Going by a system is often, though not necessarily, an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egos by trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulty of the task.  It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to the tomorrow which never comes, with the mock humility of, 'I'm not ready yet.  I don't deserve it.  Perhaps, if I work as hard as the great sages of old, I can get it in twenty years or in my next incarnation.'  But what if this is just self-punishment and spiritual masochism - lying as it were, on a bed of nails to assure oneself of 'authentic' existence?  Mortification of the ego is an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes to the same thing - of the feeling that it exists...My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.

• asceticism
• ego
• eternal present
• religion
• work
• self
• existence
• lying
• future
• eternity