The Bowl of Saki Commentary

This has various aspects. For instance the whole material life is dependent upon mental faculty. This is proven by the fact that without nerve-energy, there could be no muscular motion; it is even clearer when we examine sense-activity and still more when we consider the intellectual aspects of life.

Concentration is a process by which will masters mind, and this leads to a greater collectivity of mental power which can be adapted to whatever purposes are necessary or advisable. But there is another stage which comes when one abandons this mastery. Through the abandonment of particular faculties of mind, one may advance into the Buddhic stage. Then the mind becomes as a garden which may be planted and sown, just as a physical garden may be planted and sown. And as one need not identify oneself with matter-stuff, neither is it necessary to identify oneself with mind-stuff, although it may appear to many that the intellectual life is the basic life.

Moral qualities appear when the heart is opened, which comes spontaneously through the abandonment of identity with mind-stuff, which of itself sloughs off the vestiges of the false ego.