Writers throughout the ages have talked about an experience which we can call the transcendental experience - a deep inner experience. And you could look at what they wrote as theoretical, and that's the way I Iooked at it, as theoretical, until I began to have the same experiences myself, or similar experiences. You could read the writings of Thoreau, you could read the writings of Whitman to talk about some American writers, and they talk about inner experiences, transcendental experiences, and how those experiences related to their own life and outward experiences. And you could look at it simply as another belief system, but when you begin to experience it yourself, it isn't really a belief system. It's not a belief system in the sense that it's something you inherited from someone else, or something that you attached onto to give your life some meaning, it's a belief system in the sense that it grows out of some deep inner experience that you get, that I got, through Transcendental Meditation. Once I began to experience those feelings of inner bliss and coherence, I could read someone like, for example, Whitman, or philosophers like Plato, or prose writers like Emerson, and you could relate those experiences to the experiences that you were having. It deepens your experience of literature and makes you understand what the writers and sages were talking about, and it not only makes you understand them, but it makes you appreciate the coherence with which they expressed those feelings.