The practical half of the doctrine of states, and Neville's chief complaint about successful men. Look over the roster of the world - the great men, the politicians - and go back a short time and they were all as you are now, with no reason to believe they would be what they are and no more intelligence or power than you. Ninety-nine per cent of them, he says, stumbled into these states. The objection to stumbling is not moral but practical and turns on what happens afterwards: convulsions always take place and a man is emptied from his state, and one who fell in without knowing it was a state - who thought it was simply a natural thing based upon his birth - may never find his way back. One who entered deliberately can re-enter at will, whatever convulsion comes. Hence the instruction repeated three times in this lecture: don't fall into it, go into it deliberately, with your eyes wide open. His evidence is nine hundred letters at home, each testifying to a deliberate entrance into a state by people who knew nothing of this beforehand: they decided on a state, entered it, viewed the world from it as though it were true, and it became real in a way they could not consciously define or devise. About fourteen lectures carry 'fall into a state'.