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 Actors understand this. They only get a sense of reality when they throw themselves into a part. . . . a false centre.

The cat understands pure being, which is all we need to know and which it takes us a lifetime to learn. It is both subject and object. It is its own outlet and its own material. It is. All the rest of us are divided bits of self, some here, some there. The cat has a complete subjective unity. Being its own centre, it radiates electricity in all directions. It is magnetic and impervious. I have known people to keep a cat so that they could stroke the electricity out of it. Why didn't they know how to be electric as the cat IS? The cat is the fine specimen of the I am. Who of us is so fully the I am that I am?

Look around the world! Everybody putting himself out in some form or another! Why? It doesn't do any good. At the end you exhaust the possibilities of the outside world—geographically and spiritually. You can use up the external. You can come to the end of objectifying and objectives, and then what? In the end, only what we started with—the Self in the body, the Self at home, where it was all the time while bits of it were wandering outside.

Peter applauded with sundry bravos and benisons and divers amens, but was moved to ask, Does the cat know this? Has the cat got a conscious being? Does he appreciate his advantage?