Decrease in Growth

The decisive decrease is the ego's, and this is where the work sits now: sacrificing the attachments that swell it — the wanting, the clinging, the irritation, the negation. The image names the daily practice plainly: curb your anger, restrain your appetites. Those are the two great inflations, answered by one great discipline. Simplicity is not the absence of wealth; it is wealth relocated inward, and a season of outward less is precisely a season of inward more. Live within your actual resources without grasping past your reach (line 2's boundary — increase yourself, but never by throwing your substance away). What you genuinely surrender is not lost; it is banked in a deeper account.

The most welcome decrease of all is line 4's — your own faults, honestly diminished. Review the attitudes obstructing you, the preoccupation with what others did or might do, and resist naming the problem or contriving a solution before the true perception arrives. Every fault reduced lowers the wall around you; those kept at a distance by your sharpness come gladly near as it softens. Self-correction is hospitality. Line 3 refines the company you keep, outer and inner — release the surplus allegiance and the crowd of competing wants, so a genuine bond has room to form. And the deepest instruction: decrease your own light to increase others'. Serving without seeking the glory of it is decrease perfected — and it returns as the only increase that keeps (line 5).