Ι3
discover that no position is comfortable, though we never noticed it
before in all our lives!
This difficulty has been solved by a practice called Arcana, which will
be described later on.
Memories of the events of the day will bother us ; we must arrange
our day so that it is absolutely uneventful. Our minds will recall to us
our hopes and fears, our loves and hates, our ambitions, our envies,
and many other emotions. All these must be cut off.
We must have
absolutely no interest in life but that of quieting our minds.
This is the object of the usual monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience. If you have no property, you have no care, nothing to be
anxious about ; with chastity no other person to be anxious about, and
to distract your attention;
while if you are vowed to obedience the
question of what you are to do no longer frets: you simply obey.
There are a great many other obstacles which you will discover as
you go on, and it is proposed to deal with these in turn. But let us
pass by for the moment to the point where you are nearing success.
In your early struggles you may have found it difficult to conquer
sleep; and you may have wandered so far from the object of your
meditations without noticing it, that the meditation has really been
broken; but much later on, when you feel that you are “getting quite
good,” you will be shocked to find a complete oblivion of yourself and