My whole professional life had been unsatisfactory, with frequent changes and insecurity, which was but a natural repercussion of my rejection of security and status when at Oxford; and yet I was now enabled to retire at 51, when many more successful men, in the worldly sense of success, had years of professional work still before them.
The mind must be completely saturated by understanding of non-duality — that there is only the One Self. It is not enough to hold this as a theory.
After two to three years at Tiruvannamalai it became necessary to earn an income again and I took a job as an assistant editor of a newspaper in Madras, the nearest large town. Thus my destiny took the shape that Bhagavan approved for his followers — a period of intensive training followed by the practise of Self-enquiry in the life of the world.
“From the standpoint of the path of Knowledge, it is the supreme state of the Self. It is different from the ego, which you call your self.”
I told him, “think of Infinity as God and x as yourself. Now go and think it over and come tomorrow and tell me what you make of it.”