ble in our
boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out.
And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an
intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. About this there ought to
be no mistake, no two opinions. The thing is obvious, clear and
unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from
your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can
do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and
all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged
phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.

"Yet the weary and careworn faces that we meet by thousands, even among
the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too clearly how seldom
this mastery is obtained. How rare indeed to meet a _man_! How common
rather to discover a creature hounded on by tyrant thoughts (or cares or
desires), cowering, wincing under the lash--or perchance priding himself
to run merrily in obedience to a driver that rattles the reins and
persuades him that he is free--whom we cannot converse with in careless
_tete-a-tete_ because that alien presence is always there, on the watch.

"It is one of the most prominent doctrines of Raja Yoga that the power of
expelling thoughts, or if need be, killing them dead on the spot, _must_
be attained. Naturally the art requires practice, but like other arts,
when once acquired there is no mystery or difficulty about it. And it is
worth practice. It may indeed fairly be said that life only begins when
this art has been acquired. For obviously when instead of being ruled by
individual thoughts, the whole flock of them in their immense multitude
and variety and capacity is ours to direct and dispatch and employ where
we list ('for He maketh the winds his messengers and the flaming fire His
minister'), life becomes a thing so vast and grand compared with what it
was before, that its former condition may well appear almost antenatal.

"If you can kill a thought dead, for the time being, you can do anything
else with it that you please. And therefore it is that this power is so
valuable. And it not only frees a man from mental torment (which is
nine-tenths at least of the torment of life), but it gives him a
concentrated power of handling mental work absolutely unknown to him
before. The two things are co-relative to each other. As already said
this is one of the principles of Ra