43c | CR Book XII, Chapter 4

to aim at a similar self-emancipation with the aid
of the intellectual conquest of sense objects, but whose
purport and mode of execution is not clear from the
documents accessible to me. These are, in the Pali
scriptures, the 'eight stations of mastery', the first
three 'deliverances', and the four 'resting places of
consciousness', in the Tantra the meditation on the
sanskrit letter A, and on a picture of the full moon).

It is useful to prepare this work by a preliminary
disintegration of sensory experience, by habitually analysing per-
ceptions into the 18 elements. At times one may me-
thodically vary the manifold conditions of perception,
so as to create the conviction that sense-given dist-
inctions are unimportant, and have little, if any, basis
in, or bearing on, Reality. By learning to vary at will
the localisation of the perceived quality, and of the
perceiver, we diminish self-centredness. One may also
try to stress equally all stimuli in one field of
perception. The stature of the self and of its environ-
ment are considerably reduced when the 'now' is set
against the concrete image of long durations, and
the 'here' confronted with with the realisation of the imm-
ensity of space, and of its quantitative preponderance
over solid matter. The distance of perceived objects
from my self may be felt as irrelevant when one con-
centrates on evaluating their distance from the Tat-
hagata. Similarly, one can train oneself to disregard the
effect of temporal perspective, and to treat all events
as equally important whatever their position in time.
As a result one may induce a liberating experience of
vast width, transcending the narrow walls sense objects
build round the self, until any point in endless space
and in eternity are equally near, and equally far away.