The Wandering Lunatic Mind.

Do not pay too much attention to the wandering lunatic mind.

When you have trained it, informed it, made it clear,
decisive, and your flexible instrument and tool,
Why, do not then reverse the order and become the mere
fatuous attendant and exhibitor of its acrobatic feats (like
a keeper who shows off a monkey).
Remember that if you walk away from it, leaving it as
dead, paying it no attention whatever–it will have to follow
you–it will grow by following, by reaching up to you, from
the known to the unknown, continually;
It will become at last the rainbow-tinted garment and
shining interpreter of Yourself, and incredibly beautiful,
But if you turn and wait always upon it, and its idiotic
cares and anxieties, and endless dream-chains of argument
and imagination–
Feeding them and the microbe-swarms of thought continually,
wasting upon them your life-force;
Why, then, instead of your Mind becoming your true
companion and interpreter, it will develop antics and a St. Vitus’ dance
of its own, and the form of a wandering lunatic,
Incredibly tangle-haired and diseased and unclean,
In whose features you, in sadness and in vain, will search
for your own image–terrified lest you find it not, and
terrified too lest you find it.

Therefore, quite decisively, day by day and at every juncture,
leave your Mind for a time in silence and abeyance;
With its tyrannous thoughts and demands, and funny
little fears and fancies–the long legacy of ages of animal evolution;
Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseen–
feeling with your feet if necessary through the darkness–
till some day it may follow you;
Absolutely determined not to be bound by any of its
conclusions; or fossilized in any pattern that it may invent;
For this were to give up your kingdom, and bow down your neck to Death.