Book 4 (Part I)

50 course the unhappy youth spends a disgusted week in thinking of little else. It is positively amazingwith what persistence a thought, even a whole train of thoughts, returns again and again to the charge. It becomes a positive nightmare. It is intensely annoying, too, to find that one does not become consciousthat one has got on to the forbidden subject until one has gone right through with it. However, one continues day after day investigating thoughts and trying to check them; and sooner or later one proceeds to the next stage, Dharana, the attempt to restrain the mind to a single object. Before we go on to this, however, we must consider what is meant by success in Pratyahara. This is a very extensive subject, and different authors take widely divergent views. One writer means an analysis so acute that every thought is resolved into a number of elements (see “The Psychology of Hashish,” Section V, in Equinox II). Others take the View that supcess in this practice is something like the experience which Sir Humphrey Davy had as a result of taking nitrous oxide, in which he exclaimed: “The universe is composed exclusively of ideas.” , Others say that it gives Hamlet’s feeling: “ There ’8 nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,” interpreted as literally as was done by Mrs. Eddy.