A fellow traveller was an Italian returning from a year in India with his Guru. He was very calm and peaceful, a shining example of a happy spirit. That is, until a couple of days into the trip after spending time in a truck cab with a driver who was going through a psychotic break and would not stop talking. The guy staggered out of the truck looking for a cigarette, pleading for one of us to swap trucks with him. He had totally lost the serenity that he achieved during his year long quiet-time after getting smacked down by the physical universe.
I went through a slightly similar experience myself recently. When I returned from a several month long Scientology retreat, I landed myself a huge pile o' bitter choleric hateful antagonism from an unexpected source. At the time, I was also reading "Science of Survival" which goes into detail about the entanglement of life force with the physical universe. Reading that book gave me the understanding I needed to weather this situation and move on.
The thing about Scientology is that with auditing, you can get a bunch of spiritual improvement and feel great. The training, though, is the life raft that will keep you afloat so you don't have to stagger around looking for someone to bail you out of bad situations.
