This book consists of spiritual teachings and practices based on Vedanta. Equally useful for beginners as well as advanced aspirants, the book does shed shafts of light, dispelling the darkness of ignorance from the reader's heart. For a beginner, the book is a path-breaker; for an advanced aspirant, reassuring and strengthening; and for one already established in the goal, well, it should be a sheer delight. The book will benefit aspirants at any level, since it deals with Self-knowledge and the means to attain it.
Those who have succeeded in attaching or detaching their minds at will have succeeded in Pratyahara, which means gathering towards, checking the outgoing powers of the mind, freeing it from the thralldom of the senses. When we can do this, we shall really possess character; then alone we shall have taken a long step towards freedom. Before that, we are mere machines.
-Swami Vivekananda
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