If the wrong mental attitude is brought to the practice of these meditation exercises, if tension is introduced in the beginning and frustration later, then how can the further stage of contemplation ever be reached? If the ego is tightly clung to all the time, if its motive and desire in undertaking the practice is to acquire more powers for itself, more status in the human situation, more results of being "spiritual" without paying the price involved, then the merger of self into Overself in the final stage cannot be attained. For the ego will either fail to stop its thinking activity or, succeeding, will be lulled but not mastered, will enter a psychic not a real spiritual condition, will achieve pseudo-enlightenment. While trying to follow the usual instructions on meditation, what is actually done defeats its ultimate purpose and prevents its getting beyond a certain point. For the mind is being used wrongly simply because it is habitually used in that way. By "wrongly" is meant: "for the purposes of meditation," however right and long-established it may be for all other and ordinary purposes. The alternative to this predicament is to take to a different road from the start, to do at the beginning what will anyway inescapably have to be done at the end. The easiest method for this is to "affirm the divine Presence, Reality," and not to let go of the affirmation. This turns attention away from the ego and directs it to the thought-free Infinity which can swallow it.
-- Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 2 : Place and Condition > # 306
