I.1 — The Offer

What is offered here is not to be believed. It is to be tried.

Take one claim — that the grip loosens when it is seen — and test it against one afternoon of your own attention. If it fails, discard it. Nothing here asks to survive its own failing. If it holds, you have learned the method, and the method is the whole of the teaching.

There is no one to please by agreeing with these pages and no one to disappoint by putting them down. They were written to be handled, not held. A teaching that cannot be tested is a stone in the pocket: heavy, and no use for anything but weight. A teaching that can be tested is a tool, and a tool has only one dignity, which is that it works.

So read this the way you would read instructions for a thing you have not yet built. Take a sentence, take it into an ordinary hour, and see. What you find there is the only authority this book will ever recognize, and it is yours.