Synopsis: A demon mentors his nephew on how to bring the soul of man into hell.
Key Takeaways
Page 3 – Whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” was to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.
What is real and what is fake? Maybe our real distractions keep us from discovering what’s really important.
Page 7 – Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves to “do it on their own”.
God tests us everyday, will they carry out the tasks set for them?
Page 16 – It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
Keeping out pure and honest thoughts out, like praying or doing a good deed.
Page 16 – The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.
When we pray, do the feeling matter? No, focus on god, on his love.
Page 17 – Teach them to estimate the value of prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.
The feeling doesn’t matter, the act of prayer is what matters.
Page 18 – But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it – to the thing that has made, not the Person who has made him
The icon doesn’t matter, it’s what created the icon.
Page 37 – Humans are half spirit and half animal, as spirits they belong to the eternal world but as animals they inhibit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, there, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
Life is a struggle, and we must persevere through it
Page 51 – He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a “deeper,” “spiritual” world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea – the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction… and that to cease to do so would be “priggish,” “intolerant,” and… “Puritanical.
Fake friends will make us fake people
Page 59 – A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality and inattention in his prayers; but now you will find him opening his arms to you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with his Enemy. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say…’I now see that I spent most my life doing in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.
How much time do I waste avoiding contact that will is pure and unconditional?
Page 64 – The characteristics of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality, five minutes genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask the whole stratagem.
What is in your head is not real.
Page 65 – Remember, always, that He really like the little vermin (mankind), and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever
Its when we surrender to the will of God that we really become ourselves
Page 66 – You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.
Be who you are and not what society tell you to be.
Page 69 – The patient only hopes for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation. This is very bad.
Don’t expect grate things, daily bread
Page 69 – All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility.
If you think your humble are you really humble?
Page 70 – You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.
Be humble and live with humility, value opinions of for their truth
Page 71 – The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His longterm policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love—a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
Rejoice in the world because we are all worthy of his love
Page 72 – Your efforts to instil either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy’s side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame.
Where you ranks doesn’t matter, just leave it all out on the floor
Page 75 – The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the present. Either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
The past and future doesn’t exist, its only the now and eternity
Page 76 – Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
Forget about the future live in the here and now
Page 77 – His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity washes his mind of the whole subject, commit the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the future.
Do your best and leave the rest to the Almighty
Page 105 – For as things are, your man has now discovered the dangerous truth that these attacks don’t last forever; consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon – the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding.
This too shall pass
Page 111 – The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.
Have no claims, take life as it comes and do your best
Page 112 – The curious assumption “my time is my own”. The man can neither make nor retain one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift, he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels
How many people think they own time?
Page 135 – If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with Christian colouring.
One God, one faith, one love
Page 138 – The enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wantS men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions, is it righteous? Is I prudent? Is it possible?
Don’t worry about the big questions, just focus on the simple and reasonable.
Page 142 – A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for other; a man means not giving trouble to others
Understand we have different points of view.
Page 147 – The whole question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the chief subjects of his prayers. That means you have largely failed.
Pray for focus and not for distractions
Page 154 – At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, “taken out of himself” as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight.
Its in service to other we loose ourselves
Page 156 – Where Virtue is concerned ‘Experience is the mother of illusion’; but thanks to a change in fashion, and also of course, the historical point of view, we have largely rendered his book innocuous
Kant
Page 162 – What you must do is to keep running in his mind (side by side with the conscious intention of doing his duty) the vague idea of all sorts of things he can do or not do, inside the framework of the duty, which seem to make him a little safer. Get his mind off the simple rule (“I’ve got to stay here and do so-and-so”) into a series of imaginary life lines (“If A happened – though I very much hope it won’t – I could do B – and if the worst came to the worst, I could always do C”). Superstitions, if not recognised as such, can be awakened. The point is to keep him feeling that he has something, other than the Enemy and courage the Enemy supplies, to fall back on, so that what was intended to be a total commitment to duty becomes honeycombed all through with little unconscious reservations
Thy rod, thy staff comfort me
Page 167 – Exaggerate the weariness by making him think it will soon be over; for men usually feel that a strain could have been endured no longer at the very moment when it is ending, or when they think it is ending. In this, as in the problem of cowardice, the thing to avoid is the total commitment. Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it “for a reasonable period” – and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight
Carry on, always carry on
Final Thoughts: This book is profound. Life lessons in every page. The things I take away are; live in the moment, do what you want, work hard, pray simply and honestly, be humble and serve others. 10/10
Stranger in Sydney 