The Book of Spinoza 4 · Written between lens-grindings, from his Ethics and his letters
This man wrote his own books. His pages are full of the word God, and his God has no will, no purpose, and does not hear prayer — which is what the Prologue means by god is the law. So the third rule cannot keep him out: he is the man who carried that rule all the way. One thing more is not from his hand, and this Order records it: at twenty-four his own community expelled him with the heaviest curse it had, and he was never taken back.
4.1I will tell you the most useful thing I know.
4.2An affect stops being what it was the moment you have seen it clearly.
4.3You hate a man. While you hate him it is one lump inside you.
4.4Sit down and take it apart piece by piece: what he did; what I took that to mean at the time; which thing I was afraid of losing —
4.5and by the end the lump is smaller.
4.6It was not pressed down. Pressing does not work; what is pressed down comes up somewhere else.
4.7It was seen smaller.
4.8Because what gives an affect its force is mostly some confused idea underneath it.
4.9Make the idea clear and the force has nowhere left to be applied.
4.10This does not mean one look is enough. Some of them take years.
4.11Nor that a man can see everything clearly. He cannot.
4.12I say only: whatever part of it you have seen clearly is the part you have taken back. (cf. The Highest Covenant 1.2)
4.13A man’s freedom in this matter is entirely here, and nowhere else.
4.14Men have said that freedom is doing what you want. That is not freedom. That is not knowing why you want it.
4.15Freedom is this: that what you do follows from what you are, and is not pushed into you from outside.