Those claiming interest in achieving a state of mind vastly different from man’s ordinary one, have always pictured the matter as being both fragile and complex; from top to bottom, this is an error. For those with more than a mere claim of interest, nothing is more misleading than this belief.
The minds of the merely curious support this notion in many ways, several of which are, with the most simplistic people, the ache for another mental state is always given a supernatural setting, wherein the aspirants imagine that their efforts are connected to an attempt to please a deity. Certainly all dealings involving gods are going to be intricate and complicated, and must be handled with delicacy and tact, (to wit): “Trying to reach a state of enlightened spirituality is both fragile and complex.” Not true.
More proffered evidence by the dilettantes, is that the mind/psyche/personality of man is itself fragile and complex, and thus any efforts made to change same must themselves be fragile and complex. Not so.
Another historically salient explanation, for the presence of this error, is that the very nature of the undertaking is SO far removed from man’s everyday world, that staggering complexity must be expected, and delicacy of handling, the order of the day. A fallacy.
People to-this-sort-of-thing-born, are more dissatisfied with themselves than the average, and have a built in tendency to think of themselves as: “unusually complex and sensitive.” This fits perfectly with the overall picture of this sort of activity itself being fragile and complex. “After all,” would say they, “It is the humble, troubled souls of the world who long for enlighten-ment, not the haughty brutes. “Teresa of Avila,” they would say, “Not Alexander The Great.”
J.