A metaphysical tenet which has previously been studied is that the stored-up karmic impressions of world-experience live powerfully and continuously within the personal consciousness as thought-forms of those external things and beings which form the basis of its own separateness. Indeed, without his knowing it they compel the individual to think this world into his personal experience. Therefore man cannot have the body-thought without having the world-thought at the same time. The reverse is equally true. His consciousness of the physical ego is interlocked with his consciousness of the physical world. This is why he loses the conjoint consciousness of both during sleep when the "I"-thought lets go of the body-thought and is itself withdrawn into the mind. If now we consider meditation again, we find that when attention becomes so concentrated on its object that it actually identifies itself with it, then the consciousness of the latter as a separate existence stops altogether. The process which begins with simple concentration gradually flows until it consummates itself in deep reverie. Mentally there is then only a single thought and physically a state of intense self-absorption is induced. The latter will indeed seem to an outside observer to be what he is likely to call a "trance" and it is generally so called by writers on the subject of yoga. Hence when an ordinary yogi is able to bring his thinking operations to a dead stop as the climax of his practices, all these karmic impressions are annulled. The five senses then cease operating because the mind's attention is absent from their organs, with the consequence that the entire external world disappears from his field of consciousness and he passes into a trance. Nature, however, reasserts herself and revives the impressions, with the consequence that he passes out of his trance and back into world awareness again. If now he ruminates over what has happened to him he feels, then, that the world is only a thought.
-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism > Chapter 3 : The Individual and World Mind > # 72
