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When the editors of the popular Penguin series of paperback books asked me to write a manual on yoga, I declined but recommended my good friend Professor Earnest Wood. He was given the assignment. The reason for my refusal was that I had been too much identified with the exposition of yoga in the past and wanted to get a different, wider identity. Yoga was an essential preparation, but all too often it led to a self-conscious spirituality, a professional truth-seeking, that shut out other important facets of life as trivial. I felt, with Japanese Zen and Chinese Ch'an, that the ordinary everyday life, the world, the body, the arts, could not be ignored without loss, that a fuller vision included them all.

-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 4 : Reflections On Truth > # 176