Life is too tragically short at all times and too dismayingly swift-passing at the present time for us to find any pleasure in echoing to the last letter Patanjali's rules prohibiting the practice of meditation before character has been purified, desires dismissed, attachments broken, and asceticism followed. Hence we have not done so in past writings. If meditation is to be wooed only after a monkish virtue has been pursued and found, then the hope and possibility of a mystical inner life for twentieth-century man seem alien and remote. But this did not mean that we could not perceive the value or importance of those rules. On the contrary, by advocating constant reflection upon the lessons of earthly experience, by inserting such a theme into the formal meditation practices themselves, we took some of their essence without taking their appearance. This proved to be not enough, however. We found that the lack of equal or larger emphasis upon moral culture as upon meditation led many readers to neglect or even ignore the first whilst plunging recklessly into the second.
-- Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 1 : Preparatory > # 462
