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The excessive self-centeredness of ascetic mysticism, its passive enmity to an integral human life, its unworthy praise of pious indolence, its oyster-like indifference to human interests, and its narrow disparagement of the married state make it unfit to become a perfect ideal suited to our own times. What modern intelligence can accept and what modern heart can approve such an attitude? Asceticism is an important phase but it is not everything.

-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 3 : Philosophy, Mysticism, and The Occult > # 58