Become What You Are: Expanded Edition

If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit.

it is just a fad, just religiosity, and is precisely self-consciousness and affectation rather than unselfconsciousness and naturalness.

So many Westerners who do this kind of thing are so self-conscious about it, so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all.

I am inclined to feel that for most Westerners, these are not aids but obstacles to concentration. It is not unaffected and natural for us to assume the lotus posture and go through all sorts of spiritual gymnastics.

This is why self-consciousness is a constant inhibition of creative action,

We want to enjoy ourselves, and fear that if we forget ourselves there will be no enjoyment—an entertainment without anyone present to be entertained.

There is, perhaps, another difficulty—and this is that in the state of concentration, of clear unwavering attention, one has no self—that is, no self-consciousness. This is because the so-called self is a construct of words and memories, of fantasies which have no existence in immediate reality.

I am thinking, rather, of the old Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine which is like a raft for crossing a river. When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.

I have always found that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.