The Reason/Way to Try

     I am never bored; I realize I don't need people to be happy and that all my friends are only pleasant memories that I have no wish to meet again in real life. Where does this loneliness of the soul come from? This happiness far from pleasure? This perfect contentment with my fate?
..... If I have attacks, sometimes it's because my illusions disappear too suddenly and that hurts me, sometimes it's because my faith in the beauties of life seems to be disappearing, but otherwise I am perfectly contented....
— Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin 1914-1920, p. 276.

[By Edward Carpenter, then in his 70's:]
"Your life will never be dull as long as the quest for knowledge gives interest to your thoughts. Better to travel hopefully and thoughtfully than to arrive."
— Eileen Garrett, Many Voices: Autobiography of a Medium, p. 41.

....For suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.
— A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, p. 87.

Unless you find paradise
at your own center,
there is not the smallest chance
that you may enter.
— Angelus Silesius, The Book of Angelus Silesius,
Federick Franck, p. 31.

....Already, before leaving America, he had written to a friend: "I am glad I was born, glad I suffered so, glad to enter peace. Whether this body will fall and release me or I enter into freedom in the body, the old man is gone, gone for ever, never to come back again! Behind my work was ambition, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift...."
— Vivekananda, in Vedanta for the Western World,
Christopher Isherwood (ed.), p. 25.

For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about like this:
     That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations.
     That the Ground is at once transcendant and immanent.
     That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground.
     That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.
     That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.
     That the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; and that the Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living Law of mortification and self-transcending awareness....
— Aldous Huxley, from "The Minimum Working Hypothesis,"
in Ibid., p. 34.

....Life contains a number of vivid sense-pleasures, and the gaps of despondency and boredom between them can be filled more or less adequately by hard work, sleep, the movies, drink and daydreaming. Old age brings lethargy and morphia will help you at the end. Life is not so bad, if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination. The disciplines proposed by the spiritual teachers are drastic, and the lazy will shrink back from them. They are tedious, also, and this will discourage the impatient. Their immediate results are not showy, and this will deter the ambitious. Their practice is apt to make you appear ridiculous to your neighbors. Vanity, sloth and desire will all intervene to prevent a man from setting his foot upon the path of religious effort.
     Disregarding all these obstacles, and they are tremendous, the beginner will have to say to himself: "Well, I am going to try. I believe that my teacher is sane and honest. I don't believe in his teachings with the whole of my mind, and I won't pretend that I do, but I have enough belief to make a start. My reason is not offended. My approach is strictly experimental. I will put myself into his hands, and trust him at least as far as I would trust my doctor, I will try to live the kind of life which he prescribes. If, at the end of three or four years, I can conscientiously say that I have done what was asked of me and had no results whatsoever, then I will give up the whole attempt as a bad job."
— Christopher Isherwood, from "Hypothesis and Belief,"
in Ibid., p. 40.