There is a sequence of stages that underpins such peoples’ history in this matter. At first, (not too dissimilar from everyone else), they do not like the way life is; and if they progress, they move to a stage of not liking themselves. Should they get past that point, they reach a stage where they dislike the way they think about life and themselves. Beyond that stage few ever venture – but there is where the whole thing is.
Every ordinary, sane person thinks that the world outside of them is insane. (Outside of their mind, actually); this is neither true, nor not true. It is simply one of an infinite number of objectively meaningless concepts natural to ordinary consciousness. All you need do to get stuck at this stage is – be alive.
To a lesser degree, every ordinary, sane person also thinks of themselves as being short of satisfactory, but this is entertained in consciousness only for brief moments, and under non-routine conditions.
A few sane, but unordinary people, find their attention regularly focused on their own consciousness, and think of its operations as ill-becoming them individually. Their overall thinking accords sufficiently with the herds for them to function adequately therein, but in the privacy of their own head – they don’t like it.
It is people at this stage who seriously become involved with organized activity devoted to discovering another way that consciousness can run. As befits the mind, the activity will have a particular method of achieving the goal, and the participant becomes a student of the method.
To go from busy, monkey consciousness, to dead still, snake consciousness, you must go beyond the study of a method, to the study of the goal. The mind must have a map in hand to ever believe that it has started a journey toward the goal, but be aware that consciousness will quickly accept a periodic glancing at the map as actual travel.
J.