just beginning to sing overhead. The laughter of a loon would sound, the call of an owl, the cry of a whip-poor-will; and then--the sun was up.
Thought ran, on these lonely nights, to everything except to present or recent happenings. Life, already half over as, at twenty-one, it then seemed to me, had proved a failure; my few trivial experiences appeared gigantic and oppressive. I felt very old. Present conditions, being unhappy and promising to become more unhappy still, I left aside. I had "accepted" them as Karma, I must go through with them, but there was no need to intensify or prolong unhappiness by dwelling on them. I therefore dismissed them, thought wandering to other things. All was coloured, shaped, directed by those Eastern teachings in which I was then entirely absorbed ... and the chief problem in my mind at the time, was to master the method of accepting, facing, exhausting, whatever life might bring, while being, as the Bhagavad Gita described, "indifferent to results," unaffected, that is, by the "fruits of action." Detachment, yet without shirking, was the nearest equivalent phrase I could find; a state, anyhow, stronger than the Christian "resignation," which woke contempt in me....
Unhappiness, though it may seem trivial now, both as to cause and quality, was very deep in me at the time. It had wakened an understanding of certain things I had read--as in the stolen "Patanjali" years before--without then grasping what they meant. These things I now was beginning to reach by an inner experience of them, rather than by an intellectual comprehension merely.... And, as thought ran backwards, escaping the unpleasant Hub and Dairy, to earlier days in the Black Forest School, to the Jura Mountains village, to family holidays among the Alps or on the west coast of Scotland, it reached in due course the year spent at Edinburgh University just before I left for Canada, and so to individuals there who had strongly influenced me:
I recalled Dr. H---- who used hypnotism in his practice,
taught me various methods of using it, and often
