Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people as a result they have a stranglehold on you, they control your behaviour by their approval and disapproval they hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company to send you spirit soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people whether they be living or dead. You live by their norms conform to their standards, seek their company desire their love, you dread their ridicule, you long for their applause, you meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you, you are terrified to go against the passion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think and observe how you are just as dependent on them and enslaved by them when you control them as when they control you. For when you grip an object tightly you have gained control of the object but are also controlled by it, for you have lost the use of your hand.

To enjoy a poem or a landscape or a piece of music is a waste of time. You must produce a poem, or a composition or a work of art. Even to produce it is of little value in itself. Your work must be known. What good is it if no one ever knows it and even it it is known that means nothing if it is not applauded and praised by people. Your work achieves maximum value if it becomes popular and sells so you are right back again into the arms and control of people.

Think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs as the drug penetrates the body of the child it becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug to be without the drug is so unbearable or torment that is seems preferable to die. Now this is exactly what your society did to you when you were a child. You were not allowed to enjoy the solid nutritious food of life, birth and play and the company of people and the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drugs called approval, appreciation, attention, the drug called success, prestige, power. having got a taste for these artificial stimulants you became addicted and began to dread their loss. Hence the control you now feel terror at the prospect of failure of mistakes of the criticism of others. So you become cravenly dependent on people and you have lost your freedom other now have power to make you happy or miserable and as much as you now hate the suffering that this involves you find yourself completely helpless. There is never a minute when consciously or unconsciously you are not keenly attuned to the reaction of others. Marching to the drum of their demands, rather than dancing to the melody that welds up from within your being. When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people to beg for the comfort. The drug known as support, encouragement reassurance. To live with people in this state involves never-ending tension, but to live without them brings the agony of loneliness. You have lost your capacity to see them exactly as they are.

There are a lot of people you see who are troubled in our society and who seemed to be misfits and terribly unhappy because they just can't find the social role that they're supposed to fit in. They don't know who they are there is an inner pandemonium and conflict.

Whatever you are unaware of there you suffer, that brings suffering to you.