“Yet this is an absurd position—­for man, the heir of all the ages:  hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain.  If a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it.  We take off the boot and shake it out.  And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind.  About this there ought to be no mistake, no two opinions.  The thing is obvious, clear and unmistakable.  It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and all the rest of it.  He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.

“Yet the weary and careworn faces that we meet by thousands, even among the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too clearly how seldom this mastery is obtained.  How rare indeed to meet a man!  How common rather to discover a creature hounded on by tyrant thoughts (or cares or desires), cowering, wincing under the lash—­or perchance priding himself to run merrily in obedience to a driver that rattles the reins and persuades him that he is free—­whom we cannot converse with in careless tete-a-tete because that alien presence is always there, on the watch.

“It is one of the most prominent doctrines of Raja Yoga that the power of expelling thoughts, or if need be, killing them dead on the spot, must be attained.  Naturally the art requires practice, but like other arts, when once acquired there is no mystery or difficulty about it.  And it is worth practice.  It may indeed fairly be said that life only begins when this art has been acquired.  For obviously when instead of being ruled by individual thoughts, the whole flock of them in their immense multitude and variety and capacity is ours to direct and dispatch and employ where we list (’for He maketh the winds his messengers and the flaming fire His minister’), life becomes a thing so vast and grand compared with what it was before, that its former condition may well appear almost antenatal.

“If you can kill a thought dead, for the time being, you can do anything else with it that you please.  And therefore it is that this power is so valuable.  And it not only frees a man from mental torment (which is nine-tenths at least of the torment of life), but it gives him a concentrated power of handling mental work absolutely unknown to him before.  The two things are co-relative to each other.  As already said this is one of the principles of Raja Yoga.

“While at work your thought is to be absolutely concentrated in it, undistracted by anything whatever irrelevant to the matter in hand—­pounding away like a great engine, with giant power and perfect economy—­no wear and tear of friction, or dislocation of parts owing to the working of different forces at the same time.  Then when the work is finished, if there is no more occasion for the use of the machine, it must stop equally, absolutely—­stop entirely—­no worrying (as if a parcel of boys were allowed to play their devilments with a locomotive as soon as it was in the shed)—­and the man must retire into that region of his consciousness where his true self dwells.