The mind is like a mansion of many rooms. In each room there is a different reality. Thinking is one such room. To explore other rooms we must learn to cease thinking. The trouble is that ego barricades us in the thinking room so well that that room effectively detaches itself from the mansion and becomes a paltry outhouse – a garden shed – from which the mansion is impossible to access, and so forgotten. It then takes life-threatening trauma, stress or danger (the very things we strive to protect ourselves against) to thrust us, unsuspectingly, into a different mind-state, and thereby reveal that there are other realities available to us. Mind-expanding drugs will also do this, and as such are invaluable, but in my experience those that use them regularly become lazy.