Practices for the Quest goes to the heart of various disciplines, exercises, and techniques useful at various stages of spiritual self-discovery and self-development. It explains what qualities must be developed, why they must be developed, how they can be developed, and how that development is tested by life itself.
The previous category, The Quest, concerns itself with the discovery of the quest for self-realization and the general principles involved in spiritual seeking. Practices for the Quest concerns itself with an overview of the actually living the Quest, insofar as its goal can be approached through our own daily efforts. Many of the themes introduced here are developed more in the next eighteen categories of The Notebooks. This category presents the interrelationship of the various facets of the work involved. It makes clear the extent to which every element of our being must eventually be turned to that greatest of goals.
P.B. specified less by way of structure for this category than for any other in his overall outline of The Notebooks. He provided only the main title (Practices for the Quest, which he subtitled "An Overview of the Practices") and two principal subdivisions: "Ant's Long Path" and "Work on Oneself." Those of us working on this material found these two divisions--particularly the second--much too broad to give readers an adequate notion of the details the category explores. So we devised the structure and titles of all but the first chapter in this section. We structured the section as follows.
Chapters one through three are primarily for the person about to enter, or newly entered upon, the Quest. They examine what kind of development is necessary, and how to evaluate one's progress. Though these issues are somewhat abstract and theoretical, the perspective they offer is indispensable for getting a clear idea of what such a person is trying--or is about to start trying--to accomplish.
Chapter four begins a second level of approach to the practices: an approach that is relevant for all questers, no matter how long they have been practicing, no matter what experiences they have lived or what development they have achieved. This chapter and the rest in the category deal with issues that confront novice and proficient alike--both the person who has yet to experience any reliable inner illumination and the one who has achieved an abiding measure of success. P.B. makes eminently clear that while character development may not seem relevant at all stages of the Quest, it becomes--in the final stages--one of the most deciding factors in the passage to permanent enlightenment.
Most importantly, this category as a whole distinguishes, clarifies, and begins to reconcile two fundamentally different attitudes underlying and preconditioning stages of spiritual development: the "Long Path" of self-improvement and character development, and the "Short Path" of ego-renunciation and illumination. It shows the relative usefulness of each of these attitudes at appropriate stages of self-development. As P.B. clearly considered a certain amount of Long Path development an indispensable prerequisite to fruitful use of Short Path techniques, this section emphasizes the techniques and developments of the former. The Short Path attitude and its corresponding techniques, touched upon only briefly here, are fully developed in category twenty-three.
Editorial conventions for this category are the same as explained in the introductions to Perspectives and The Quest. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para here indicates that the para also appears in Perspectives.