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Overview of Practices Involved → The Measure of Progress
He will have to recognize that not only the universe outside but his own nature inside is governed by precise laws, and that his spiritual progression is subject to such laws, too.
∫… The path may be a long one, but when success comes it comes unexpectedly and the final stages are short and rapid…
∫He has gone far on this path when his last thought on falling asleep at night is the Overself and his first thought on waking up in the morning is again the Overself.
∫You may certainly hope for success when the whole trend of your thinking and the whole trend of your action is strongly directed to this single purpose only, when you have resolutely subordinated personal feelings and temperamental predilections to the solution of the problem of truth.
∫He who has nurtured the thoughts and cultivated the stillness and behaved by the injunctions which philosophy has offered him will, when the late evening of his life comes, not only never regret it but be glad for it.
∫He may measure progress partly by the signs of strengthened intuition and partly by the signs of strengthened will.
∫Eventually, one will tend to dislodge oneself from less worthwhile pursuits. Ordinary automatic responses to these and other worldly affairs will cease as one feels the deepening need for thought-stilling and inner peace.
∫The mind must go on gradually parting with its ancient illusions, its time-fed prejudices, hardly aware of any progress, until one fateful day truth triumphs abruptly in a vivid flash of supreme illumination.
∫A mere belief in the soul’s existence is the first and shortest step. An intellectual study of its nature and a devotional discipline of the self is the next and longest step. A direct intuitive realization of the soul’s presence is the third and last one.
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