The importance of the mental attitude with which the meditator enters this supreme experience is immense. For it is truly creative. Thought maketh the man. It is here that the meditator's interference may alter the results that should legitimately be expected from this enlargement of consciousness. Such interference may take the shape, for example, of insisting on attaching his intellectual preconceptions and emotional complexes to the Overself in anticipation of what he thinks it is or ought to be. He will usually emerge from this experience with a view of the significance coloured by his previous habitual thought and distinctive life. If, for instance, he enters it out of ascetic escapism, as often happens, out of a quest of refuge from a world with whose trials or temptations, existence or values he cannot cope, he will return with a strengthened denunciation of the world's worthlessness. This faulty interpretation of his mystical experience is due not only to the immaturity of his intellectual ideas but also to the bias of his emotional temperament.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 15 : Illuminations > # 56
