“The Western Mind can break things down into such finite elements that the central meaning is lost. You can take a rose, for example, and pull it apart, dissecting every element, analyzing the chemical structure of its perfume, and developing a whole array of theories — but you no longer have the rose you started with. What you have, scattered on the table, does not look like a flower, or smell like a flower. All its perfume, grace, and beauty are gone. The thirst of the mind for knowledge has destroyed it. This is not the tradition in the East. There, the idea is to pull things back into their basic oneness, into their essence, which is God. The Easterner would not dissect the flower but seek to identify with its essence, and within that essence would discover the joy which is within the flower, the beauty which is within the flower, and by experiencing that joy and beauty, he would worship God.”
“The Western Mind can break things down into such finite elements that the central meaning is lost. You can take a rose, for example, and pull it apart, dissecting every element, analyzing the chemical structure of its perfume, and developing a whole array of theories — but you no longer have the rose you started with. What you have, scattered on the table, does not look like a flower, or smell like a flower. All its perfume, grace, and beauty are gone. The thirst of the mind for knowledge has destroyed it. This is not the tradition in the East. There, the idea is to pull things back into their basic oneness, into their essence, which is God. The Easterner would not dissect the flower but seek to identify with its essence, and within that essence would discover the joy which is within the flower, the beauty which is within the flower, and by experiencing that joy and beauty, he would worship God.”
~Paramahansa Yogananda
~via Yogananda Returns, by Robert R. Leichtman, M.D.
Circle of the Dolphins 
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