horror of looking ridiculous. The man who loses his temper often thinks
he is doing something rather fine and majestic. On the contrary, so far
is this from being the fact, he is merely making an ass of himself. He
is merely parading himself as an undignified fool, as that supremely
contemptible figure--a grown-up baby. He may intimidate a feeble
companion by his raging, or by the dark sullenness of a more subdued
flame, but in the heart of even the weakest companion is a bedrock
feeling of contempt for him. The way in which a man of uncertain temper
is treated by his friends proves that they despise him, for they do not
treat him as a reasonable being. How should they treat him as a
reasonable being when the tenure of his reason is so insecure? And if
only he could hear what is said of him behind his back!...

The invalid can cure himself by teaching his brain the habit of dwelling
upon his extreme fatuity. Let him concentrate regularly, with intense
fixation, upon the ideas: 'When I lose my temper, when I get ruffled,
when that mysterious vibration runs through me, I am making a donkey of
myself, a donkey, and a donkey! You understand, a preposterous donkey! I
am behaving like a great baby. I look a fool. I am a spectacle bereft of
dignity. Everybody despises me, smiles at me in secret, disdains the
idiotic ass with whom it is impossible to reason.'

Ordinarily the invalid disguises from himself this aspect of his
disease, and his brain will instinctively avoid it as much as it can.
But in hours of calm he can slowly and regularly force his brain, by
the practice of concentration, to familiarise itself with just this
aspect, so that in time its instinct will be to think first, and not
last, of just this aspect. When he has arrived at that point he is
saved. No man who, at the very inception of the fire, is visited with a
clear vision of himself as an arrant ass and pitiable object of