Book 4 (Part I)

73 say in this place, that Dhyana has to be classed as the most vivid and catastrophic of all experiences. This will be con- firmed by any one who has been there. It is, then, difficult to overrate the value that such an experience has for the individual, especially as it is his entire conception of things, including his most deep—seated conception, the standard to which he has always referred everything, his own self, that is overthrown; and when we try to explain it away as hallucination, temporary suspension of the faculties or something similar, we find ourselves unable to do so. You cannot argue with a flash of lightning that has knocked you down. Any mere theory is easy to upset. One can find flaws in the reason- ing process, one can assume that the premisses are in some way false; but in this case, if one attacks the evidence for Dhyana, the mind is staggered by the fact that all other experience, attacked on the same lines, will fall much more easily. In whatever way we examine it the result Will always be the same. Dhyana may be false; but, if so, so is everything else. Now the mind refuses to rest in a belief of the unreality of its own experiences. It may not be what it seems; but it must be something, and if (on the whole) ordinary life is something, how much more mus that be by whose light ordinary life seems nothing! The ordinary man sees the falsity and disconnectedness and purpose-