Chapter 9Experiences and Realisations · Spiritual Experience as Substantial Experience

Your feeling [of spiritual experience as a “substance”] is quite correct. All spiritual experience is a substantial experience — consciousness, Ananda even are felt as something substantial. It is also true that it is felt so by something deeper than mind; it is the mind that turns concrete realities into abstractions.

* Yes, so long as the attitude is mental it is insecure because it is something imposed on the nature — a mental direction and control. But with the spiritual experience what begins is a change in the stuff of the consciousness itself and by that, as it proceeds to settle and confirm itself, begins naturally what we call the transformation of the nature.

* The phrase [“stuff of consciousness”] simply means “substance of consciousness”, the consciousness in itself.

As the Yogic experience develops, consciousness is felt as something quite concrete in which there are movements and formations which are what we call thoughts, feelings etc.

Chapter Two