In the spiritualization of active life, through the deeds that come from him and the events that come to him, he has one effectual method of self-development. For a valuable part of the quest's technique is to treat each major experience as a means of lifting himself to a higher level. All depends not on the particular nature of the experience, but upon his reaction to it. It may be pleasurable or painful, a temptation or a tribulation, a caress by fortune or a blow of fate; whatever its nature he can use it to grow. As he moves from experience to experience, he may move from strength to strength. If he uses each situation aright--studying it analytically and impersonally, supplicating the higher self for help if the experience is in the form of temptation, or for wisdom if it is in the form of tribulation--his progress is assured. Thus action itself can be converted into a technique of self-purification instead of becoming, as so many monastics think it inevitably must become, a channel of self-pollution.
-- Notebooks Category 2: Overview of Practices Involved > Chapter 5 : Balance the Psyche > # 96
