The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.
I could give 48 penalties in every match if I wanted to. It is a question of sometimes choosing what is - in your own mind - of material importance and what isn't, what might be a crucial potential penalty and what might not be.
When you completely extract yourself from anything familiar, you start reverting back to that state of mind where you're having conversations with yourself, and that's where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from.
But when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won't be focused. You're likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn't doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.
Earnsha was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.
The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.