this work to a successful conclusion would not have been possible.

R.V.C.BEast Hanney

October 1,1954

Contents

Introduction - ix

Prologue - 3

I - Worrying is Futile but Contagious

II - Worrying about the Past and the Future

III Worrying about One's Importance

IV Worrying about One's Social Standing

V Worrying about Financial Problems

VI Worries Brought on by Physical Indulgence

VII Worries Attendant on Love Affairs and Marriage

VIII Worries about Illness and Insomnia

IX That Worrying Condition When One Wakes

X Worrying about One's Work

XI Worrying about Politics and World Affairs

XII Worrying about Religion

XIII Worrying about Death and the Life to Come

XIV Perseverance is Essential to the Attainment of Serenity

In Search of Serenity

Prologue

When some years ago I disappeared into the Sahara Desert no one gave it much thought. Many believed I had gone on a trip from which I would soon return. When I did not, a few were moderately concerned that one of them should vanish in this unconventional way. The majority merely crossed my name out of their address books and forgot about me. None of them tried to guess why I should discard my heritage and cut myself adrift from my traditions. No one would have understood, if I had explained, that I was tired of people and purposeless pastimes and wanted a place where I could cleanse my brain and set my thoughts in order. No one would have had an inkling of what I meant by a need for an existence which was not governed by codes based on false values. That would have sounded fantastic and out of tune with the ways of thinking of those who had been my companions in war and peace, at school and at home. It would have seemed even more fantastic to them that I was to find the beginnings of what I sought among nomad Tribesmen of North Africa.

These nomads were true Arabs. They had nothing in common with the hybrids who lived in the Mediterranean Coast towns of Algeria. They were purebred, perhaps more so than most of the Arab races, which was the result of their isolation in this part of the world since the great Moslem expansions of the seventh and twelfth centuries. Their customs, their philosophies, their pastoral customs belonged to those eras when Islam's empire was flourishing. It seems incredible than in these days any race could remain so completely detached. Yet, so it was in the Sahara.

These nomads looked and thought as did their ancestors who built the Alcazar and the Alhambra and ruled Spain and Portugal for seven hundred years. Their tents and means of transportation had not changed since Richard I led his Crusaders into the Holy Land centuries ago. Long before Columbus discovered America, these turbaned knights roamed the Sahara without considering the outer world. They were still doing so when I joined them in the twentieth century. Unless gold or oil or uranium is discovered under their pastures, they will doubtless be continuing in the same way two hundred years hence.

It is chiefly the search for material wealth which leads men to uproot ancient customs and, in the name of progress, substitute their frenzied conception of living. More than anything, it was the Arab detachment from what went on in England and America which made believe that I might find Serenity among these wandering tribes of the great Sahara Desert.

These men could see little good in our ways. They felt sorry for our confusion and anxiety. They wished we could set our minds at rest. Sitting beside the camp fire, we would sometimes discuss the Occidental and his peculiarities, and while the argument followed various lines, it almost always ended with the Arab's conclusions:

As far as we can see, your brand of civilization leads you to rush round in circles, wearing out your minds and bodies, turning your hair white and engaging in wars beside which our wars are no more than schoolboy fist fights. If that is what you call 'progress', we prefer to be thought backward and continue in our way of life with the peace which the desert gives us.

And there was nothing I could say to contradict these observations, because the Arabs did have peace, not only in the Silence of the Sahara but also in their daily routine and approach to worldly and spiritual problems. Religion to them was an intimate and integral part of their lives. It may have been the effect of the desert, but these men seemed to assign to God a far more important place in their scheme of things than do those whose countries are filled with all the accoutrements of modern civilization. In their eyes the Sahara was the Garden of Allah, the only place in the world where God can walk in peace unmolested by human beings. The earth was God's carpet and respected with bare feet.

So, little by little, I allowed my thoughts and habits to drift into Arab ways. I wore the nomad dress because it as best suited to desert life, and I made my home in a tent because it was the only habitation these wanderers knew. Whereas I had always regarded camping as a kind of temporary

ordeal, I discovered that this attitude towards the out of doors was completely foreign to my nomad companions. They and their forebears were born in a tent, married in a tent and one day would die in a tent. Many of my shepherds had never been inside a house; none had ever slept in a bed. Camping was their natural way of living. It was also their business. They were nomads because they had to feed their sheep. Their lives were controlled by the problem of pastures. It controlled mine as long as I lived in the Sahara.

At dawn, I rose with my companions and said the morning prayer. Except for a bowl of camel's milk, there was no breakfast. Once I had been accustomed to missing this meal, I felt no urge to feed a body well rested by deep sleep, so, mounting my horse, I followed the others to look for fresh grazing. At noon we halted for the midday prayer. There was no lunch, but the horses were allowed to browse while we sat on the desert and talk or, usually, remained silent. The Arabs, like many Orientals, have an admirable quality of never making conversation. An Arab never says It is a fine day. It is self-evident that the day is fine, so why draw attention to it. Nor were these silences awkward. They were restful. There was none of that feeling that something must be said just for the sake of saying it. Occasionally we would go for a whole day without uttering a word that was not pertinent to what we happened to be doing. Then, suddenly, a topic would come into someone's mind and would be tossed into our midst as might a stone into a pond. The ensuing talk would be like the ripples caused by the vanishing stone, spreading out forgetful of their origin and dying again as suddenly as the initial splash.

It was these unstrained silences, as much as anything else, which pushed me a little nearer to the comforting peace I needed so badly. It was the way these men minded their own business, never projecting themselves into my thoughts or actions, which gave me that profound rest which is usually found only in solitude.

Our working day was always brought to a close with the afternoon prayer. After that, we turned our horses' heads toward camp, which we usually reached at sunset, when we prayed again and, finally, sat down to the only square meal of the day. When our appetites had been satisfied, we chatted or told stories until the time came for the final prayer. Then we stretched ourselves on carpets in our tents and, wrapping our cloaks about us, slept as only the healthy and carefree and physically tired can.

Thus, gradually, this hardy life in the open began to cure my physical aches and mental worries. I realized that these desert men were not only sound of mind and body, but had no neuroses. Unless a man had an accident, he lived to a fine old age and then faded gracefully away without becoming insane or infirm. Soon I no longer jumped when a gun was fired or woke in the night obsessed with apprehension. I began to feel the serenity of my companions taking possession of me. Being an Occidental, I did not accept this as a matter of course. I began to wonder what had changed me, and this brought me to the following conclusions.

While the active existence in this exhilarating air had done me inestimable physical good, while Islam had comforted me and the reliance on In sha Allah - If God so wills -- had quieted me, there was something else: The Arabs never fussed. They never fussed about things over which they had no control.

For example, during drought years when many of their sheep died, these nomads never gave way to despair or exclaimed, If we had gone to pasture there or there, the sheep would not have died. Instead they said, For some reason best known to Allah, those sheep have died, and there is nothing we can do about it. Let us, therefore, forget about them. Let us go somewhere else and breed more sheep. And this they promptly did, without weeping over what they could not change.

When I first went to the Sahara and my nervous reflexes were not yet under control, I wondered whether much of this attitude was not put on. I waited, expecting to see someone caught off balance by the unexpected. But the moment never came. These men did not rush or shout or lose their tempers. They practiced what they preached, and not like pulpit speakers or psychiatrists who while overflowing with counsels for the sick at heart are, in themselves, often as confused as their congregations or patients. They said, Don't fuss! And they did not. They had peace. If further proof were needed, one

had only to look at their eyes, at their gestures, at the easy way in which they slept. During my early days among these shepherds, I believed in all kinds of social conventions. I had great ideas of what I stood for. I was not quite sure what I thought I stood for but something. And then, suddenly, I was brought face to face with realization that I stood for absolutely nothing! My background and upbringing did not mean anything to an Arab. To him, I was just a man (and an Occidental infidel at that) who, for some suspicious reason, had come to live in the Sahara. That was all.

The appreciation of how important I was in this Arab community hit me hard. Once the initial shock had worn off, however, I saw the soundness of the Arab reasoning. I was not important there or anywhere else! The moment this idea was absorbed, my gropings for truth became less haphazard. I began to realize how much time I had wasted on the unworthwhile, how cluttered had been my mind with futile inhibitions. Gradually I began to discard them. In a few years, I had discarded them all. I had found the beginnings of the formulas for tranquility of mind. I insist on the beginnings because Serenity does not come to one automatically as a result of going to live for a while in the desert. That would be too simple a solution. It would eliminate moral responsibilities and the role of conscience. As Socrates replied to a man who complained that he had not benefited from a change of scene, It serves you right, you traveled with yourself.

My Sahara experience made me profoundly aware of the other me. It made me acutely conscious of the faults that cling to one like burs until they are pulled off and burned. It made me understand what were really the causes for worry and what were generated by tired nerves; in sum, it gave me foundations on which to build Serenity. It did not give me much more than the foundations, for, while these were of rock, the structure did not spring up like a New York skyscraper in a few weeks. In fact, as I look back now, I am aware that much of what I thought I had, I did not have in the Sahara. The real thing came later.

How this happened is too long a story to tell and not appropriate for this book. Suffice it to say that during the next twenty-five years, I continued to be a nomad. I lived in the Dutch Indies, in China, Japan, and Manchuria and in the South Sea Islands. I worked as a journalist and wrote over a dozen books. I taught English literature in a Japanese university in Tokyo, became a screenplay writer in Hollywood and lectured in almost every state of North America.

Yet, in spite of all these experiences and adventures in different parts of the world, I never lost the lessons which I had learned from the Arabs of North Africa. I did not lose them because I was aware of their inestimable value in my search for Serenity and continued to apply them under all circumstances. Nor will those who want to gain something constructive out of this book be able to unless they do likewise when dealing with the problems of their daily lives.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. So said Confucius, which is pertinently applicable to the secret of finding Serenity. One must learn to be serene just as one must learn to be anything else worthwhile.

There is always something to worry you. It comes as regularly as sunrise.LORD BEACONSFIELD

Chapter I

Worrying Is Futile but Contagious

My first attempt to impart to others what I had originally learned from the Arabs and then used to good account among other peoples took the form of lectures.

These lectures were at first rather ineffectual. They were so because most of the men and women who listened to me could not put themselves in my position or sense the silence of the Sahara or the Serenity of the nomad shepherds. The imaginative few declared, quite logically, that it was useless to try to gain this kind of peace while living in noisy cities with clamouring and demanding families for whom material needs took precedence over the contemplation of the stars or a philosophy that God will provide. In short, my lectures were listened to politely and even with interest as the report of strange experiences, but not as applicable to the problems of human beings in the busy modern world.

It was no easy task to translate the logical reasoning of a nomad Arab in a way which hurrying men and women would understand and then put to practical use. For some time, I was baffled, and continued to present my Sahara reminiscences hoping that the point would permeate my listeners. This was simple foolishness, or perhaps just laziness.

Then, one evening, after a particularly heavy barrage of postlecture questions, it flashed on me what these anxious people needed. I accordingly restructured my talk in such a way as to forestall the questions before they were put to me from the floor of the auditorium. The Arabs began to serve only as an introduction and source of examples, while the main body of the lectures dealt with what seemed to be the main causes of worry to the average housewife, student, farmer, artisan or business executive who came to hear me. I have used the same principle in writing this book, the only difference being that I have gone into much greater detail than in an hour lecture and clarified anything that might be brought up during a question period.

The order which the chapters follow has not been established with any consideration for the relative values of the sources or mental suffering dealt with in each one. All troubles have their degrees of importance, and whoever we are and whatever we do, there will always be some kind of worry available to suit our individual temperaments. Yet there is no more reason why we should succumb to it than to mumps or measles when they declare themselves in the neighborhoods where we live.

Every man and woman in any civilized community takes precautions the moment a disease seems to menace the family. Even before epidemic conditions exist, doctors and serums and inoculations are employed, and if anyone falls ill, he or she is cared for with all necessary speed. Yet when worrying appears imminent, precautions are seldom taken to ward it off, and nine times out of ten the afflicted one is either ignored or pampered like a neurotic invalid.

Men might become immortal if they would understand the deadly properties of worry. They would certainly live longer if they made up their minds to root it out of their inner selves. Their brains would undoubtedly function more freely if they could be awakened to the futility of fussing. This is no exaggeration. Responsible doctors have told me that worry has been known to cause tooth decay, to bring on diabetes, fabricate gallstones and, of course, develop high blood pressure with consequent heart complications.

If every young man and every young woman setting out on the journey of life could be made to appreciate this and, furthermore, realize that one can become an efficient worrier just as one can become anything else efficient, a great many physical ailments would disappear from a physician's

possible diagnoses.To those who object that there are something over which one cannot help worrying, I would

like to suggest that they are mixing up worry and anxiety which are quite different emotions.For example, a mother has a sick child about whom she understandably anxious. That is normal

and natural. Yet it does not mean that this anxiety should be allowed to turn into a frenzy of fussing. There is nothing more contagious than worrying. There is nothing which spreads faster through a household than fussing. There is nothing more damaging to a sick person than this kind of disturbance in the minds of those about him.

One reason why people have a better chance of recovery in a hospital than at home is that, while nurses are anxious to see that the patient gets better, they are not worrying about it. They have no reason to. They know him only as an afflicted human being and have no personal reason to be distressed. In the same way, when someone is very ill in a hospital, friends and relatives are kept away. The chief object of this seemingly inconsiderate gesture is that these people may bring an atmosphere of worry into the sickroom which will be conveyed to the patient and affect him adversely.

I remember a well-meaning lady visiting me in a nursing home where I was recuperating from an operation, but unaware, myself, how ill it had left me. However, by the time the lady had said good-by, the expression on her face, together with a suggestion that it might be a good thing if I saw a clergymen, convinced me that I was dying. It was only complete isolation from outside influences which gave me back my equanimity and the incentive to get better.

Worrying is a waste of energy. It lowers vitality and decreases efficiency. It begets ill humor, tiredness and insomnia, to say nothing of the physical sickness which follows the mental contamination. It leads nowhere and does no one any good.

So many of us remain so immature. Whether we are twenty or sixty, we are still struggling with the uncertainties of our childhood and adolescence. Some of us never completely emerge from our nurseries and schoolrooms. We continue to imagine that somewhere ahead of us lie the solutions to our troubles. We hopefully say:

When I am thirty, everything will be much simpler! And then, When I am fifty, there won't be anything to bother about. By the time I am sixty, I will have defeated life's problems! Or else, In a few years, I'll be the boss; then I won't have to worry about anything any more.

The only trouble with this, as with the other hope formulas is that one never is the boss. There is always someone higher up. If it is not a particular man, it will be a group of men or maybe the public or the family or sometimes even one's conscience.

What few can grasp is that curse for unstable worrying are not generated through achieving more important official, business or worldly positions or out of some physical emancipation, but in our reasoning brains. It is chiefly for those to whom this declaration seems obscure that this book has been written, giving what I have found to be the most efficacious remedies. How these remedies work will depend not only on the co-operation of the fussers but on their admission that they are fussers. Many will never acknowledge that anything ever ruffles them. They claim to be serene, and if they do have emotional outbursts, blame them on tiredness and bad digestion. Those can, of course, be the causes of getting worked up over something which does not matter, but the average human being's worrying condition is a habit, a developed mental attitude to problems which for the most part are not problems at all. For as George Bernard Shaw wrote, The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

There are some men and women who like to have something to fuss about and would be positively unhappy without a grievance. They are constitutional worriers like crossword puzzle maniacs and fanatical stamp collectors; but whereas the crosswords and stamps may only lead the addicts to unsociability, constitutional worrying can one day get even with the votaries and overwhelm them. The professional grumbler is digging his own grave, in which he will not even have the comforting unconsciousness of the buried dead. He will also be damaging everyone with whom he

comes into contact. He will be more of a menace than a visitor with active tuberculosis. For tuberculosis there is a fairly definite cure, for worrying, when it takes hold, there is none except one's power to relax and see oneself during a bout of emotionalism.

When I first went to live with the Arabs, they used to point at me and say, Look at that man, he's behaving like an Occidental trying to catch a train! Because these men associated Occidentals with train catching and fussing. And then, addressing me, they would add, If you ride all today and tomorrow, you won't find a train, so relax and stop getting excited.

And this I tried to do but found it difficult. I could not let my mind and body go limp. I could not forget myself or follow the example of those simple men who did not become disturbed about things over which they had no control, and, above all, practiced what they preached.

I remember once motoring with a party of Arabs in the Northern Sahara when suddenly the car stopped. The driver lifted his seat and lifted the hood. Shaking his head he said, almost to himself:

Makanche essence! which means No more gas!Without comment, my companions climbed out of the car and sat on the desert. For a while no

one spoke. Then it began to rain. One of the older men looked at the sky and said fervently:Alhamdullah! May God be praised for this rain, it will do great good to our pastures.And another old man chimed in with, Alhamdullah! I trust that this rain is falling in the Atlas

and will water my brother's crops.But I was not impressed by these pious ejaculations. I was still new to the philosophies of the

desert people. I was also wet and cold, so, turning to my friend and host, the Caid Madani, I said to him peevishly:

Why don't you do something about this driver? He knew how far we were going! He knew how much gas we needed! It's his fault we're stuck here! Why don't you tell him so?

To which, without any change of expression, Madani replied, What good will lit do? And then, realizing that I was not convinced, added, The next time we got on a trip, I will ascertain that there is enough gas. If, however, I scold this man now as you suggest, it will make him uncomfortable, it will make us uncomfortable and it will produce no gas. What goodwill it do?

To which argument there was, of course, no reasonable reply.This story must not be laughed off as another example of Oriental fatalism. It is a reasoning

which can be applied by anyone to any situation anywhere and belongs as much to America as to the Sahara, as much to Europeans as to Arabs. Furthermore, when scoffers tell me that they will believe me when they see me applying my Arab theories to the tense citizens of the United States, I assure them that I am doing it all the time. Here is a recent example.

I had delivered an evening lecture at Walla Walla and had to make for Spokane to speak there the following afternoon. In order to do this, it was necessary to go to a place called Wallulah after my Walla Walla engagement and there picked up the express coming from Portland.

I reached Wallulah, which consists of a small wooden station and about six frame houses, at 11:30 P.M. In damp, cold, midwinter darkness and found no train. The official in charge of the windswept junction said that the Spokane express might be in, in a couple of hours, or it might not. He himself had no idea. He would, however, advise the passengers the moment he knew anything.

As soon as the full implication of this communication had been taken in by my fellow travellers, they began to fuss. The waiting room into which we had trooped after the discouraging news about the train was of the shed variety and furnished sparsely with wooden benches. On these the men and women seated themselves and stared for a while at the red-hot stove with the resignation of criminals waiting to be executed. Then, as if a hidden power had prodded them, they all got up and followed each other to the door of the shed. With the same automatic movements, they opened it and let in an a blast of icy wind while they stared silently at the deserted tracks. Then they shut the door and returned to the benches.

For a while I watched these frenzied people, fascinated by their fear of something, which was

not in the least frightening. They were under shelter, they were warm (when they were not opening the door), they had company and a man to tell them when their train would be due. The worse that could happen to them was to miss some appointment, as I would probably miss my lecture. But even had the consequences of being delayed been disastrous, there was nothing they could do which fussing or worrying would remedy.

After a time, I got tired of following the restless peregrination round the waiting room and let my thoughts wander.

I remembered nights on the desert when, wrapped in my burnous, I slept on the hard ground as a matter of course. Simultaneously, it occurred to me that my present circumstances were no more uncomfortable than they had been in the Sahara and there was no reason why I should not be resting in the same way now. Furthermore, as on that desert motor trip there had been no gas, so now there was no train, and getting excited over it, there or here, would produce precisely the same negative results. So, without further thought on the matter, I stretched myself out on the bench, relaxed my body and mind and soon slept.

When I awoke, rather stiff but quite refreshed, my fellow passengers were drifting round the waiting room like lost souls in Limbo. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 6 A.M. There was obviously still no train in the offing, so I went out into the freezing dawn to see if I could find some other conveyance to take me on my way. In this I was successful, and by flagging a bus on the road about a mile from the station, I made Spokane in sufficient time to deliver my lecture. So everyone concerned was happy and I was not even tired.

Nor had I accomplished anything remarkable. All that I had done was to apply my principle that worrying did no good. But if I had tried to explain this to the distraught creatures of Wallulah, they would probably have punched my head. Their minds were so congested and unreceptive to logical reasoning that they could not think of anything but the nonarrival of the train. Maybe if I had made them a speech, the punching of the head would have given them relief. But I slept instead. Perhaps it was better so. Mental and physical relaxation requires a great deal of personal concentration. Yet if it is not acquired in time, the omission can ruin the heart or lead to murder or land men and women in the divorce court. There is nothing which is beyond the reach of worrying. It has the insidiousness of poison ivy, the vitality of the dandelion, the smothering strength of the creeping vine. Once it has taken hold, only a stern determination can destroy its menace. Only the conviction that worrying does no good will put a stop to making efficient fussing as important an aim in life as efficient housekeeping or efficient salesmanship.

If your lot is certainly decreed, what profit to guard against it? Or, if all is uncertain, what is the use of fear?

AUSONIUS SOLONChildren have no past nor future, unlike us they relish the present.

LA BRUYRE

Chapter II

Worrying about the Past and the Future

Plato admirably summed up the vainness of this worrying habit in nine words: Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety.

Four centuries later, Jesus Christ added to this sentiment with: Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

And, six hundred years after that, Mohammed developed the charge by warning his followers that worrying over what had happened was waste of energy and time.

Men throughout the ages have paraphrased or confirmed these precepts. Most philosophers and theologians have recognized their logic. They have laid stress on them in their writings and preachings and with what effect? None that is worthy of record.

Had the human race, had half the human race, considered and acted on these maxims, the writings of such books as this one would not be worth undertaking. Were there any effective belief in these precepts of Platonism or Christianity or Islam, except as admirable but impractical idealism, most psychiatrists would have to go out of business.

Without carrying the principle of Plato's dictum to extremes, one can set it to work under the most varied circumstances.

For example, one of the greatest embarrassments which a platform speaker has to overcome before he can capture an audience is nervousness or what actors term stage fright. It is an almost universal complaint among professional entertainers and it attacks business executives and diplomats and high-ranking military men when they are called on to make a speech. I was at one time apprehensive myself and inclined to develop a dry throat and shaking knees when the time drew near for me to start a lecture. There was nothing I could do to control this nervousness until, one day, I remembered what Plato had said twenty-four hundred years ago: Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety. Nothing in human affairs -- that undoubtedly included lectures.

The moment I had this thought planted in my mind, all my nervousness departed. I was going to do my best on the platform, but if I failed, nothing frightful would happen to me like Scheherazade, who was doomed to death the moment she stopped telling amusing tales to Haroun al Raschid. In fact, the thought of the way that lovely lady of eighth-century Baghdad kept her talks interesting under such terrifying circumstances made me ashamed of giving way to any fear generated by women's clubs or Rotarians.

It may be argued that but a small proportion of people are lecturers or actors who need this formula for self-assurance, which is true. Nevertheless, these principles can be applied to any situation where nervous tension is possible. Here is one of many examples.

A young baseballer said to me after a match in which he had not distinguished himself, I was made so jittery by all those people watching me that I couldn't see the ball, let alone hit it.

To which I commented, But why did you consider the spectators? No one cared about or even noticed your play except yourself. Had you gone to bat without anyone watching, you'd probably have swiped the ball out of the field.

There are certainly many tennis players and golfers who will recognize themselves under this

heading, men and women who go onto the courts and courses tensely believing that the world is watching them.

Think too, of self-conscious people one sees entering a public room or sometimes arriving at a private party. Many of these will be imagining that every pair of eyes is focused on them and summing them up, probably unfavorably. Yet, with the exception of one or two, no one will have registered the newcomers' arrival except in the most casual manner.

Let us suppose, however, that this lecturing or this playing of games or this appearing in public does matter and is worthy of any great anxiety. Let us imagine that any of these things can have momentous consequences in our lives; getting excited about them will not make things better. If, for instance, one is sitting for an examination, the thought of the outcome will mean much to one's future will not help one to write correct answers. It will usually do the reverse. It will solidify the brain and make one handle the paper involved as if it were a death warrant for one's execution. There will be fluster in the mind an this fluster will be reflected in what one writes.

I once sat for an examination where I suddenly found myself confronted by questions on a subject which, for some reason, I had not studied. However, as soon as the first panic at seeing the strange problems was over, I let myself go lump and read the paper over analytically. Then I put down what I thought would be the logical answers to the conundrums before me. They were, apparently, sufficiently near to what the examiners wanted, as I received the necessary mark to pass. And this was due only to my not losing my nerve, by applying Plato's dictum that nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety among which are examinations!

The second declaration of the trilogy, Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, is an elaboration of the proverb about not crossing bridges until one reaches them.

This seems fairly obvious advice which it should not be too hard to follow. Nevertheless, with the fussers over things which do not matter and the criers over spilt milk, the premature crossers of bridges thrive in their confusion.

One of the commonest examples of unreasonable anticipation of something which may never happen is shown by fidgety train catchers. There is little which causes some people more anxiety than the catching of trains. Whole households are often turned upside down for days ahead of the intended journey, usually by one member of the family who is obsessed by this train-missing phobia. My father was one of these. He not only started to pack days in advance of his departure, but also frequently slept in station hotels to minimize the danger of not being able to get a cab to take him to the train. My memories of moving as a child are laden with nausea brought on by this anticipation of journeys long before we came to them. It took me quite a time, too, to cure myself of this deep-set panic which the mere sight of trunks being brought down from the attic generated in me. In fact, until I made up my mind that this Christian precept about not worrying about tomorrow must be as much part of me as breathing, prospective fussing interfered with everything I did.

When, for instance, I had a book or article to write, I would go to my desk reluctantly with all kind of ideas of how tiresome my task would be. Before I had picked up my pencil, my thoughts were tense and my body stiff, and if there is anything which generates bad writing it is preliminary mental or physical rigidity. Then one day someone commented on the amusing letters I wrote, which reminded me that it was rereading correspondence I had exchanged with my mother from India which had first given me a notion that I might make authorship a profession. Nor was the reason for this easy prose hard to explain. I was writing only for the sake of conveying my thoughts and without any fear about what a publisher or reviewer might say. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof is an admirable maxim for authors and can save a lot of frustration for beginners in any profession as well as for those who are more mature.

If one gives the matter any thought, it seems fantastic that there should be human beings so foolish as to ignore Jesus' advice. The human mind has got itself into the habit of automatically

wondering about tomorrow. Yet how many of us can quote occasions when any anticipatory fears materialized. I know that those misfortunes which have overtaken me struck with no preliminary anxieties. What we fear and worry about rarely happens. What we least expect does.

My Arab friends did not as much as allow future occurrences to enter their minds. (There is not even a tense in their grammar to express it their design for living belongs solely to the present.) In fact, this insistence on taking no thought for tomorrow often went to extremes. If, for example, a man asked another man to a meal, the potential guest would not reply yes or no; he would say instead, In sha Allah -- If God wills it. And if between the invitation and the dinner Allah thrust six friends in the guest's path or placed some obstacle in his way, he would either arrive with six other guests or not put an appearance at all. Nor would he warn his host, who, in turn, would not complain but merely blame himself for having anticipated something problematical and in no way sure. The Moslem uses the expression In sha Allah because he believes that those words of Jesus should be put into practice. He believes also in another Christian invocation, Give us this day our daily bread.

Most of us who recite the Lord's Prayer, through habit or inspiration, do not pause to reflect that Jesus was teaching his disciples to ask God only for what they required during the actual day at hand. What they ate tomorrow would be there or not -- In sha Allah. It would eliminate a great deal of worry and a great many heartaches, too, if those maxims were remembered every morning on waking when most people start fussing about what is going to happen during the coming twenty-four hours.

The wise physician Sir William Osler said in the course of an address to Yale students some years ago, Now the way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired by long and steady repetition. It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day's work. And a little later in his speech, he quoted the word of Thomas Carlyle: Our main business is not to see dimly what lies at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

So many of us start our breakfasts wondering how we can possibly fit everything which has to be done into the coming day. I used to feel that way with lectures to give and publishers' deadlines to meet and letters to write, to say nothing of seeing people and shopping and reading. Then one day it occurred to me that the mere planning of how I should work out my program wasted valuable time, whereas if I started with the first task and went on to the next without thought of the third or fourth, everything would be finished without an undue expenditure of nervous energy. In fact, without thinking about it, I was following the counsels of Jesus and Sir William Osler, or of Ovid and Seneca, who wrote, respectively, Reap the harvest today; trust tomorrow as little as possible, and Lay hold of today's task and you will not depend so much on tomorrow's.

The third or Islamic maxim of the trilogy regarding the futility of worrying over what has happened also elaborates a timeworn proverb, the one about crying over spilt milk. Anyone who really wants Serenity should try not to regret and never give rein to remorse.

Remorse is a hideous and painful state of mind which feeds on the past instead of the present. It is not the same as regret and serves even less purpose. We have all undoubtedly done many things which we regret, we have made many errors of judgment; we have let opportunities slip by which might have influenced our lives for the better. We have also done thoughtless harm to people and have left them wondering how we came to act so wantonly and, in many cases, idiotically. But that does not mean that we should allow remorse to take hold and start eroding our Serenity and perhaps our sanity.

Most Occidentals spend inordinate periods worrying over the might-have-beens. They look back on what they consider to be missed opportunities and wonder how they came to do this and that until the whole issue assumes gigantic proportions.

To take an example which affects so many men and women in all walks of life, let us go back to the subject of trains. When I chance to miss a train, I have taught myself not to stalk up and down the platform muttering like most of my fellow travelers, If I'd started five minutes earlier, I wouldn't have missed the train! But I didn't start five minutes earlier and I didn't catch the train. It has gone and

there's nothing I can do to bring it back. All the excitement, all the leaping and howling of a dancing Dervish will not alter this. So I contain my one-time, and still instinctive, irritation and occupy myself in some way until the next train.

I am sometimes asked whether I am not bothered about inconveniences which my not arriving at the appointed time may cause to others for example, missing a lecture. My answer is No! I am naturally sorry that I'm letting down a program chairman, but provided there is no possible means of doing something to remedy the situation, I do not allow myself to become distraught. What would be the point? It would not help me or the lecture audience. It would do no good. Worrying about it would do no good!

When our sheep died during a Sahara drought, when the gas ran out in the rain, all the worrying in the world would not have brought the sheep back to life or produced gas. The results would have been much the same as those of becoming frenzied over missing the train.

Furthermore, missed opportunities may not necessarily have been beneficial opportunities, they may have been the reverse; we cannot tell unless we are able to follow up, or back, what would have occurred if what we wanted so much had materialized. Think, for example, of the man who planned and looked forward to crossing the Atlantic on board the Titanic in April of 1912 and then missed the boat train in London, or of a friend of mine who nearly committed suicide because he had been jilted by a girl who turned out to be such a nagging shrew that the man she did marry was driven almost to the point of wanting to kill himself. There are so many cases I could cite to prove that disappointments, far from being subjects for regret, often turn out to be for our good. Even if they do not, there is nothing more unrewarding than worrying over the past. The truth of this should be self-evident, yet I challenge anyone to tell me honestly that, even if he has not allowed regret or remorse to gnaw at him, he has not at one time or another exclaimed, If only I hadn't done that! or else, I wonder why I made that idiotic decision?

So, once more, let it be stressed that, whether we are dealing with the future or the past, worrying about it does no good. If we will arm ourselves with this principle and bear in mind the words of Plato and Jesus and Mohammed, we should be able to meet each day not only with confidence but triumphantly. We should be able to say to God and man:

Here I am, neither complaining nor self-pitying, neither vain, nor intolerant, but filled with courage and optimism, ready to take on whatever is in store for me with the sure and certain knowledge that, as I handle it, so will I be rewarded.

Humility is a virtue which all men preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear.JOHN SELDON

The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk.MARCUS TELLIUS CICERO

Chapter III

Worrying about One's Importance

Whereas Thou shalt not fuss must be accepted as the first and great commandment in the attaining of Serenity, the others are no less important. All of them are essential to tranquility of mind. All of them function as part of a whole. None of them can be put to work without humility, and the more humility, the smoother and easier will be the attainment of the goal. In fact, until one can see oneself as one really is, Serenity will be kept at a distance.

I once persuaded a woman, whose mind was racked by guilty yet inexplicable restlessness which amounted almost to neurosis, to write the history of her life. I told her to let herself go and put everything that had ever happened to her into her story without self-consciousness or fear of shocking me. I need not have insisted. What came out of that lady's experiences was something so dramatic that only the artlessness of the writing made me believe it. It made me realize, too, that it is the average women in buses and drugstores, those behind counters and those who wait on tables in restaurants, to whom things happen which are worth recording. The glamour girls of society and Hollywood lead comparatively routine lives devoid of much startling incident.

At any rate, the production of those hundred or so pages did my friend a great deal of good. It relieved her of the pressure of always wondering about herself. The marshaling of the episodes of her life in a frank and ordered manner had allowed her to see why this and that had happened to her and how. It showed her also that what she believed to have been a drab existence had, in reality, been filled with as many gay as sad incidents and a large number which were actually romantic.

This is not to imply that I have discovered something new or have missed my vocation as a psychiatrist. Obviously if you can bring yourself to write about yourself frankly, a lot of satisfaction will probably result. The frankness is important. The style, even the coherence, does not matter. The only essential is to get at the facts without excuses or explanations. If honesty is maintained, any extenuating circumstances will appear of their own accord.

Some people may think they have nothing worthwhile to record. They may regard their lives as uneventful or consider than nothing superlatively good or bad ever came their way. This is rarely so. We all have skeletons in our cupboards, but that does not mean they should be forever kept under lock and key. An airing of what may have become a bogey by long imprisonment can do much to tranquilize the mind by chasing away imaginary fears.

The confessional is one of the strongest and most comforting qualities of the Roman Catholic Church. It explains why so few of this faith take their troubles to psychiatrists. Their religious confessors, while varying in degree of tolerance of repetitions of self-reproof, are always available, usually impersonal and never fee-conscious.

Nevertheless, there is a large proportion of the human race which cannot open its mind to doctor or priest. For those, it is a wise idea to put mental problems on paper. If it achieves nothing else, it may lead to the attainment of this most important and essential requisite in gaining Serenity humility.

Humility must be acquired before Serenity will come in. There can be no subterfuges or excuses, no evading the issue. Only to the humble will Serenity offer itself. This statement is made with the authority of one who was brought up and educated without the mention of the word humility and certainly without any examples of it. In fact, it was not until I went to live with the Arabs that I began to see myself as who I was, and what I had been, in true focus.

To these desert men, the idea that being born into a special caste or the acquiring of monetary riches could give one any social advantage seemed ridiculous. Birth or outward appearance as a criterion of worth was as alien to them as the eating of pork or the drinking of wine. I remember once, during my early apprenticeship to Moslem way, discussing the probability that a nomad I knew was of higher standing than the average because of the way he was turned out. Before I had gone very far with my argument, however, my friend, the Caid Madani, interrupted me.

Clothes mean nothing! he declared. Some people are dressy, some aren't. The Agha Daylis, for example, is but I am not, yet we belong to the same family and have an equal number of flocks. You can't judge people by what they have on. Not in the Sahara anyway. He paused and added, One day, I'll be carried to my grave in the same kind of shroud as my poorest shepherd, and when I get to Paradise, in sha Allah, the Archangel won't ask me how many flocks I had or what clothes I wore. He'll ask me what I thought and what I did with my life. The Caid looked at me thoughtfully as if to say, Get that into your congested brain and let it percolate slowly until all those notions based on false values have been washed away.

And he was right, of course. I was saturated with false values, as are the minds of the majority of conventionally educated Occidentals. The standards of those Orientals who have not been weakened by Western ideas are much more flexible than ours.

One of the hardest lessons I have had to teach myself has been this belief in my own lack of importance. At times I felt that I was too set, that the false values which had been my childhood's diet had been too well digested to be eliminated. Then I began to give time to listening to other people and sometimes questioning them. In a short while I realized that not only was I not unique to my egocentricity, but that the majority of mankind was tremendously concerned with his individual self and what he stood for. One of the most difficult things for him to accept was the conviction that he did not really matter in the general scheme of the universe or that his death would change anything in its course. My inquiring mind was now alerted, and I began to put my theories to a general test. This was facilitated by my lecturing tours, which brought me into contact with all kinds of men and women of all ages and all callings.

One case I recollect particularly. A young reporter was interviewing me in Oklahoma City. In order to illustrate my views on this particular subject, which was also the subject of my lecture, I said:

If, for example, you are run over by an automobile and killed as you leave this hotel, it won't really matter. No one outside your immediate family circle will be affected by your death or ever hear about it. A look of consternation spread over the youth's face, so I quickly added, If, half an hour later, I am run over, it won't matter either. I may get a little longer obituary notice than you because I am older and have done more, but that will be all. Otherwise, it won't matter.

And I meant this it would not matter. Nevertheless, the reporter described in his column as one whose long spells of living in out-of-the-way places had affected his health. What he meant, of course, but was too polite or too young to say, was that my mental balance had been affected by this protracted intimacy with Orientals. Nor was he alone in his point of view. The average man and woman will not admit that his or her little life, or big life even, is not of paramount importance. He or she gauges everything from purely personal angles.

Take, for example, a war or a strike. If the fighting is in South America, a farmer in France will glance at the headlines in the morning paper and pass quickly on to the local news. If there is a railway strike, a housewife who never leaves her home will hardly be aware of it. But put that war on the Rhine or the railway strike into the life of a train commuter and you will see the repercussions it will have. Think of yourselves inconvenienced by bad weather or a cold, and your attitude to a wet day when you do not have to go out or to an acquaintance who is sneezing and coughing.

I am no skier so I do not pray for snow. I am happier when there is no snow. There are those, however, for whom a warm winter spoils everything. To some it even means financial disaster.

We are fundamentally and unreasonably concerned with our own problems. We cannot relegate

them to the level of unimportance they represent in terms of the universe. We will not convince ourselves that, until we see ourselves as we are and admit our insignificance, Serenity will keep at a distance.Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted is one of the hardest Christian lessons to assimilate, yet it is essential to the acquiring of Serenity.

Lecturing is not good for humility. This being the center of attraction, this uninterrupted prorating from platforms, this being questioned as if every answer one gives cannot be doubted or contradicted is apt to breed an unintentional and often unconscious superiority complex. I know that when I finish a lecture tour and find myself at a party where I am just another guest, I am filled with an urge to make myself heard. Without realizing it, I discover myself trying to establish myself as an authority on whatever subject is under discussion, regardless of the mental capacity or experience of others, and making myself an egocentric bore. So it is difficult for me, knowing all the pitfalls, to practice humility, how infinitely harder for the man who has never considered whether he is being boastful or self-satisfied.

As soon as you begin to take yourself seriously, writes Thomas Merton in Seeds of Contemplation, and imagine that your virtues are important because they are yours, you become the prisoner of your own vanity and even your best works will blind and deceive you. Then, in order to defend yourself, you will begin to see sins and faults everywhere in the actions of other men. And the more unreasonable importance you attach to yourself and to your works, the more you will tend to build your own idea of yourself by condemning other people. Some of the most virtuous men are also the bitterest and most unhappy, because they have unconsciously come to believe that all their happiness depends on their being more virtuous than other men.

To more virtuous I would add more knowledgeable, which is often an equally fictitious presumption. For example, during question periods after lectures, I have found myself inventing replies of which I was not absolutely sure. One evening I realized how outrageous and vain this was, and from then on, when not positive of the correct answer, I said, I don't know! I found then that not only did this add to my composure, but it also enhanced my prestige as a reliable speaker who was not afraid to admit himself fallible.

Some of us are overconcerned with our outward appearances and even more so with those of others. We forget those lines of the Gospels concerning the lilies of the field. I was as guilty as anyone of this false vanity until one evening, while watching a scrofulous old tramp eating his dinner in a cafeteria, it occurred to me that once the food had passed his gullet, precisely the same digestive process would go on as in my stomach or in that of a lovely girl or a well-washed millionaire. What I was seeing was the exterior and allowing myself to be unjustifiably influenced thereby.

In spite of what Thomas Jefferson said on the subject, men and women are not created equal. They are born privileged or handicapped, healthy or unhealthy, mentally balanced or unbalanced. But if you belong to the healthy, wealthy and gifted category it does not necessarily make you better than those who do not. It certainly does not give you a right to a superiority complex.

Pride drives Serenity away as relentlessly as autumn winds strip leaves from trees. Until we accept this, until we understand that worldly achievement leads to disillusion, there is little chance that individuals or nations will find spiritual or temporal peace.

This must not be taken to meant that humility has anything in common with inferiority complexes. In fact, the developing of an inferiority complex is as injurious to one's tranquility of mind as the developing of a pride complex. The person who believes that he is less intelligent or less physically attractive than anyone else is not humble. He is merely self-centred. He is as bad as someone who imagines that his virtues are paramount and sees only sins in other men. Furthermore, inferiority complexes will actually breed this comparison and then condemnation of faults in others. It is merely a kind of defensive mechanism not humility.

So, while the dictionary may suggest that being humble connotes a sense of inferiority, do not

let that bother you. No one is completely superior or completely inferior to anyone else. In almost everyone there is something to be admired. Everyone has some specialized knowledge, be it just hairdressing or carving meat, with which you are not familiar and might like to learn about. Nor have I ever failed to discover that the seemingly stupid socialite or semieducated laborer had at least one subject on which he or she could talk entertainingly.

Thus you, too, have something which is interesting to someone else, however little you think or read. You may also have a great many things you do not suspect. In any case, you have your place in the general plan of the universe, which may be a larger place than you suppose. So do not imagine things. Take everything as it comes. Develop humility, but not an inferiority complex. Be your natural self.

(2)

Akin to fussing about one's own importance is allowing one's selfish idiosyncrasies to affect the lives of others.

I know a man, for example, who can be extremely pleasant and excellent company. He has a friendly smile and fundamentally, a kind nature. He has, however, an unreasonably susceptible nervous system which is easily bruised, combined with an ability to like and dislike people violently and for no obvious reason. When it so happens that this sensitive mind has been hurt in some way, a complex is set up which is so unamiable that everyone under the same roof feels it. He keeps his own counsel, too, so that, unless one knows him intimately, there is no evidence that anyone is disturbing him. All one senses is that the whole atmosphere is so poisoned that one wants to escape into the open air to be rid of the contamination. Nor is it necessary for me or you to be the cause of the disturbance. This man may be showering us with every sign of affection, but the vindictive thinking he generates is so powerful that it strikes at anyone within reach.

I once occupied a room in a hotel next to a woman who thought evilly. She could see only bad traits in people and if she could say disagreeable things about them she did. In fact, this continual disparagement of everyone and everything distressed me so that I stopped having anything to do with the lady. But that changed nothing for me. I used to sense the malicious thinking coming at me in waves through the wall of our rooms, so that, without hearing a sound, I knew whether my neighbour was at home or out, awake or asleep. Sometimes the vibrations become so strong that I found myself as disturbed as if I had actually been having an argument with my former friend.

That, of course, should not have affected me any more than the rancorous abstractions of the man mentioned above. Nor does it now at least not so much. I have learned to close my mind to those thought attacks and then counter them with pleasant sentiments. If one can start this deflection in time and before the malevolence has been fully generated, it is amazing what calming results can be obtained quite quickly.

A simple formula for this is to repeat a sentence of Voltaire: The opportunity of doing mischief is found one hundred times a day and of doing good once in a year. Then try to reverse the maxim

People tell me they cannot help thinking what they do but they can! The control of the thinking machine is just as possible as the control of the arms and legs. When a baby first begins to stagger about, it develops muscles which enable it to walk erect in any direction it chooses. It is merely a matter of devoting as much attention to the care of the mental facilities as of the physical.

Applied and purposeful reading may be an initial help in bringing this discipline into being. Once the brain has been made to obey one kind of order, it will automatically obey another until it has become as disciplined as the hands.

Nor is this visionary or vain advice which, even when applicable, leads nowhere. Mind control is one of the great rewards of adult existence, and the difference between bondage and freedom.

(3)

Less insidious than these generators of harmful mental vibrations, but still a menace to Serenity and definitely in the category of those suffering from self-importance complexes, are those who still believe in physical vengeance. While these may gain more temporary satisfaction by seeing their victims in material trouble than by just hoping that a malicious remark has hit the target or that a convivial evening has been spoiled by making fellow guests feel ill at ease, the repercussions have to be considered. Hitting or killing have legal punishments which can counterbalance the satisfaction of revenge, but they are not nearly as lasting as vindictive words, or even thoughts, aimed designedly at some person. But whatever the form of retaliative action or intention, it destroys all chances of attaining any degree of Serenity.

Vengeance is mine! I will repay, saith the Lord! Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him, if he thirst, give him drink; for, in so doing, thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head! was St. Paul's exhortation to the Romans sixty years after Christ's death. It is on the same lines as Lao Tze's recommendations about coping with our enemies. Recompense injury with kindness. To those who are good, I am good; to those who are not good, I am also good.... There is nothing in the world softer or weaker than water, and yet for attacking things which are weak and strong, there is nothing that can take precedence of it.

These principles are hard to apply; they are hard even to understand. Yet, from a practical angle, what they suggest is no more complicated than this.

The moment one starts to follow the instinctive course of hating someone who has done one a bad turn, the disturbance of one's mental and bodily condition begins automatically. Hating hurts the hater as much as, if not a great deal more than, the hatred. Paradoxically, the object of the hatred, provided he is aware of the anger which he is causing, is certainly a great deal of pleasure out of the upset he has brought about. As Dale Carnegie said to me when he heard me venting my fury against an agent whom I felt had done me wrong:

You know, if X was aware how much he could upset you, he would probably spend the first half hour of every morning dancing round the office from sheer glee! And then, realizing I was not convinced, he added, Even if you cannot control your inner feelings, don't try and get your own back. It'll make the chap dance all the more and probably damage you in the process.

Well, I was undisciplined in those days. I was full of egoism and unreceptive, too, to the elements which go to make true Serenity, so I did not heed the wise counsels of my philosophic friend. I continued to hate and I continued to try to get even, so that not only did this imagined enemy triumph over me, but he trampled on me as well. I believe, moreover, that had I applied the friendly method, our positions would have been reversed. In fact, I know from practice now that if I make no reply when someone starts to pick a quarrel, the argumentative one will stop because he can think of nothing further to say. If I then walk away without still having spoken, my victory will be complete and the defeat of the other correspondingly great.

However, laying aside the material satisfaction which such procedure gives one, it is more comfortable for all concerned to love than to hate, and this is not to imply that being kind and considerate should be based on ulterior motives. The saying about casting bread upon the waters is as true today as it was three thousand years ago when King Solomon made it.

For those who complain that generosity is repaid by ingratitude, remember that if one helps or gives with gratitude in view, the whole point of giving or helping ceases. It is a mark of superiority to confer a kindness, declared Aristotle, but it is a mark of inferiority to receive it.

I once went out of my way to help a man. I gave him money, I got him clothes, I went to a great deal of trouble to do him good turns for more than a year. When, however, that man was rehabilitated and able to take care of himself, he not only did not thank me, but went out of his way to be ungracious and then ruled me out of his life. For several months, I could think of little else but this ingratitude, and

in so doing damaged my peace of mind. Then one day it occurred to me that my expecting thanks marred my friendly gestures, in other words, I was gauging my acts self-righteously, while the man himself resented having been obliged to accept favors from me and wanted to put the whole matter out of his mind. So I immediately did like-wise and the resentment vanished accordingly.

I know a few people who are instinctively and genuinely compassionate towards their fellow men. I know many more whose kind deeds are only self-seeking. While some of these look for material rewards in repayment, a number evaluate the spiritual dividends like marks at school as in the case of the rich woman who replied, when I asked her if she had ever done an altruistic kindness to anyone, Why, yes, of course. I give thousands of dollars every year to A and B and C charities, as well as to my church.

I was on the point of explaining that this was not what I meant by kindness, but the expression on the lady's face made me realize that she gauged her compassion wholly in dollars and cents. Perhaps, too, that was what was intended as her role in the community. Ten thousand dollars, more or less, would make little difference to this woman's income. On the other hand, someone else with more understanding of my interpretation of compassion would not have ten thousand dollars to give, so it all evened out for the best. It all evened out except perhaps as it concerned the personal satisfaction afforded to the lady bountiful. And yet who knows? Maybe the gesture of signing those checks with her secretary made out in favor of the church and the hospital and the home for old men produced an ecstasy equal to that of comforting someone deeply afflicted by disease or doubt?

What gives me pleasure is to help someone who needs help, even when this causes me inconvenience. It comes under the heading of Confucious' and later Jesus' enjoinders to do for others what you would wish done for yourself. Nor should this application of the golden rule be confined to actions only. Considerate thoughts can do just as much good as inconsiderate thoughts can do harm.

Every now and then, the memory of one of those people against whom one has a grievance will spring into one's thoughts, and the first reaction will be vindictive. This is wrong or, more exactly, negative and can in a very short while have painful physical and mental repercussions. So, instead of letting vindictiveness remain for a second in them ind, one should exclude it and replace it with something constructive. When, too, anger is replaced by affection, it is amazing how quickly Serenity will supplant what could have been a bubbling turmoil of conflicting and nauseating thoughts. A compassionate mentality is the greatest joy promoter imaginable.

Thoughts are similar to the vibrations generated by electric batteries. They are much gentler but they eddy out in the same way through the ether. A sensitive mind can, likewise, catch the thoughts as a receiver catches broadcasts. To some they may not come at all, but if good-will is focused on some other person, comfort will ensue for that person as discomfort will follow ill-intentioned thinking.

Try this yourself. Lying in your bed, morning or evening, wish happiness and peace to anyone you know well enough to visualize. If it produces nothing else, it will give you a quiet night or a happy day.

(4)

There are certain types, usually those without enough to occupy them, whose self-importance takes the form of an unhealthy interest in other people's affairs and what they conceive as their shortcomings if not sins. They are usually people vulnerable themselves to criticism but, after the proverbial manner of stone throwers in glass houses, do not recognize this and work themselves into frenzies over what is not their business or else take pleasure in telling others what they have heard in confidence, especially when the confidences are apt to do harm.

Whenever I hear a sensational story at someone's expense, I try to gauge the mentality and motives of the raconteur and either discard everything that has been said or else endeavor to determine what probably started the yarn. Do his yourself before hastily judging the subject of the gossip. Bear in

mind, also, that a scurrilous story at someone's expense will one day return to its generator or repeater like a whizzing boomerang.

Worse than this oral damage, however, is mischief making through abusive letters. Hearsay may be forgotten. The written word cannot. In most correspondence, nothing of the least importance or literary value is recorded and posted to various parts of the world. Except for love letters, which are, for the most part, so banal that they do not bear reading aloud, only a small proportion are composed expressly to please or inform some topic of artistic, scientific or political interest. All that remains are conventional condolences and congratulations, or scoldings and invectives.

If you have written a clever and conclusive but scathing letter, said Lord Avebury, keep it back until next day and it will often not go at all. And St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians: Let not the sun go down on your wrath.

I wish I had blazoned those words on the walls of every room in which I have ever lived. I wish that I had learned them by heart as soon as I could read. I wish that a great many other people whom I know had done so too.

It is frightening to think how letters hurt, for the terrible quality about them is that their pain giving is deliberate. It takes time and concentration to seat oneself at a desk and write words to someone else. It also takes time and concentration to read what one has written and consider its significance. It takes more time to place the letter in an envelope, address and mail it.

Letter writing is not like an angry exclamation touched off by some unexpected taunt. It is not like a thought which forms spontaneously in the mind but can be repressed before it has time to be changed into words. The production of letters is all coldly calculated, and when carried out in an angry mood, has intention to harm behind it. Furthermore, unless the recipient of the communication is a philosopher, who will tear it up the moment he has perceived its nature, it will remain a constant reminder of the ill-will which was once generated in the imagination of the sender. This ill-will may have evaporated an hour after the letter was posted, but is too late then. The words are already flying like poisoned arrows to hit their mark without warning and there remain to fester through the years. Only the other day, for example, I found a venomous letter which had been written by a close friend thirty-five years ago. The reading of those mischievous words brought back to me a host of hideous recollections which I had completely forgotten but disturbed me almost as greatly as in that far-off time. So, if you have written a clever and conclusive but scathing letter, keep it back until next day and it will often not go at all. To which I would add that, having decided beforehand to hold the letter overnight, there should be no restraint in its preparation. The more one lets oneself go, the more one airs one's grievances on paper, the greater will be the relief from tension.

It is better and wiser, however, not to write vindictively or think vindictively. It is far wiser to be kindly disposed towards those one believes are enemies. One cannot damage the neighbor with hatred without damaging oneself, and that starts an interminable series of repercussions which destroy everything one has tried to achieve in the search for Serenity.

Happiness, and thence Serenity, depends to a great extend on the ability to renounce the memory of anything unpleasant, however sharply it may sting one's inner susceptibilities. That maxim is as important as Worrying does no good. In fact, the two are almost synonymous. If you can put them into practice, tranquility of mind will soon be yours.

(5)

The final manifestation of this self-importance complex is anger. Anyone who cannot control his temper is a selfish and despicable creature who, knowing that his moods are feared by his family or friends, trades on the knowledge, demanding flattery and compliance with his whims.

Like drinking, anger can wreck a family and home and destroy friendships, and may even lead to murder and suicide. Like drinking, too, this failing can be cured only by the determined efforts of the

sufferer himself. Apart, too, from the degrading spectacle which anger offers, it can kill the person so addicted, not slowly like alcohol, but as abruptly as a bullet fired from a rifle.

Sometimes this agitation does not show itself in flaring rages and is, to all intents and purposes, unconscious. Patients go to doctors complaining of poundings of the heart when they are lying in bed and, apparently, not in the least angry. The answer is, of course, that unawareness of tension does not mean that it does not exist. The very fact that the heart, though normal, pounds when it is at rest is one of the best proofs that all is not evenly balanced and that tension does exist.

However, while this undercurrent of emotional disturbance is distressing and perhaps dangerous to the individual, it does not usually upset the composure of a community, and only the person involved or maybe a wife or husband or parent is disturbed. With a man or a woman who flies into paroxysms of rage, however, it is a different story. Everyone within reach of the fury is affected.

A person with an uncertain temper is like a homicidal maniac who goes about with a concealed revolver which the least upset will cause him to use. His lack of control puts every relative, friend and neighbor on the alert and destroys any peace there may be in the community where the anger-infected creature lives. And there can be even worse consequences. A man in a rage not only loses all sense of proportion but develops inordinate strength which he may use to attack blindly what he believes to be the cause of his grievance. If he does not resort to physical violence, he can say things which will not only hurt his friends but get him into trouble with those who have no family compunctions to hold them back from taking reprisals. The angry man is quite illogical and showers abuse on people who are not responsible for what is disturbing him.

For example, the waiter who gets a scolding because the food in a restaurant is bad when he had nothing to do with cooking it, or the station master who is blamed when the train is late, or the reckless or overcautious automobile drivers who upbraid each other and cause accidents which self-control might have avoided.

I once saw a man of obviously good upbringing go into an unbelievable tantrum when a railway porter picked up his bag, which had not been properly shut, and spilled the contents onto the platform. It was obviously not the porter's fault, but the owner's, who turned the air blue with his language. Luckily the porter remained calm and repacked the bag, by which time the raging traveler had cooled down and was evidently deeply ashamed of the performance.

Apart from its other damaging consequences, loss of temper is such a waste of time. I never saw an Arab, or for that matter, any Oriental get unduly excited or enraged. They were permeated with the silent Serenity of the desert or saturated with the composure of their Buddhas. They had peace of mind because they knew the futility of everything else. They knew that any nervous or emotional upset fails to exist in the presence of complete relaxation.

The best way to cure anger is to try and see oneself during a sulk or a tantrum, and convince oneself that whenever one allows self-control to slip, one is appearing in the guise of an undignified baboon, secretly laughed at and liable not only to lose friends and job but also wife and children. If one can do that and act accordingly, smiles will take the place of scowls, and gaiety will displace those awkward pauses in conversation when one enters a room. Health, too, will improve and bouts of nausea and painful indigestion will be as much a part of a forgotten past as the urge to punch people's noses or kick the dog. Above all, there will be Serenity and peace in the home and in the neighborhood.

Envy is almost the only vice which is practicable at all times and in every place; the only passion which can never lie quiet from want of irritation.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Chaper IV

Worrying about One's Social Standing

While some people are obsessed by their own importance, others are equally concerned with the importance of others, yearning to be like them or among them or to have what they have. They are possessed by that envy complex the futility of which has no equal. While Thou shalt not covet was the last of God's commandments, that makes it no less important to this search for Serenity than the other nine.

For those who insist that they have never had an inordinate desire to possess something belonging to someone else, let me use a colloquial expression which is synonymous with coveting: Keeping up with the Joneses, or with any outwardly more successful families or sets than your own the relative social stratum does not matter. It is the mere effort of trying to keep up with or outrival someone or something which counts.

Wherever one goes in North America, one notices this constant striving to eclipse the other fellow, the other wife, the other family. The better house, the better car, the better coat, even the better pots and pans obsess both men and women but chiefly women. They are harassed by these ambitions until the mania to outrival takes precedence over everything else and drives those who fall into mental depression and often into actual physical decline.

Class consciousness, too, is more accentuated in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world and helps to maintain this keeping-up mania. In an American small town, for instance, every man proclaims that every other is as good as he, but he does not really believe so. The chairman of the directors of a local department store does not invite the cashier to dine at his home any more than the floor manager goes to lunch with the garbage collector. The outward familiarity which one notices between frequenters of club cars on trains does not include invitations to the traveling salesman for week-end visits with the executives to whom they have stood drinks.

The American habit of calling chance acquaintances by their Christian names three minutes after a meeting does not indicate affection or even intimacy, and although it may be done to suggest equality with the exclusive Joneses, it has none of the significance of the same thing in other countries, where it often takes years to get into an informal social basis.

Keeping up with or climbing up to the position of the Joneses, with its accompanying worries, takes many strange forms, one of the strangest being in the matter of subscribing to charities. There are people I know who can no longer afford to give what they once did to the Community Chest, for instance, but do so in order to be listed in the same category as wealthy donors; while others, newly rich, make large contributions in order to attract attention and create envy.

One of the traits I noticed earliest in the Arabs was their lack of envy. Some I knew were exceedingly wealthy, with barely taxed incomes from their date palms and flocks but no one would have known it. Except on ceremonial occasions, the chiefs dressed in the same way as the shephards and lived in the same kinds of tents. A begger held out his hand with as much gesture of giving as receiving. There was no servility in his thanks to the alms giver, in fact there was no thanks at all other than an affirmation other that Allah would repay. Interestingly enough, both parties believed this so that painful and insincere relationship between the recipient of charity and its promoter woas never established. To an Arab, acquiring a better cloak or a better horse or a better tent, merely for the sake of outdoing another nomad, would appear to be sheer nonsense. If Abdallah or Moussa or Sliman wanted a new cloak or horse or tent, it would be because he wanted it for himself, not to impress others, who

would not anyway notice the addition of the new item.This is not to belittle honest competition, but to condemn competing with no other objective

than to outshine the neighbor, which, unfortunately, is more the rule than the exception in most communities.

One of the most interesting lectures I ever gave, from the point of view of audience reaction to this aspect of Serenity, occurred in Hollywood. My listener's attention was admirable until I reached that part of my talk which dealt with humility and envy. At that point, I suddenly realized that I was confronted by a galaxy of the most expensive furs and hats, to say nothing of jewelry, which had ever been gathered before me at a lecture anywhere. There they were, furry and feathery, gay and glittering, and there was I fruitlessly condemning the obsession to have more material things rather than developing inner virtues. Nor was there any alternative but to struggle on and let my exhortations rebound from wall to wall of the auditorium.

One of the most poignant examples of the fatuity of social competition is the spectacle of middle-aged widows who rock and regret on the verandas of summer resort hotels. There they sit, rocking and regretting, regretting and rocking. They have nothing to do, nothing to look forward to and usually little enough to look back on. And why so? Why do they rock in this derelict state of mind and body? Usually because their husbands worked frenziedly to give them means to maintain their false standards and died from the effort.

An American told me that she asked her twelve-year-old daughter, after a trip abroad, what had struck her most about her first contact with Europe. The reply was significant: There were as many old gen