Recall the kind of feeling you have when you succeed, when you have made it, when you get to the top, when you win a game or an argument.And contrast it with the kind of feeling you get when you really enjoy the job you are doing, you are absorbed in, the action you are currently engaged in. . . .Notice the qualitative difference between the worldly feeling and the soul feeling.. . .Now attempt to understand the true nature of worldly feelings—of self-promotion, self-glorification.They are not natural, they were invented by your society and your culture to make you productive and to make you controllable.These feelings do not produce the nourishment and happiness that is produced when one contemplates nature or enjoys the company of one's friends or one's work.They were meant to produce thrills, excitement—and emptiness.
Think of the high noon of summer, or of the stillness of a snow-covered country, how the heat or lightness everywhere gives an intense sense of overflowing and abounding life, making a quietness of rapture rather than fear. Such, only of a deeper and far more intimate kind, is the atmosphere of waiting souls...Gradually, as mind, soul and even body grow still, sinking deeper and deeper into the life of God, the pettiness, the tangles, the failures of the outer life begin to be seen in their true proportions, and the sense of the divine infilling, uplifting, redeeming Love becomes real and illuminating.