Book 4 (Part I)

74 lessness of dreams,' he ascribes them (rightly) to a disordered mind. The philosopher looks upon waking life with similar contempt ; and the person who has experienced Dhyana takes the same View, but not by mere pale intellectual conviction. Reasons, hoWever cogent, never convince utterly; but this man in Dhyana has the same commonplace certainty that a man has on waking from a nightmare. “ I wasn’t falling down a thousand flights of stairs, it was only a bad dream.” Similarly comes the reflection of the man who has had experience of Dhyana: “ I am not that wretched insect, that imperceptible parasite of earth ; it was only a bad dream.” And as you could not convince the normal man that his nightmare was more real than his awakening, so you cannot convince the other that his Dhyana was hallucination, even though he is only too well aware that he has fallen from that state into “normal” life. It is probably rare for a single experience to upset thus radically the whole conception of the Universe, just as sometimes, in the first moments of waking, there remains a half-doubt as to whether dream or waking is real. But as one gains further experience, when Dhyana is no longer a shock, when the student has had plenty of time to make himself at home in the new world, this conviction will become absolute.1 ᾽It should be remembered that at present there are no data for determining the