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.

Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm.

The point which emerges is that what we are counting or measuring in physics, and that what we are experiencing in everyday life as sense data, is at root unknown and probably unknowable.

For reason operates only on the surface of the mind, and however purely rational a man may suppose himself to be, when he sleeps he is caught unawares by the thoughts that he believes to have vanished.

The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point.

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.

Spiritual illumination is often described as absolute freedom of the soul, and we have seen that the One Reality is all-inclusive. Is the mind of the mystic singularly free and all-inclusive? If so, it would seem that his spirituality does not depend on thinking any special kinds of thoughts, on having a particular feeling ever in the background of

Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is—a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism. But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of

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.