This truly extraordinary urge to force one’s consciousness to arouse itself, as it were, from a sluggish, fanciful dream world of thought to a more accurate and informative state of unprejudiced awareness, is so different from any other thought a man will ever have. Its singularity gives it a patina of quantitative substance that demonstratively is not there. The only thing that is there – the only thing standing between you and abject ordinariness – is that one thought, the: “I want to wake up” thought.
You have not been called by the gods, nor selected by The Great Secret Himalayan Brotherhood, to achieve enlightenment. It is not your duty; it is not your curse. It is just a thought whose potential was part of your inherent wiring, and which got activated, but has always been, and will always be, but one thought out of the many hordes that endlessly sweep across the steppes of your mental geography, and which, like any face in the crowd, must struggle for attention.
It is not hard to wake up because everything in life is arranged to oppose it. The difficulty comes not from your personal weakness or stupidity, (though you may be both). The problem is that you only have one thought out of all the others that wants to change the very conditions in which all the others operate.
It is one-against-many. It is indeed, one against a potentially limitless number, and not a single one of your other thoughts has the interest. Some can lend a passive ear when the one thought is yacking about it, but none of the others will ever join in the struggle, and neither will, nor can any of the thoughts of other people ever assist.
J.