It’s not only so-called mystics and devotees of oriental religions who feel that there is something a little wrong or unnatural about our ordinary way of feeling ourselves and the surrounding world. For the psychologist as well as the mystic may easily hit upon the idea that human beings are bedeviled by a fundamental twist of perception, a distortion of their whole feeling of life, which lies at the root of a large constellation of moral, psychological, and spiritual problems.
It is one of my strongest intuitions—has been for years—that it is basically a very simple matter for man to shift from (what I will call) the egocentric to the universal mode of awareness.
If I understand that forced or intentional concentration is impossible, if I really know this to be so and thus give it up, I immediately and automatically acquire the feel of the mind’s innate and natural concentration, and so am enabled to use it.
If you have a New England conscience, you will be quite certain that anything which is easy or which feels easy is wrong. You will glory in effort for its own sake, and babble about the inherent splendor of the struggle of the human spirit against nature, thinking it all the more glorious just because it is fundamentally tragic—the point being not so much to succeed as to do battle; not to conquer, but to toughen the character.