However it turns out that the two-state Hamiltonian H of benzene is not diagonal. The off-diagonal elements result into lowering of energy and the benzene molecule stabilizes in a structure which is a superposition of these symmetric ones with energy E − − < E . For any general two-state system avoided level crossing repels the eigenstates | ψ ψ + ⟩ ⟩ and | ψ ψ − − ⟩ ⟩ such that it requires more energy for the system to achieve the higher energy configuration.