At the end of all this work what does he get? Does he touch reality? The answer is no. He simply gets one thought instead of another, replaces an old thought by a new one. There is here a danger that the replacement may be the exact opposite of the thought which it replaces--as if he were substituting a correct concept for an erroneous one. But this still does not bring him into reality, the knowledge of which is Truth. There is indeed only one way out of this impasse and that is to recognize that the plane of thoughts and concepts is not the plane which holds the real but must be transcended. This realization is a kind of crisis which enables him to admit that the way of the intellect is in the end a circular way leading from one thought to another and that it must be transcended. But the thinking has led to one useful result, though it is indeed a negative result: it has told him what reality is not, and the use of thought has enabled him to destroy the belief that thought is the way to the goal. This reminds one of Ramakrishna's illustrative metaphor about the use of one thorn to remove another which had got stuck in the finger. And so, this point reached, it is but one step further to perceive that the consciousness which holds all thoughts is what he's really seeking and not those projections from it which appear as concepts, ideas, and thoughts. There, in this consciousness, he can come to peace: the peace of the silent Mind, the transcendental Mind. Once he has become steeped deeply in this realization, he perceives with full clarity that it is not the movement from one set of beliefs or one set of ideas to a new one which is going to complete his search but the redirection of attention to THAT which is behind all thoughts--the reorientation of concentration to THAT which is in the gap between two thoughts.
If this is done with perseverance and sustained with patience, Truth dawns upon him either slowly or swiftly and then stays with him forever and cannot be broken by any form of materialism in thinking, of dualism in belief, or personality cult in practice. He looks henceforth only to the infinitude of Being which is within him, within the cosmos, and has always been so. If indeed in meditation the world disappears, he does not need to go so far as the Advaitans and assert that there is no world! If in wide activity it reappears, he knows it is still a phenomenon, an appearance made by mind, issuing forth from mind, and the Ultimate Mind was there and is there now. Whatever form thoughts and concepts may take, he knows them for what they are and does not let go of That which is their ultimate origin. This is real knowledge, for it is practice, it is life and not a concept.
-- Notebooks Category 7: The Intellect > Chapter 1 : The Place of Intellect > # 213
