colour and size; moves its position; gets out of shape. And one of the 
essential difficulties in practice is that it takes a great deal of skill and 
experience to become really alert to what is happening. You can go on 
day-dreaming for quite long periods before realising that your thoughts 
have wandered at all. This is why I insist so strongly on the practices 
described above as producing alertness and watchfulness, and you will 
obviously realise that it is quite evident that one has to be in the pink of 
condition and in the most favourable mental state in order to make any 
headway at all. But when you have had a little practice in detecting and 
counting the breaks in your concentration, you will find that they 
themselves are useful, because their character is symptomatic of your 
state of progress. 
     20. Breaks are classed as follows:— 
     Firstly, physical sensations; these should have been overcome by 
Asana. 
     Secondly, breaks that seem to be indicated by events immediately 
preceding the meditation: their activity becomes tremendous. Only by 
this practice does one understand how much is really observed by the 
senses without the mind becoming conscious of it. 
     Thirdly, there is a class of break partaking of the nature of reverie or 
'day-dreaming.' These are very insidious—one may go on for a long time 
without realising that one has wandered at all. 
     Fourthly, we get a very high class of break, which is a sort of 
abberation of the control itself. You think, 'How well I am doing it!' or 
perhaps that it would be rather a good idea if you were on a desert island, 
or if you were in a sound-proof house, or if you were sitting by a 
waterfall. But these are only trifling variations from the vigilance itself. 
     A fifth class of break seems to have no discoverable source in the 
mind—such might even take the form of actual hallucination, usually 
auditory. Of course, such hallucinations are infrequent, and are 
recognised for what they are. Otherwise the student had better see a 
doctor. The usual kind consists of odd sentences, or fragments of 
sentences, which are quite distinctly heard in a recognisable human voice, 
not the student's own voice, or that of anyone he knows. A similar 
phenomenon is observed by wireless operators, who call such messages 
'atmospherics.' 
     There is a further kind of break, which is the desired result itself. 
     21. I have already indicated how tedious these practices become; how 
great the bewilderment; how constant the disappointment. Long before 
the occurrence of Dhyana, there are quite a number of minor results 
which indicate the breaking up of intellectual limitation. You must not be 
disturbed if these results make you feel that the very foundations of your 
mind are being knocked from under you. The real lesson is that, just as 
you learn in Asana, the normal body is in itself nothing but a vehicle of 
pain, so is the normal itself insane; by its own standards it is insane. You 
have only got to read a quite simple and elementary work like Professor 
Joad's Guide to Philosophy to find that any argument carried far enough