Progressive Stages of the Quest.
1. Glimpses and flashes of insight.
Consciousness is the unique element in every experience.
Once we learn the secret of our true nature we begin to perceive.
A ray from the Overself will shine upon our normal mind and transform and transfigure it. But moments of spiritual ecstasy are heralds of the high state which is yet to come when the Overself is taken fully into our councils and we have let go of the terrestrial ego with its dwarfed personal viewpoint.
2. Surrender of the ego.
To give up the "I" is very hard, yet that is our one and only task. The right attitude eclipses the ego and brings peace, whereas the wrong attitude enhances the ego and brings pain.
Habitually if unconsciously we split all experience into the world that is known and the I that knows it, into the "not I" and the "I."
Consider what happens when we become intensely interested in a story unfolding itself on a cinema screen. What happens during the deepest points of such concentration? For the time being we actually forget ourselves, and we drop the whole burden of personal memories, relations, desires, anxieties, and pettinesses which constitute the ego. Temporarily the "I" is transcended. The attainment of the Overself is nothing more than the ability to detach, not destroy, the ego at will.
Our sufferings arise out of our own failings, out of our inability to pass tests unconsciously invoked by our entry into the orbit of this quest. But even those sufferings, like all which come out of such contacts, carry tremendous spiritual lessons, and we can, if we will, turn them to great profit and inner progress. For what is progress after all? It is movement from the standpoint of the ego to that of the non-ego, the Overself.
The personality is but a transient shadow; a shadow presupposes a light; the light of the real self exists; renounce living in the shadow and move over to the light.
Personal bias is often quite unconscious and constitutes a hindrance on the path to truth.
Jesus said, "Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven." What did he mean? Consider the minds of children in whom the ego is but little developed. How egoless they are. How spontaneous and immediate is their knowledge of the world around them.
The giving up of thoughts leads to the giving up of the personal self.
In his quietest moments a man hears in the depths of his being a voice which tells him that he comes from a country to which one day he must return.
3. The lonely nature of the path.
Some complain that this quest makes them feel inwardly lonely and isolated. That is true. In one sense the study of philosophy will condemn the student to a forlorn solitude, for he will find few that care for it and many who despise it. But the loneliness is to help him to find and feel the presence of the best companion, the Overself. This brings him into sympathetic touch with all mankind through its revelation of unity. The feeling of isolation is only the inevitable differentiation from the self-deceived, the superficial, and the intuitionally backward.
4. Preparation and tests.
Preparation must precede enquiry. No student can profitably undertake Vedantic enquiry who skips through this earlier stage. His enquiries will always be limited in depth and scope as well as ineffective in final result if he lacks the sound training of intelligence which should come first.
Do not be impatient. For you are learning the alphabet of a higher life. When you have mastered that you will begin to form words, and later sentences, and in time whole paragraphs. You must prolong through years, if needs be, this disciplining of mind and mood.
Teak, which is among the hardest woods in the world, is cut from what is one of the slowest growing trees in the world. Perhaps the teak tree which we have seen growing in the Far East and nowhere else has picked up something of the Buddhistic atmosphere of those lands, with their wonderful patience, as befits a faith which perceives life to be beginningless and endless; we do not know. Anyway, the moral is that the higher the goal the longer it takes to reach, and that the better the goal the more patient the aspirant must be in his struggles to reach it.
An authoritative Tibetan text says, "The best sign of spiritual progress is the gradual lessening of passions and selfishness." But the emphasis should be laid on the word "gradual." The student, like most earthborn mortals, may suffer from sporadic outbursts of sudden passion or shameful anger. But this is insufficient reason for abandoning the quest. The sincere student will always be conscious that the path must be followed despite the grey hours of despondency and failure. It will always call him back with such insistency that he will now know life will grant him rest only when the goal is attained.
We may well feel that we fall far short of that standard which should be attained by enlightened people, but this does not mean that the quest is too difficult for us. It means rather that we must patiently pursue our way undeterred by failures, knowing that what is not achieved during the present incarnation will surely if gradually be achieved during coming incarnations. It means that we are never to permit hope to desert us but only to temper it with understanding.
Most of us cannot help being mistaken at times, but all of us can help being stubborn after our mistakes have been pointed out to us, either by our own experiences or by another human being.
We start with psychology, proceed to epistemology, and end with ontology. In other words, we start with what is given to consciousness, we proceed to what is really known, and we discover that knowing must end in being.
Realization is not a mere feeling because feeling is sub-rational. It is not a mere concept because concepts are finite. Yet it fulfils the demands of both feeling and reason inasmuch as it contains both categories. Paradoxically, however, it also transcends them. The flux of life is transformed into diviner shapes.
-- Notebooks Category 2: Overview of Practices Involved > Chapter 3 : Uncertainties of Progress > # 29
