When we attach ourselves to this (idea of enlightenment), we lose our balance: we infallibly enter the crooked way.

"Our experience, our deepest experience, has taught us something; [and] we wish to convey it to others. When they question its validity, we become angry, losing our mental serenity by holding so firmly to what is after all more intangible than snowflakes or the rainbow. It is not merely calmness of mind that we have lost, however, but what is this and more, [what we have lost is] the Middle Way, the knowledge (and practice) that our profoundest interpretation of life also must be thrown overboard together with the sentimentality, cruelty, snobbery, and folly that make our lives a misery.

"The Crooked Way is not a morally distorted manner of life. It is composed of virtues as much as of vices, of ideals, religious dogmas, principles of freedom and justice, as much as of degradation and tyranny, The Crooked-Way is over-grieving at inevitable sorrows, over-clinging to joys which must cease; it is regarding as permanent what is but transitory; always looking for the silver lining, desiring to be in the non-existent and impossible "Land beyond the morning star."