Transcriber's note:

 In the original book, the Table of Contents was located after the Preface, but I have placed it at the beginning of the text for this online version. 

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM

by

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Author of "Mysticism, " "The Mystic Way, " "Immanence: A Book of Verses. "

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. "WILLIAM BLAKE

New YorkE. P. Dutton & Company681 Fifth AvenueCopyright 1915 byE. P. Dutton & Company

TO THE UNSEEN FUTURE

CONTENTS

 Preface vii I. What is Mysticism 1 II. The World of Reality 13 III. The Preparation of the Mystic 21 IV. Meditation and Recollection 56 V. Self-Adjustment 29 VI. Love and Will 74 VII. The First Form of Contemplation 87 VIII. The Second Form of Contemplation 105 XI. The Third Form of Contemplation 126 X. The Mystical Life 148

PREFACE

This little book, written during the last months of peace, goes topress in the first weeks of the great war. Many will feel that insuch a time of conflict and horror, when only the most ignorant, disloyal, or apathetic can hope for quietness of mind, a bookwhich deals with that which is called the "contemplative" attitudeto existence is wholly out of place. So obvious, indeed, is thispoint of view, that I had at first thought of postponing itspublication. On the one hand, it seems as though the dreams of aspiritual renaissance, which promised so fairly but a little timeago, had perished in the sudden explosion of brute force. On theother hand, the thoughts of the English race are now turned, andrightly, towards the most concrete forms of action--struggle andendurance, practical sacrifices, difficult and long-continuedeffort--rather than towards the passive attitude of self-surrenderwhich is all that the practice of mysticism seems, at first sight, todemand. Moreover, that deep conviction of the dependence of allhuman worth upon eternal values, the immanence of the DivineSpirit within the human soul, which lies at the root of a mysticalconcept of life, is hard indeed to reconcile with much of thehuman history now being poured red-hot from the cauldron ofwar. For all these reasons, we are likely during the present crisisto witness a revolt from those superficially mystical notionswhich threatened to become too popular during the immediatepast. 

Yet, the title deliberately chosen for this book--that of "Practical"Mysticism--means nothing if the attitude and the discipline whichit recommends be adapted to fair weather alone: if the principlesfor which it stands break down when subjected to the pressure ofevents, and cannot be reconciled with the sterner duties of thenational life. To accept this position is to reduce mysticism to thestatus of a spiritual plaything. On the contrary, if the experienceson which it is based have indeed the transcendent value forhumanity which the mystics claim for them--if they reveal to us aworld of higher truth and greater reality than the world ofconcrete happenings in which we seem to be immersed--then thatvalue is increased rather than lessened when confronted by theoverwhelming disharmonies and sufferings of the present time. Itis significant that many of these experiences are reported to usfrom periods of war and distress: that the stronger the forces ofdestruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual visionwhich opposed them. We learn from these records that themystical consciousness has the power of lifting those whopossess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, candisturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck. Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldlycalm, isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life. Rather, it gives them renewed vitality; administering to thehuman spirit not--as some suppose--a soothing draught, but themost powerful of stimulants. Stayed upon eternal realities, thatspirit will be far better able to endure and profit by the sterndiscipline which the race is now called to undergo, than thosewho are wholly at the mercy of events; better able to discern thereal from the illusory issues, and to pronounce judgment on thenew problems, new difficulties, new fields of activity nowdisclosed. Perhaps it is worth while to remind ourselves that thetwo women who have left the deepest mark upon the militaryhistory of France and England--Joan of Arc and FlorenceNightingale--both acted under mystical compulsion. So, too, didone of the noblest of modern soldiers, General Gordon. Theirnational value was directly connected with their deep spiritualconsciousness: their intensely practical energies were the flowersof a contemplative life. 

We are often told, that in the critical periods of history it is thenational soul which counts: that "where there is no vision, thepeople perish. " No nation is truly defeated which retains itsspiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which doesnot emerge with soul unstained. If this be so, it becomes a part oftrue patriotism to keep the spiritual life, both of the individualcitizen and of the social group, active and vigorous; its vision ofrealities unsullied by the entangled interests and passions of thetime. This is a task in which all may do their part. The spirituallife is not a special career, involving abstraction from the worldof things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realisedit he is not a complete human being, has not entered intopossession of all his powers. It is therefore the function of apractical mysticism to increase, not diminish, the total efficiency, the wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to practise it. Itwill help them to enter, more completely than ever before, intothe life of the group to which they belong. It will teach them tosee the world in a truer proportion, discerning eternal beautybeyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them ina charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer onthem an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, even inthe hour of greatest desolation, "There lives the dearest freshnessdeep down things. " As a contribution, then, to these purposes, this little book is now published. It is addressed neither to thelearned nor to the devout, who are already in possession of awide literature dealing from many points of view with theexperiences and philosophy of the mystics. Such readers arewarned that they will find here nothing but the re-statement ofelementary and familiar propositions, and invitations to adiscipline immemorially old. Far from presuming to instructthose to whom first-hand information is both accessible andpalatable, I write only for the larger class which, repelled by theformidable appearance of more elaborate works on the subject, would yet like to know what is meant by mysticism, and what ithas to offer to the average man: how it helps to solve hisproblems, how it harmonises with the duties and ideals of hisactive life. For this reason, I presuppose in my readers noknowledge whatever of the subject, either upon the philosophic, religious, or historical side. Nor, since I wish my appeal to begeneral, do I urge the special claim of any one theologicalsystem, any one metaphysical school. I have merely attempted toput the view of the universe and man's place in it which iscommon to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and tosuggest the practical conditions under which ordinary personsmay participate in their experience. Therefore the abnormal statesof consciousness which sometimes appear in connection withmystical genius are not discussed: my business being confined tothe description of a faculty which all men possess in a greater orless degree. 

The reality and importance of this faculty are considered in thefirst three chapters. In the fourth and fifth is described thepreliminary training of attention necessary for its use; in thesixth, the general self-discipline and attitude toward life which itinvolves. The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters treat in anelementary way of the three great forms of contemplation; and inthe tenth, the practical value of the life in which they have beenactualised is examined. Those kind enough to attempt the perusalof the book are begged to read the first sections with someattention before passing to the latter part. 

E. U. 

_September_ 12, 1914. 

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS MYSTICISM?

Those who are interested in that special attitude towards theuniverse which is now loosely called "mystical, " find themselvesbeset by a multitude of persons who are constantly asking--somewith real fervour, some with curiosity, and some with disdain--"What _is_ mysticism?" When referred to the writings of themystics themselves, and to other works in which this questionappears to be answered, these people reply that such books arewholly incomprehensible to them. 

On the other hand, the genuine inquirer will find before long anumber of self-appointed apostles who are eager to answer hisquestion in many strange and inconsistent ways, calculated toincrease rather than resolve the obscurity of his mind. He willlearn that mysticism is a philosophy, an illusion, a kind ofreligion, a disease; that it means having visions, performingconjuring tricks, leading an idle, dreamy, and selfish life, neglecting one's business, wallowing in vague spiritual emotions, and being "in tune with the infinite. " He will discover that itemancipates him from all dogmas--sometimes from all morality--and at the same time that it is very superstitious. One expert tellshim that it is simply "Catholic piety, " another that Walt Whitmanwas a typical mystic; a third assures him that all mysticism comesfrom the East, and supports his statement by an appeal to themango trick. At the end of a prolonged course of lectures, sermons, tea-parties, and talks with earnest persons, the inquireris still heard saying--too often in tones of exasperation--"What_is_ mysticism?"

I dare not pretend to solve a problem which has provided somuch good hunting in the past. It is indeed the object of this littleessay to persuade the practical man to the one satisfactory course:that of discovering the answer for himself. Yet perhaps it willgive confidence if I confess pears to cover all the ground; or atleast, all that part of the ground which is worth covering. It willhardly stretch to the mango trick; but it finds room at once for thevisionaries and the philosophers, for Walt Whitman and thesaints. 

Here is the definition:--

_Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is aperson who has attained that union in greater or less degree; orwho aims at and believes in such attainment_. 

It is not expected that the inquirer will find great comfort in thissentence when first it meets his eye. The ultimate question, "What is Reality?"--a question, perhaps, which never occurred tohim before--is already forming in his mind; and he knows that itwill cause him infinite-distress. Only a mystic can answer it:and he, in terms which other mystics alone will understand. Therefore, for the time being, the practical man may put it on oneside. All that he is asked to consider now is this: that theword "union" represents not so much a rare and unimaginableoperation, as something which he is doing, in a vague, imperfectfashion, at every moment of his conscious life; and doing withintensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments of thatlife. We know a thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it;by an interpenetration of it and ourselves. It gives itself to us, justin so far as we give ourselves to it; and it is because our outflowtowards things is usually so perfunctory and so languid, that ourcomprehension of things is so perfunctory and languid too. Thegreat Sufi who said that "Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is toescape the flame of separation" spoke the literal truth. Wisdom isthe fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of thosewho "keep themselves to themselves, " and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have never truly known. 

Because he has surrendered himself to it, "united" with it, thepatriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which isinconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Realknowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more orless intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols oftouch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analyticthought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension, the union: and we, in our muddle-headed way, have persuadedourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge--that it is, infact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it. But whenwe get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitiveactivities through which our mental kitchen gets its supplies, wesee that the distinction between mystic and non-mystic is notmerely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, betweenintellect and intuition. The question which divides them is reallythis: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shallconsciousness seize upon--with what aspects of the universe shallit "unite"?

It is notorious that the operations of the average humanconsciousness unite the self, not with things as they really are, but with images, notions, aspects of things. The verb "to be, "which he uses so lightly, does not truly apply to any of theobjects amongst which the practical man supposes himself todwell. For him the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged: heconceives not the living lovely, wild, swift-moving creaturewhich has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on thedeplorable dish which he calls "things as they really are. " Socomplete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from thefacts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough"understanding, " garnishing, assimilating the carcass from whichthe principle of life and growth has been ejected, and whereofonly the most digestible portions have been retained. He is not"mystical. "

But sometimes it is suggested to him that his knowledge is notquite so thorough as he supposed. Philosophers in particular havea way of pointing out its clumsy and superficial character; ofdemonstrating the fact that he habitually mistakes his own privatesensations for qualities inherent in the mysterious objects of theexternal world. From those few qualities of colour, size, texture, and the rest, which his mind has been able to register andclassify, he makes a label which registers the sum of his ownexperiences. This he knows, with this he "unites"; for it is hisown creature. It is neat, flat, unchanging, with edges welldefined: a thing one can trust. He forgets the existence of otherconscious creatures, provided with their own standards of reality. Yet the sea as the fish feels it, the borage as the bee sees it, theintricate sounds of the hedgerow as heard by the rabbit, theimpact of light on the eager face of the primrose, the landscape asknown in its vastness to the wood-louse and ant--all theseexperiences, denied to him for ever, have just as much claim tothe attribute of Being as his own partial and subjectiveinterpretations of things. 

Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the mostpart to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coinof experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, theinfinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simplydo not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then thatsymbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some greatemotion, some devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, liftsus to another level of consciousness; and we are aware for amoment of the difference between the neat collection of discreteobjects and experiences which we call the world, and the height, the depth, the breadth of that living, growing, changing Fact, ofwhich thought, life, and energy are parts, and in which we "liveand move and have our being. " Then we realise that our wholelife is enmeshed in great and living forces; terrible becauseunknown. Even the power which lurks in every coal-scuttle, shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declaresitself in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and growth, issupersensual. We do but perceive its results. The more sacredplane of life and energy which seems to be manifested inthe forces we call "spiritual" and "emotional"--in love, anguish, ecstasy, adoration--is hidden from us too. Symptoms, appearances, are all that our intellects can discern: suddenirresistible inroads from it, all that our hearts can apprehend. Thematerial for an intenser life, a wider, sharper consciousness, amore profound understanding of our own existence, lies at ourgates. But we are separated from it, we cannot assimilate it;except in abnormal moments, we hardly know that it is. We nowbegin to attach at least a fragmentary meaning to the statementthat "mysticism is the art of union with Reality. " We see that theclaim of such a poet as Whitman to be a mystic lies in the factthat he has achieved a passionate communion with deeper levelsof life than those with which we usually deal--has thrust past thecurrent notion to the Fact: that the claim of such a saint as Teresais bound up with her declaration that she has achieved union withthe Divine Essence itself. The visionary is a mystic when hisvision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of thesenses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyondthought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is amystic when he knows his actions to be a part of a greateractivity. Blake, Plotinus, Joan of Arc, and John of the Cross--there is a link which binds all these together: but if he is to makeuse of it, the inquirer must find that link for himself. All fourexhibit different forms of the working of the contemplativeconsciousness; a faculty which is proper to all men, though fewtake the trouble to develop it. Their attention to life has changedits character, sharpened its focus: and as a result they see, some awider landscape, some a more brilliant, more significant, moredetailed world than that which is apparent to the less educated, less observant vision of common sense. The old story of Eyes andNo-Eyes is really the story of the mystical and unmystical types. "No-Eyes" has fixed his attention on the fact that he is obliged totake a walk. For him the chief factor of existence is his ownmovement along the road; a movement which he intends toaccomplish as efficiently and comfortably as he can. He asks notto know what may be on either side of the hedges. He ignores thecaress of the wind until it threatens to remove his hat. He trudgesalong, steadily, diligently; avoiding the muddy pools, butoblivious of the light which they reflect. "Eyes" takes the walktoo: and for him it is a perpetual revelation of beauty and wonder. The sunlight inebriates him, the winds delight him, the very effortof the journey is a joy. Magic presences throng the roadside, orcry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The richworld through which he moves lies in the fore-ground of hisconsciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step. "No-Eyes, " when told of his adventures, usually refuses tobelieve that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that hiscompanion has been floating about in the air, or beset byagreeable hallucinations. We shall never persuade him to thecontrary unless we persuade him to look for himself. 

Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man ishere invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing andbrightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation fromthe fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levelsof the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe whichthe spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. Thisamount of mystical perception--this "ordinary contemplation, " asthe specialists call it--is possible to all men: without it, they arenot wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural humanactivity, no more involving the great powers and sublimeexperiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than theordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powersof the great musician. 

As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone--though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning thanother men--so the world of Reality exists for all; and all mayparticipate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and tothe strength and purity of their desire. "For heaven ghostly, " says_The Cloud of Unknowing_, "is as nigh down as up, and up asdown; behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other. Inasmuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, thenthat same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and thenext way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet. " Nonetherefore is condemned, save by his own pride, sloth, orperversity, to the horrors of that which Blake called "singlevision"--perpetual and undivided attention to the continuouscinematograph performance, which the mind has conspired withthe senses to interpose between ourselves and the living world. 

CHAPTER II

THE WORLD OF REALITY

The practical man may justly observe at this point that the worldof single vision is the only world he knows: that it appears to himto be real, solid, and self-consistent: and that until the existence--at least, the probability--of other planes of reality is made clear tohim, all talk of uniting with them is mere moonshine, whichconfirms his opinion of mysticism as a game fit only for idlewomen and inferior poets. Plainly, then, it is the first business ofthe missionary to create, if he can, some feeling of dissatisfactionwith the world within which the practical man has always livedand acted; to suggest something of its fragmentary and subjectivecharacter. We turn back therefore to a further examinationof the truism--so obvious to those who are philosophers, soexasperating to those who are not--that man dwells, under normalconditions, in a world of imagination rather than a world of facts;that the universe in which he lives and at which he looks is but aconstruction which the mind has made from some few amongstthe wealth of materials at its disposal. 

The relation of this universe to the world of fact is not unlike therelation between a tapestry picture and the scene which itimitates. You, practical man, are obliged to weave your image ofthe outer world upon the hard warp of your own mentality; whichperpetually imposes its own convention, and checks the freerepresentation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various andfull of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so theworld of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series ofstatic elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtlecurves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinerycannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countlesssuggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the realworld presents to you, you snatch one here and there. Of theseyou weave together those which are the most useful, the mostobvious, the most often repeated: which make a tidy and coherentpattern when seen on the right side. Shut up with this symbolicpicture, you soon drop into the habit of behaving to it as though itwere not a representation but a thing. On it you fix your attention;with it you "unite. " Yet, did you look at the wrong side, at themany short ends, the clumsy joins and patches, this simplephilosophy might be disturbed. You would be forced to acknowledgethe conventional character of the picture you have madeso cleverly, the wholesale waste of material involved in theweaving of it: for only a few amongst the wealth of impressionswe receive are seized and incorporated into our picture of theworld. Further, it might occur to you that a slight alteration in therhythm of the senses would place at your disposal a completenew range of material; opening your eyes and ears to sounds, colours, and movements now inaudible and invisible, removingfrom your universe those which you now regard as part of theestablished order of things. Even the strands which you havemade use of might have been combined in some other way; withdisastrous results to the "world of common sense, " yet withoutany diminution of their own reality. 

Nor can you regard these strands themselves as ultimate. As themost prudent of logicians might venture to deduce from a skeinof wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the rawstuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe whichtranscends the reproductive powers of your loom. Even thecamera of the photographer, more apt at contemplation than themind of man, has shown us how limited are these powers in somedirections, and enlightened us as to a few of the cruder errors ofthe person who accepts its products at face-value; or, as he wouldsay, believes his own eyes. It has shown us, for instance, that thegalloping race-horse, with legs stretched out as we are used to seeit, is a mythical animal, probably founded on the mental image ora running dog. No horse has ever galloped thus: but its real actionis too quick for us, and we explain it to ourselves as somethingresembling the more deliberate dog-action which we have caughtand registered as it passed. The plain man's universe is full ofrace-horses which are really running dogs: of conventionalwaves, first seen in pictures and then imagined upon the sea: ofpsychological situations taken from books and applied to humanlife: of racial peculiarities generalised from insufficient data, andthen "discovered" in actuality: of theological diagrams andscientific "laws, " flung upon the background of eternity as themagic lantern's image is reflected on the screen. 

The coloured scene at which you look so trustfully owes, in fact, much of its character to the activities of the seer: to that processof thought--concept--cogitation, from which Keats prayed with sogreat an ardour to escape, when he exclaimed in words whichwill seem to you, according to the temper of your mind, either aninvitation to the higher laziness or one of the most profoundaspirations of the soul, "O for a life of sensations rather thanthoughts!" He felt--as all the poets have felt with him--thatanother, lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders, alivewith ultimate music, awaited those who could free themselvesfrom the fetters of the mind, lay down the shuttle and theweaver's comb, and reach out beyond the conceptual image tointuitive contact with the Thing. 

There are certain happy accidents which have the power ofinducting man for a moment into this richer and more vitalworld. These stop, as one old mystic said, the "wheel of hisimagination, " the dreadful energy of his image-making powerweaving up and transmuting the incoming messages of sense. They snatch him from the loom and place him, in the nakedsimplicity of his spirit, face to face with that Other than himselfwhence the materials of his industry have come. In these hourshuman consciousness ascends from thought to contemplation;becomes at least aware of the world in which the mystics dwell;and perceives for an instant, as St. Augustine did, "the light thatnever changes, above the eye of the soul, above the intelligence. "This experience might be called in essence "absolute sensation. "It is a pure feeling-state; in which the fragmentary contacts withReality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness ofcommunion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a waywhich the reason can never understand, that Totality of whichfragments are known by the lover, the musician, and the artist. Ifthe doors of perception were cleansed, said Blake, everythingwould appear to man as it is--Infinite. But the doors of perceptionare hung with the cobwebs of thought; prejudice, cowardice, sloth. Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: tooarrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have itsway. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make thattransition: for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning ofthe soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wildbirds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged withwonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise ofthe gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that theyhave lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a worldof morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance oflife. 

There will be many who feel a certain scepticism as to thepossibility of the undertaking here suggested to them; a prudentunwillingness to sacrifice their old comfortably upholstereduniverse, on the mere promise that they will receive a newheaven and a new earth in exchange. These careful ones may liketo remind themselves that the vision of the world presented to usby all the great artists and poets--those creatures whose veryexistence would seem so strange to us, were we not accustomedto them--perpetually demonstrates the many-graded character ofhuman consciousness; the new worlds which await it, once itfrees itself from the tyranny of those labour-saving contrivanceswith which it usually works. Leaving on one side the more subtleapprehensions which we call "spiritual, " even the pictures of theold Chinese draughtsmen and the modern impressionists, ofWatteau and of Turner, of Manet, Degas, and Cezanne; thepoems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman--these, andcountless others, assure you that their creators have enjoyeddirect communion, not with some vague world of fancy, but witha visible natural order which you have never known. These haveseized and woven into their pictures strands which neverpresented themselves to you; significant forms which elude you, tones and relations to which you are blind, living facts for whichyour conventional world provides no place. They prove by theirworks that Blake was right when he said that "a fool sees not thesame tree that a wise man sees"; and that psychologists, insistingon the selective action of the mind, the fact that our preconceptionsgovern the character of our universe, do but teach the mostdemonstrable of truths. Did you take them seriously, as youshould, their ardent reports might well disgust you with thedull and narrow character of your own consciousness. 

What is it, then, which distinguishes the outlook of great poetsand artists from the arrogant subjectivism of common sense?Innocence and humility distinguish it. These persons prejudgenothing, criticise nothing. To some extent, their attitude to theuniverse is that of children: and because this is so, theyparticipate to that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According totheir measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live alife in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than onthought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was thatideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with theessence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which afew great mystics appear to have possessed--not indeed in itsentirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, "one withthe Reality of things. " The greater the artist is, the wider anddeeper is the range of this pure sensation: the more sharply he isaware of the torrent of life and loveliness, the rich profusion ofpossible beauties and shapes. He always wants to press deeperand deeper, to let the span of his perception spread wider andwider; till he unites with the whole of that Reality which he feelsall about him, and of which his own life is a part. He is alwaystending, in fact, to pass over from the artistic to the mysticalstate. In artistic experience, then, in the artist's perennial effortto actualise the ideal which Keats expressed, we may find a point ofdeparture for our exploration of the contemplative life. 

What would it mean for a soul that truly captured it; this life inwhich the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, themessages the world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticateduniverse into which our clever brains transmute them? Plainly, itwould mean the achievement of a new universe, a new order ofreality: escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life, where everything is classified and labelled, and all the gradedfluid facts which have no label are ignored. It would mean aninnocence of eye and innocence of ear impossible for us toconceive; the impassioned contemplation of pure form, freedfrom all the meanings with which the mind has draped anddisguised it; the recapturing of the lost mysteries of touch andfragrance, most wonderful amongst the avenues of sense. Itwould mean the exchanging of the neat conceptual world ourthoughts build up, fenced in by the solid ramparts of the possible, for the inconceivable richness of that unwalled world from whichwe have subtracted it. It would mean that we should receive fromevery flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the label"flower" has been affixed, but the full impact of its unimaginablebeauty and wonder, the direct sensation of life having communionwith life: that the scents of ceasing rain, the voice oftrees, the deep softness of the kitten's fur, the acrid touch of sorrelon the tongue, should be in themselves profound, complete, andsimple experiences, calling forth simplicity of response in oursouls. 

Thus understood, the life of pure sensation is the meat and drinkof poetry, and one of the most accessible avenues to that unionwith Reality which the mystic declares to us as the very object oflife. But the poet must take that living stuff direct from the fieldand river, without sophistication, without criticism, as the life ofthe soul is taken direct from the altar; with an awe that admits notof analysis. He must not subject it to the cooking, filteringprocess of the brain. It is because he knows how to elude thisdreadful sophistication of Reality, because his attitude to theuniverse is governed by the supreme artistic virtues of humilityand love, that poetry is what it is: and I include in the sweep ofpoetic art the coloured poetry of the painter, and the wordlesspoetry of the musician and the dancer too. 

At this point the critical reader will certainly offer an objection. "You have been inviting me, " he will say, "to do nothing more orless than trust my senses: and this too on the authority of thoseimpracticable dreamers the poets. Now it is notorious that oursenses deceive us. Every one knows that; and even your ownremarks have already suggested it. How, then, can a wholesaleand uncritical acceptance of my sensations help me to unite withReality? Many of these sensations we share with the animals: insome, the animals obviously surpass us. Will you suggest that myterrier, smelling his way through an uncoordinated universe, is abetter mystic than I?"

To this I reply, that the terrier's contacts with the world aredoubtless crude and imperfect; yet he has indeed preserved adirectness of apprehension which you have lost. He gets, andresponds to, the real smell; not a notion or a name. Certainly thesenses, when taken at face-value, do deceive us: yet the deceptionresides not so much in them, as in that conceptual world whichwe insist on building up from their reports, and for which wemake them responsible. They deceive us less when we receivethese reports uncooked and unclassified, as simple and directexperiences. Then, behind the special and imperfect stammeringswhich we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, wesometimes discern a _whole fact_--at once divinely simple andinfinitely various--from which these partial messages proceed;and which seeks as it were to utter itself in them. And we feel, when this is so, that the fact thus glimpsed is of an immensesignificance; imparting to that aspect of the world which we areable to perceive all the significance, all the character which itpossesses. The more of the artist there is in us, the more intensethat significance, that character will seem: the more complete, too, will be our conviction that our uneasiness, the vagueness ofour reactions to things, would be cured could we reach and unitewith the fact, instead of our notion of it. And it is just such an actof union, reached through the clarified channels of sense andunadulterated by the content of thought, which the great artist orpoet achieves. 

We seem in these words to have come far from the mystic, andthat contemplative consciousness wherewith he ascends to thecontact of Truth. As a matter of fact, we are merely consideringthat consciousness in its most natural and accessible form: forcontemplation is, on the one hand, the essential activity of allartists; on the other, the art through which those who choose tolearn and practise it may share in some fragmentary degree, according to their measure, the special experience of the mysticand the poet. By it they may achieve that virginal outlook uponthings, that celestial power of communion with veritable life, which comes when that which we call "sensation" is freed fromthe tyranny of that which we call "thought. " The artist is no moreand no less than a contemplative who has learned to expresshimself, and who tells his love in colour, speech, or sound: themystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special andexalted kind, who tries to express something of the revelation hehas received, mediates between Reality and the race. In the gameof give and take which goes on between the human consciousnessand the external world, both have learned to put the emphasisupon the message from without, rather than on their own reactionto and rearrangement of it. Both have exchanged the falseimagination which draws the sensations and intuitions of the selfinto its own narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them, for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater universe. 

CHAPTER III

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC

Here the practical man will naturally say: And pray how am Igoing to do this? How shall I detach myself from the artificialworld to which I am accustomed? Where is the brake that shallstop the wheel of my image-making mind?

I answer: You are going to do it by an educative process; a drill, of which the first stages will, indeed, be hard enough. You havealready acknowledged the need of such mental drill, suchdeliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of life. You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing andsharpening of attention which you call a "business training, " a"legal education, " the "acquirement of a scientific method. " Butthis new undertaking will involve the development and thetraining of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow inthe past; the acquirement of a method you have never usedbefore. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work anddiscipline should be needed for this: that it should demand ofyou, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues ofthe golf course. 

The education of the mystical sense begins in self-simplification. The feeling, willing, seeing self is to move from the various andthe analytic to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence whichmay cause hard breathing and mopping of the brows on the partof the practical man. Yet it is to you, practical man, reading thesepages as you rush through the tube to the practical work ofrearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that thismessage so needed by your time--or rather, by your want of time--is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading theadvertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observethe stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive ofthe crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The essenceof mystical contemplation is summed in these two experiences--union with the flux of life, and union with the Whole in which alllesser realities are resumed--and these experiences are wellwithin your reach. Though it is likely that the accusation willannoy you, you are already in fact a potential contemplative: forthis act, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, is proper to all men--is, indeed, the characteristic human activity. 

More, it is probable that you are, or have been, an actualcontemplative too. Has it never happened to you to lose yourselffor a moment in a swift and satisfying experience for which youfound no name? When the world took on a strangeness, and yourushed out to meet it, in a mood at once exultant and ashamed?Was there not an instant when you took the lady who now ordersyour dinner into your arms, and she suddenly interpreted to youthe whole of the universe? a universe so great, charged with soterrible an intensity, that you have hardly dared to think of itsince. Do you remember that horrid moment at the concert, whenyou became wholly unaware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpennyseat? Those were onsets of involuntary contemplation; suddenpartings of the conceptual veil. Dare you call them the leastsignificant, moments of your life? Did you not then, like theAfrican saint, "thrill with love and dread, " though you were notprovided with a label for that which you adored?

It will not help you to speak of these experiences as "mereemotion. " Mere emotion then inducted you into a world whichyou recognised as more valid--in the highest sense, more rational--than that in which you usually dwell: a world which had awholeness, a meaning, which exceeded the sum of its parts. Mereemotion then brought you to your knees, made you at once proudand humble, showed you your place. It simplified and unifiedexistence: it stripped off the little accidents and ornaments whichperpetually deflect our vagrant attention, and gathered up thewhole being of you into one state, which felt and knew a Realitythat your intelligence could not comprehend. Such an emotion isthe driving power of spirit, and august and ultimate thing: andthis your innermost inhabitant felt it to be, whilst your eyes wereopen to the light. 

Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mysticalexperience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality intothe _one_ which is really you--into the "unity of your spirit, " asthe mystics say--the great forces of love, beauty, wonder, grief, may do for you now and again. These lift you perforce from theconsideration of the details to the contemplation of the All: turnyou from the tidy world of image to the ineffable world of fact. But they are fleeting and ungovernable experiences, descendingwith dreadful violence on the soul. Are you willing that yourparticipation in Reality shall depend wholly on these incalculablevisitations: on the sudden wind and rain that wash your windows, and let in the vision of the landscape at your gates? You can, ifyou like, keep those windows clear. You can, if you choose toturn your attention that way, learn to look out of them. These arethe two great phases in the education of every contemplative: andthey are called in the language of the mystics the purification ofthe senses and the purification of the will. 

Those who are so fortunate as to experience in one of its manyforms the crisis which is called "conversion" are seized, as itseems to them, by some power stronger than themselves andturned perforce in the right direction. They find that thisirresistible power has cleansed the windows of their homely coatof grime; and they look out, literally, upon a new heaven and newearth. The long quiet work of adjustment which others mustundertake before any certitude rewards them is for theseconcentrated into one violent shattering and rearranging of theself, which can now begin its true career of correspondence withthe Reality it has perceived. To persons of this type I do notaddress myself: but rather to the ordinary plodding scholar of life, who must reach the same goal by a more gradual road. 

What is it that smears the windows of the senses? Thought, convention, self-interest. We throw a mist of thought betweenourselves and the external world: and through this we discern, asin a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it inthe way in which our neighbours see it; sometimes through apink veil, sometimes through a grey. Religion, indigestion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes. The prismaticcolours of a fashionable school of art may stain them. Inevitably, too, we see the narrow world our windows show us, not "initself, " but in relation to our own needs, moods, and preferences;which exercise a selective control upon those few aspects of thewhole which penetrate to the field of consciousness and dictatethe order in which we arrange them, for the universe of thenatural man is strictly egocentric. We continue to name the livingcreatures with all the placid assurance of Adam: and whatsoeverwe call them, that is the name thereof. Unless we happen to beartists--and then but rarely--we never know the "thing seen" in itspurity; never, from birth to death, look at it with disinterestedeyes. Our vision and understanding of it are governed by all thatwe bring with us, and mix with it, to form an amalgam withwhich the mind can deal. To "purify" the senses is to releasethem, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentricjudgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion forclassification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfishquestion, "What does it mean to _me_?" learn to dip ourselves inthe universe at our gates, and know it, not from without bycomprehension, but from within by self-mergence. 

Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence of all purificationis self-simplification; the doing away of the unnecessary andunreal, the tangles and complications of consciousness: and wemust remember that when these masters of the spiritual life speakof purity, they have in their minds no thin, abstract notion of arule of conduct stripped of all colour and compounded chiefly ofrefusals, such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set up. Their purity is an affirmative state; something strong, clean, andcrystalline, capable of a wholeness of adjustment to thewholeness of a God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a lensfrom which all irrelevancies and excrescences, all the beams andmotes of egotism and prejudice, have been removed; so that itmay reflect a clear image of the one Transcendent Fact withinwhich all others facts are held. 

 "All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms, But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. "

All the details of existence, all satisfactions of the heart andmind, are resumed within that Transcendent Fact, as all thecolours of the spectrum are included in white light: and wepossess them best by passing beyond them, by following back themany to the One. 

The "Simple Eye" of Contemplation, about which the mysticwriters say so much, is then a synthetic sense; which sees thatwhite light in which all colour is, without discrete analysis of itsproperties. The Simple Ear which discerns the celestial melody, hears that Tone in which all music is resumed; thus achievingthat ecstatic life of "sensation without thought" which Keatsperceived to be the substance of true happiness. 

But you, practical man, have lived all your days amongst theillusions of multiplicity. Though you are using at every instantyour innate tendency to synthesis and simplification, since thisalone creates the semblance of order in your universe--thoughwhat you call seeing and hearing are themselves great unifyingacts--yet your attention to life has been deliberately adjusted to aworld of frittered values and prismatic refracted lights: full ofincompatible interests, of people, principles, things. Ambitionsand affections, tastes and prejudices, are fighting for yourattention. Your poor, worried consciousness flies to and froamongst them; it has become a restless and a complicated thing. At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm ofbees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears tobe a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not ashopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon theperiphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world ofappearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you arenot able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one withthe rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists:the permanent being which persists through and behind the flowand change of your conscious states. You have been snatched tothat centre once or twice. Turn your consciousness inward to itdeliberately. Retreat to that point whence all the various lines ofyour activities flow, and to which at last they must return. Sincethis alone of all that you call your "selfhood" is possessed ofeternal reality, it is surely a counsel of prudence to acquaintyourself with its peculiarities and its powers. "Take your seatwithin the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus, " cries the Easternvisionary. "Hold thou to thy Centre, " says his Christian brother, "and all things shall be thine. " This is a practical recipe, not apious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but youcan do it if you will: standing back, as it were, from the vagueand purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vitalenergies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certaindetachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it:can discern too, if you be at all inclined to mystical adventure, thestages of the road along which you must pass on your waytowards harmony with the Real. 

This universe, these possibilities, are far richer, yet far simplerthan you have supposed. Seen from the true centre of personality, instead of the usual angle of self-interest, their scattered partsarrange themselves in order: you begin to perceive thosegraduated levels of Reality with which a purified and intensifiedconsciousness can unite. So, too, the road is more logicallyplanned, falls into more comprehensible stages, than those whodwell in a world of single vision are willing to believe. 

Now it is a paradox of human life, often observed even by themost concrete and unimaginative of philosophers, that man seemsto be poised between two contradictory orders of Reality. Twoplanes of existence--or, perhaps, two ways of apprehendingexistence--lie within the possible span of his consciousness. Thatgreat pair of opposites which metaphysicians call Being andBecoming, Eternity and Time, Unity and Multiplicity, and othersmean, when they speak of the Spiritual and the Natural Worlds, represents the two extreme forms under which the universe canbe realised by him. The greatest men, those whose consciousnessis extended to full span, can grasp, be aware of, both. Theyknow themselves to live, both in the discrete, manifested, ever-changeful parts and appearances, and also in the Whole Fact. They react fully to both: for them there is no conflict between theparochial and the patriotic sense. More than this, a deep instinctsometimes assures them that the inner spring or secret of thatWhole Fact is also the inner spring and secret of their individuallives: and that here, in this third factor, the disharmonies betweenthe part and the whole are resolved. As they know themselves todwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcendingit, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivablyexceeds all that they know to be--as the soul of the musiciancontrols and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody, but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadencesmust play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid life, that"inward light" which these men find at their own centres whenthey seek for it, is for them an earnest of the Uncreated Light, theineffable splendour of God, dwelling at, and energising withinthe heart of things: for this spark is at once one with, yet separatefrom, the Universal Soul. 

So then, man, in the person of his greatest and most livingrepresentatives, feels himself to have implicit correspondenceswith three levels of existence; which we may call the Natural, theSpiritual, and the Divine. The road on which he is to traveltherefore, the mystical education which he is to undertake, shallsuccessively unite him with these three worlds; stretching hisconsciousness to the point at which he finds them first as three, and at last as One. Under normal circumstances even the first ofthem, the natural world of Becoming, is only present to him--unless he be an artist--in a vague and fragmentary way. He is, ofcourse, aware of the temporal order, a ceaseless change andmovement, birth, growth, and death, of which he is a part. But therapture and splendour of that everlasting flux which India callsthe Sport of God hardly reaches his understanding; he is too busywith his own little movements to feel the full current of thestream. 

But under those abnormal circumstances on which we havetouched, a deeper level of his consciousness comes into focus; hehears the music of surrounding things. Then he rises, through andwith his awareness of the great life of Nature, to the knowledgethat he is part of another greater life, transcending succession. Inthis his durational spirit is immersed. Here all the highest valuesof existence are stored for him: and it is because of his existencewithin this Eternal Reality, his patriotic relationship to it, that theefforts and experiences of the time-world have significance forhim. It is from the vantage point gained when he realises hiscontacts with this higher order, that he can see with the clear eyeof the artist or the mystic the World of Becoming itself--recognise its proportions--even reach out to some faint intuitionof its ultimate worth. So, if he would be a whole man, if he wouldrealise all that is implicit in his humanity, he must actualise hisrelationship with this supernal plane of Being: and he shall do it, as we have seen, by simplification, by a deliberate withdrawal ofattention from the bewildering multiplicity of things, a deliberatehumble surrender of his image-making consciousness. He alreadypossesses, at that gathering point of personality which the oldwriters sometimes called the "apex" and sometimes the "ground"of the soul, a medium of communication with Reality. But thisspiritual principle, this gathering point of his selfhood, is just thataspect of him which is furthest removed from the active surfaceconsciousness. He treats it as the busy citizen treats his nationalmonuments. It is there, it is important, a possession which addsdignity to his existence; but he never has time to go in. Yet as thepurified sense, cleansed of prejudice and self-interest, can give usfleeting communications from the actual broken-up world ofduration at our gates: so the purified and educated will canwholly withdraw the self's attention from its usual concentrationon small useful aspects of the time-world, refuse to react to itsperpetually incoming messages, retreat to the unity of its spirit, and there make itself ready for messages from another plane. This is the process which the mystics call Recollection: the firststage in the training of the contemplative consciousness. 

We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Realitywill involve certain stages of preparation as well as stagesof attainment; and these stages of preparation--for somedisinterested souls easy and rapid, for others long and full ofpain--may be grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining andsimplifying of the attention, which is the essence of Recollection. Next, the disciplining and simplifying of the affections and will, the orientation of the heart; which is sometimes called by theformidable name of Purgation. So the practical mysticism of theplain man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold scheme oftraining and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the selffor union with Reality, and the last three unite it successivelywith the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finallywith that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absoluteand the religious mystic calls God. 

CHAPTER IV

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION

Recollection, the art which the practical man is now invited tolearn, is in essence no more and no less than the subjection of theattention to the control of the will. It is not, therefore, a purelymystical activity. In one form or another it is demanded of allwho would get control of their own mental processes; and does orshould represent the first great step in the education of the humanconsciousness. So slothful, however, is man in all that concernshis higher faculties, that few deliberately undertake this educationat all. They are content to make their contacts with things by avague, unregulated power, ever apt to play truant, ever apt to failthem. Unless they be spurred to it by that passion for ultimatethings which expresses itself in religion, philosophy, or art, theyseldom learn the secret of a voluntary concentration of the mind. 

Since the philosopher's interests are mainly objective, and theartist seldom cogitates on his own processes, it is, in the end, tothe initiate of religion that we are forced to go, if we would learnhow to undertake this training for ourselves. The religiouscontemplative has this further attraction for us: that he is bynature a missionary as well. The vision which he has achieved isthe vision of an intensely loving heart; and love, which cannotkeep itself to itself, urges him to tell the news as widely and asclearly as he may. In his works, he is ever trying to reveal thesecret of his own deeper life and wider vision, and to help hisfellow men to share it: hence he provides the clearest, mostorderly, most practical teachings on the art of contemplation thatwe are likely to find. True, our purpose in attempting this art mayseem to us very different from his: though if we carry out theprinciples involved to their last term, we shall probably find thatthey have brought us to the place at which he aimed from thefirst. But the method, in its earlier stages, must be the same;whether we call the Reality which is the object of our questaesthetic, cosmic, or divine. The athlete must develop much thesame muscles, endure much the same discipline, whatever be thegame he means to play. 

So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire of her whatwas the method by which she taught her daughters to gatherthemselves together, to capture and hold the attitude mostfavourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us--and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christiancontemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressureof long experience--that the process is a gradual one. The methodto be employed is a slow, patient training of material which thelicence of years has made intractable; not the sudden easy turningof the mind in a new direction, that it may minister to a newfancy for "the mystical view of things. " Recollection begins, shesays, in the deliberate and regular practice of meditation; aperfectly natural form of mental exercise, though at first a hardone. 

Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking andcontemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value fromthis transitional character. The real mystical life, which is thetruly practical life, begins at the beginning; not with supernaturalacts and ecstatic apprehensions, but with the normal faculties ofthe normal man. "I do not require of you, " says Teresa to herpupils in meditation, "to form great and curious considerations inyour understanding: I require of you no more than to _look_. "

It might be thought that such looking at the spiritual world, simply, intensely, without cleverness--such an opening of the Eyeof Eternity--was the essence of contemplation itself: and indeedone of the best definitions has described that art as a "lovingsight, " a "peering into heaven with the ghostly eye. " But the selfwho is yet at this early stage of the pathway to Reality is notasked to look at anything new, to peer into the deeps of things:only to gaze with a new and cleansed vision on the ordinaryintellectual images, the labels and the formula, the "objects" andideas--even the external symbols--amongst which it has alwaysdwelt. It is not yet advanced to the seeing of fresh landscapes: itis only able to re-examine the furniture of its home, and obtainfrom this exercise a skill, and a control of the attention, whichshall afterwards be applied to greater purposes. Its task is here to_consider_ that furniture, as the Victorines called this preliminarytraining: to take, that is, a more starry view of it: standing backfrom the whirl of the earth, and observing the process of things. 

Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst the common stock, and hold it before your mind. The selection is large enough: allsentient beings may find subjects of meditation to their taste, forthere lies a universal behind every particular of thought, howeverconcrete it may appear, and within the most rational propositionsthe meditative eye may glimpse a dream. 

 "Reason has moons, but moons not hers! Lie mirror'd on her sea, Confounding her astronomers But, O delighting me. "

Even those objects which minister to our sense-life may well beused to nourish our spirits too. Who has not watched the intentmeditations of a comfortable cat brooding upon the AbsoluteMouse? You, if you have a philosophic twist, may transcend suchrelative views of Reality, and try to meditate on Time, Succession, even Being itself: or again on human intercourse, birth, growth, and death, on a flower, a river, the varioustapestries of the sky. Even your own emotional life will provideyou with the ideas of love, joy, peace, mercy, conflict, desire. You may range, with Kant, from the stars to the moral law. Ifyour turn be to religion, the richest and most evocative of fields isopen to your choice: from the plaster image to the mysteries ofFaith. 

But, the choice made, it must be held and defended during thetime of meditation against all invasions from without, howeverinsidious their encroachments, however "spiritual" their disguise. It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again and again, asdistractions seem to snatch it from your grasp. A restlessboredom, a dreary conviction of your own incapacity, willpresently attack you. This, too, must be resisted at sword-point. The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditationwill be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convinceyou how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, howmiserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from thecaptaincy of your own soul. It should convince, too, the mostcommon-sense of philosophers of the distinction between realtime, the true stream of duration which is life, and the sequenceof seconds so carefully measured by the clock. Never before hasthe stream flowed so slowly, or fifteen minutes taken so long topass. Consciousness has been lifted to a longer, slower rhythm, and is not yet adjusted to its solemn march. 

But, striving for this new poise, intent on the achievementof it, presently it will happen to you to find that you haveindeed--though how you know not--entered upon a fresh plane ofperception, altered your relation with things. 

First, the subject of your meditation begins, as you surrender toits influence, to exhibit unsuspected meaning, beauty, power. Aperpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase ofattention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is theone agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. Itceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were into the deepsof it, rest in it, "unite" with it; and learn, in this still, intentcommunion, something of its depth and breadth and height, as welearn by direct intercourse to know our friends. 

Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend youfrom the perpetual assaults of the outer world. You will hear thebusy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody, and knowyourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You have set aring of silence between you and it; and behold! within thatsilence you are free. You will look at the coloured scene, and itwill seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst countlesspossible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your reach. Andgradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a _You_, whocan thus hold at arm's length, be aware of, look at, an idea--auniverse--other than itself. By this voluntary painful act ofconcentration, this first step upon the ladder which goes--as themystics would say--from "multiplicity to unity, " you have tosome extent withdrawn yourself from that union with unrealities, with notions and concepts, which has hitherto contented you; andat once all the values of existence are changed. "The road to aYea lies through a Nay. " You, in this preliminary movement ofrecollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the claimwhich the world of appearance makes to a total possession ofyour consciousness: and are thus making possible some contactbetween that consciousness and the World of Reality. 

Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back uponyourself. Observe your own being in a fresh relation with things, and surrender yourself willingly to the moods of astonishment, humility, joy--perhaps of deep shame or sudden love--whichinvade your heart as you look. So doing patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing thestruggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that thereis something within you--something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire--which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your ownsoul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which thisreal _You_ is distinct from, an alien within, the world in whichyou find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not onthe stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; whenyou have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of makingthis first crude distinction between appearance and reality, theinitial stage of the contemplative life has been won. It is notmuch more of an achievement than that first proud effort inwhich the baby stands upright for a moment and then relapses tothe more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds within it thesame earnest of future development. 

CHAPTER V

SELF-ADJUSTMENT

So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behindall that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousnesswith its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interestand apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even thepsychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act, you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not whollypractical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life ofcorrespondences with the world of normal men, and hungers forcommunion with a spiritual universe. And this thing so foreign toyour surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous withit, you recognise as the true Self whose existence you alwaystook for granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in itsscattered manifestations. "That art thou. "

This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorinemystics, is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at itssummit do we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of thepathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, asufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer todwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and thereto make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery whichshall veil the naked truth. True and complete self-knowledge, indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone. Few can bear tocontemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange andterrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of theseer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest andmost drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude towardshimself and all other things. Likely enough, if you really knewyourself--saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercyof its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspectionand measured against eternal values; your unacknowledgedself-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates--you would becompelled to remodel your whole existence, and become for thefirst time a practical man. 

But you have done what you can in this direction; have at lastdiscovered your own deeper being, your eternal spark, the agentof all your contacts with Reality. You have often read about it. Now you have met it; know for a fact that it is there. What next?What changes, what readjustments will this self-revelationinvolve for you?

You will have noticed, as with practice your familiarity with thestate of Recollection has increased, that the kind of consciousnesswhich it brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands ofyou, conflict sharply with the consciousness and the attitudewhich you have found so appropriate to your ordinary life in thepast. They make this old attitude appear childish, unworthy, atlast absurd. By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reality youare at once brought face to face with that dreadful revelation ofdisharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which the bluntmoralists call "conviction of sin. " Never again need thosemoralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnestpursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration uponthe game of getting on. None the less, this attitude persists. Againand again you swing back to it. Something more than realisationis needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of theworld. This game which you have played so long has formed andconditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to playanother, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a differentsort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refusesto respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drasticremodelling of character which the mystics call "Purgation, " thesecond stage in the training of the human consciousness forparticipation in Reality. 

It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with asuperficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned thewrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have becomeaccustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certainvalueless things, certain specific positions. For years yourtreasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House ofCommons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if theystill exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither yourheart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. Youare not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, whichknows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence withthe Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmonybetween the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of theburied spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours ofmeditation--pushing out, as it were, towards the light--and thevarious changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of thesurface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: theyconflict at every turn. It becomes apparent to you that thedeclaration of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by all the mystics, concerning a "higher" and a "lower" life, and the cleavage thatexists between them, has a certain justification even in theexperience of the ordinary man. 

That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all human personalitywas thus two-fold: thus capable of correspondence with twoorders of existence. The "higher life" was always tending toward?union with Reality; towards the gathering of it self up into One. The "lower life, " framed for correspondence with the outwardworld of multiplicity, was always tending to fall downwards, andfritter the powers of the self among external things. This is but arestatement, in terms of practical existence, of the fact whichRecollection brought home to us: that the human self istransitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of living towardseither Eternity or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautifultheories on these subjects: another when the unresolved dualismof your own personality (though you may not give it thishigh-sounding name) becomes the main fact of consciousness, perpetually reasserts itself as a vital problem, and refuses to takeacademic rank. 

This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues onbeing pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attentionbetween two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction thatthere is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as youhave always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about thelife which your innermost inhabitant wants to live--thesedisagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one andthen the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably betweentheir attractions and their claims; and will have no peace untilthese claims have been met, and the apparent opposition betweenthem resolved. You are sure now that there is another, moredurable and more "reasonable, " life possible to the humanconsciousness than that on which it usually spends itself. But it isalso clear to you that you must yourself be something more, orother, than you are now, if you are to achieve this life, dwell in it, and breathe its air. You have had in your brief spells ofrecollection a first quick vision of that plane of being whichAugustine called "the land of peace, " the "beauty old and new. "You know for evermore that it exists: that the real thing withinyourself belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time invitedand enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to feel and know in everyfibre of your being the mystical need of "union with Reality"; andto realise that the natural scene which you have accepted sotrustfully cannot provide the correspondences toward which youare stretching out. 

Nevertheless, it is to correspondences with this natural order thatyou have given for many years your full attention, your desire, your will. The surface-self, left for so long in undisputedpossession of the conscious field, has grown strong, andcemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladlyexchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, froma selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by therich stream of life, a defensive shell of "fixed ideas. " It is uselessto speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shellfrom the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end. Aconflict of some kind--a severance of old habits, old notions, oldprejudices--is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to theform which the new adjustments must take. 

Now although in a general way we may regard the practicalman's attitude to existence as a limpet-like adherence to theunreal; yet, from another point of view, fixity of purpose anddesire is the last thing we can attribute to him. His mind is full oflittle whirlpools, twists and currents, conflicting systems, incompatible desires. One after another, he centres himself onambition, love, duty, friendship, social convention, politics, religion, self-interest in one of its myriad forms; making of each acore round which whole sections of his life are arranged. Oneafter another, these things either fail him or enslave him. Sometimes they become obsessions, distorting his judgment, narrowing his outlook, colouring his whole existence. Sometimesthey develop inconsistent characters which involve him in publicdifficulties, private compromises and self-deceptions of everykind. They split his attention, fritter his powers. This state ofaffairs, which usually passes for an "active life, " begins to take ona different complexion when looked at with the simple eye ofmeditation. Then we observe that the plain man's world is in amuddle, just because he has tried to arrange its major interestsround himself as round a centre; and he is neither strong enoughnor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched littlewhirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming, interrupting--as heimagines, in his own interest--its even flow: and within thatwhirlpool are numerous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a continualstate of unrest. The man who makes a success of his life, in anydepartment, is he who has chosen one from amongst these claimsand interests, and devoted to it his energetic powers of heart andwill; "unifying" himself about it, and from within it resisting allcounter-claims. He has one objective, one centre; has killed outthe lesser ones, and simplified himself. 

Now the artist, the discoverer, the philosopher, the lover, thepatriot--the true enthusiast for any form of life--can only achievethe full reality to which his special art or passion gives access byinnumerable renunciations. He must kill out the smaller centresof interest, in order that his whole will, love, and attention maypour itself out towards, seize upon, unite with, that specialmanifestation of the beauty and significance of the universe towhich he is drawn. So, too, a deliberate self-simplification, a"purgation" of the heart and will, is demanded of those whowould develop the form of consciousness called "mystical. " Allyour power, all your resolution, is needed if you are to succeed inthis adventure: there must be no frittering of energy, no mixtureof motives. We hear much of the mystical temperament, themystical vision. The mystical character is far more important: andits chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, andself-control. It is towards the perfecting of these military virtues, not to the production of a pious softness, that the discipline ofasceticism is largely directed; and the ascetic foundation, in oneform or another, is the only enduring foundation of a sanecontemplative life. 

You cannot, until you have steadied yourself, found a poise, andbegun to resist some amongst the innumerable claims which theworld of appearance perpetually makes upon you: attentionand your desire, make much use of the new power which Recollectionhas disclosed to you; and this Recollection itself, so longas it remains merely a matter of attention and does not involvethe heart, is no better than a psychic trick. You are committedtherefore, as the fruit of your first attempts at self-knowledge, to a deliberate--probably a difficult--rearrangement ofyour character; to the stern course of self-discipline, thevoluntary acts of choice on the one hand and of rejection on theother, which ascetic writers describe under the formidable namesof Detachment and Mortification. By Detachment they mean theeviction of the limpet from its crevice; the refusal to anchoryourself to material things, to regard existence from the personalstandpoint, or confuse custom with necessity. By Mortification, they mean the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currentsof your own conflicting passions, interests, desires; the killing outof all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollectionwould condemn, and which create the fundamental oppositionbetween your interior and exterior life. 

What then, in the last resort, is the source of this opposition; thetrue reason of your uneasiness, your unrest? The reason lies, notin any real incompatibility between the interests of the temporaland the eternal orders; which are but two aspects of one Fact, twoexpressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself; in your attitudetowards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb "tohave": all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individualdemands, appetites, wants. That "love of life" of which wesometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love. We are quick to snapat her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding whichwe dignify by the name of pessimism. The mystic knows not thisattitude of demand. He tells us again and again, that "he is rid ofall his asking"; that "henceforth the heat of having shall neverscorch him more. " Compare this with your normal attitude to theworld, practical man: your quiet certitude that you are well withinyour rights in pushing the claims of "the I, the Me, the Mine";your habit, if you be religious, of asking for the weather and thegovernment that you want, of persuading the Supernal Powers totake a special interest in your national or personal health andprosperity. How often in each day do you deliberately revert to anattitude of disinterested adoration? Yet this is the only attitude inwhich true communion with the universe is possible. The verymainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continuedpossession of that which you have, or for something which as yetyou have not: wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friendship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right tosome of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, acertain immunity from failure or humiliation. You resentanything which opposes you in these matters. You becomerestless when you see other selves more skilful in the game ofacquisition than yourself. You hold tight against all comers yourown share of the spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boringresponsibilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil; are greedyof pleasure and excitement, devoted to the art of having a goodtime. If you possess a social sense, you demand these things notonly for yourself but for your tribe--the domestic or racial groupto which you belong. These dispositions, so ordinary that theyalmost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers theSeven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust. Perhaps you would rather call them--asindeed they are--the seven common forms of egotism. Theyrepresent the natural reactions to life of the self-centred humanconsciousness, enslaved by the "world of multiplicity"; andconstitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long asthese dispositions govern character we can never see or feelthings as they are; but only as they affect ourselves, our family, our party, our business, our church, our empire--the I, the Me, theMine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detachedand purified heart can view all things--the irrational cruelty ofcircumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life, the acts and beliefs of enemy and friend--in true proportion; andreckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore themystics tell us perpetually that "selfhood must be killed" beforeReality can be attained. 

"Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but none other thingthan _thyself_, " says _The Cloud of Unknowing_. "When the I, the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done, "says Kabir. The substance of that wrongness of act and relationwhich constitutes "sin" is the separation of the individual spiritfrom the whole; the ridiculous megalomania which makes eachman the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turning inwardsand condensation of his energies and desires, till they do indeedform a "lump"; a hard, tight core about which all the currents ofhis existence swirl. This heavy weight within the heart resistsevery outgoing impulse of the spirit; and tends to draw all thingsinward and downward to itself, never to pour itself forth inlove, enthusiasm, sacrifice. "So long, " says the _TheologiaGermanica_, "as a man seeketh his own will and his own highestgood, because it is his, and for his own sake, he will never find it:for so long as he doeth this, he is not seeking his own highestgood, and how then should he find it? For so long as he doeththis, he seeketh himself, and dreameth that he is himself thehighest good. . . . But whosoever seeketh, loveth, and pursuethgoodness, as goodness and for the sake of goodness, and makeththat his end--for nothing but the love of goodness, not for love ofthe I, Me, Mine, Self, and the like--he will find the highest good, for he seeketh it aright, and they who seek it otherwise do err. "

So it is disinterestedness, the saint's and poet's love of things fortheir own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is thesecret of union with Reality and the condition of all realknowledge. This brings with it the precious quality of suppleness, the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the greatrhythms of life; and this will only come when the ungainly"lump" of sin is broken, and the verb "to have, " which expressesits reaction to existence, is ejected from the centre of yourconsciousness. Then your attitude to life will cease to becommercial, and become artistic. Then the guardian at the gate, scrutinising and sorting the incoming impressions, will no longerask, "What use is this to _me_?" before admitting the angel ofbeauty or significance who demands your hospitality. Thenthings will cease to have power over you. You will become free. "Son, " says a Kempis, "thou oughtest diligently to attend to this;that in every place, every action or outward occupation, thou beinwardly free and mighty in thyself, and all things be under thee, and thou not under them; that thou be lord and governor of thydeeds, not servant. " It is therefore by the withdrawal of your willfrom its feverish attachment to things, till "they are under theeand thou not under them, " that you will gradually resolve theopposition between the recollective and the active sides of yourpersonality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude whichthe mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfectfreedom--for these are two aspects of one thing--will becomepossible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge andthrowing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall atlast arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit;where the various forces of your character--brute energy, keenintellect, desirous heart--long dissipated amongst a thousand littlewants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become astrong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self canforce a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality. 

CHAPTER VI

LOVE AND WILL

This steady effort towards the simplifying of your tangledcharacter, its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal, is not to dispense you from that other special training of theattention which the diligent practice of meditation andrecollection effects. Your pursuit of the one must never involveneglect of the other; for these are the two sides--one moral, theother mental--of that unique process of self-conquest whichRuysbroeck calls "the gathering of the forces of the soul into theunity of the spirit": the welding together of all your powers, thefocussing of them upon one point. Hence they should never, either in theory or practice, be separated. Only the act ofrecollection, the constantly renewed retreat to the quiet centre ofthe spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and morevalid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain ofself-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth ofthe world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligentcharacter-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts atself-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the humantendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makespossible the further development of the contemplative power. 

So it is through and by these two great changes in your attitudetowards things--first, the change of attention, which enables youto perceive a truer universe; next, the deliberate rearrangement ofyour ideas, energies, and desires in harmony with that which youhave seen--that a progressive uniformity of life and experience issecured to you, and you are defended against the dangers of anindolent and useless mysticality. Only the real, say the mystics, can know Reality, for "we behold that which we are, " theuniverse which we see is conditioned by the character of themind that sees it: and this realness--since that which you seek isno mere glimpse of Eternal Life, but complete possession of it--must apply to every aspect of your being, the rich totality ofcharacter, all the "forces of the soul, " not to some thin andisolated "spiritual sense" alone. This is why recollection andself-simplification--perception of, and adaptation to, the SpiritualWorld in which we dwell--are the essential preparations forthe mystical life, and neither can exist in a wholesome andwell-balanced form without the other. By them the mind, the will, theheart, which so long had dissipated their energies over a thousandscattered notions, wants, and loves, are gradually detached fromtheir old exclusive preoccupation with the ephemeral interests ofthe self, or of the group to which the self belongs. 

You, if you practise them, will find after a time--perhaps a longtime--that the hard work which they involve has indeed broughtabout a profound and definite change in you. A new supplenesshas taken the place of that rigidity which you have beenaccustomed to mistake for strength of character: an easier attitudetowards the accidents of life. Your whole scale of values hasundergone a silent transformation, since you have ceased to fightfor your own hand and regard the nearest-at-hand world as theonly one that counts. You have become, as the mystics wouldsay, "free from inordinate attachments, " the "heat of having" doesnot scorch you any more; and because of this you possess greatinward liberty, a sense of spaciousness and peace. Released fromthe obsessions which so long had governed them, will, heart, andmind are now all bent to the purposes of your deepest being:"gathered in the unity of the spirit, " they have fused to become anagent with which it can act. 

What form, then, shall this action take? It shall take a practicalform, shall express itself in terms of movement: the pressingoutwards of the whole personality, the eager and trustfulstretching of it towards the fresh universe which awaits you. Asall scattered thinking was cut off in recollection, as all vagrantand unworthy desires have been killed by the exercises ofdetachment; so now all scattered willing, all hesitations betweenthe indrawing and outflowing instincts of the soul, shall bechecked and resolved. You are to _push_ with all your power: notto absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love. With this"conative act, " as the psychologists would call it, the truecontemplative life begins. Contemplation, you see, has no veryclose connection with dreaminess and idle musing: it is more likethe intense effort of vision, the passionate and self-forgetful actof communion, presupposed in all creative art. It is, says one oldEnglish mystic, "a blind intent stretching . . . A privy lovepressed" in the direction of Ultimate Beauty, athwart all thechecks, hindrances, and contradictions of the restless world: a"loving stretching out" towards Reality, says the greatRuysbroeck, than whom none has gone further on this path. Tension, ardour, are of its essence: it demands the perpetualexercise of industry and courage. 

We observe in such definitions as these a strange neglect of thatglory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prigenjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. Italmost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of thesupremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towardssome new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards newand more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to assure us thatman's most sublime thoughts of the Transcendent are but a littlebetter than his worst: that loving intuition is the only certainguide. "By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thoughtnever. "

Yet here you are not to fall into the clumsy error of supposingthat the things which are beyond the grasp of reason arenecessarily unreasonable things. Immediate feeling, so far as it istrue, does not oppose but transcends and completes the highestresults of thought. It contains within itself the sum of all theprocesses through which thought would pass in the act ofattaining the same goal: supposing thought to have reached--as ithas not--the high pitch at which it was capable of thinking its wayall along this road. 

In the preliminary act of gathering yourself together, and in thoseunremitting explorations through which you came to "a knowingand a feeling of yourself as you are, " thought assuredly had itsplace. There the powers of analysis, criticism, and deductionfound work that they could do. But now it is the love and will--the feeling, the intent, the passionate desire--of the self, whichshall govern your activities and make possible your success. Fewwould care to brave the horrors of a courtship conducted uponstrictly intellectual lines: and contemplation is an act of love, thewooing, not the critical study, of Divine Reality. It is an eageroutpouring of ourselves towards a Somewhat Other for which wefeel a passion of desire; a seeking, touching, and tasting, not aconsidering and analysing, of the beautiful and true whereverfound. It is, as it were, a responsive act of the organism to thoseSupernal Powers without, which touch and stir it. Deep humilityas towards those Powers, a willing surrender to their control, isthe first condition of success. The mystics speak much of theseelusive contacts; felt more and more in the soul, as it becomesincreasingly sensitive to the subtle movements of its spiritualenvironment. 

 "Sense, feeling, taste, complacency, and sight, These are the true and real joys, The living, flowing, inward, melting, bright And heavenly pleasures; all the rest are toys; All which are founded in Desire As light in flame and heat in fire. "

But this new method of correspondence with the universe is notto be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderlyforms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every"mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimentalaestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited:nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way ofspiritual silliness. All the powers of the self, raised to their intensest form, shall be used in it; though used perhaps in a newway. These, the three great faculties of love, thought, and will--with which you have been accustomed to make great show on theperiphery of consciousness--you have, as it were, drawn inwardsduring the course of your inward retreat: and by your educationin detachment have cured them of their tendency to fritter theirpowers amongst a multiplicity of objects. Now, at the very heartof personality, you are alone with them; you hold with you in that"Interior Castle, " and undistracted for the moment by thedemands of practical existence, the three great tools wherewiththe soul deals with life. 

As regards the life you have hitherto looked upon as "normal, "love--understood in its widest sense, as desire, emotionalinclination--has throughout directed your activities. You didthings, sought things, learned things, even suffered things, because at bottom you wanted to. Will has done the work towhich love spurred it: thought has assimilated the results of theiractivities and made for them pictures, analyses, "explanations" ofthe world with which they had to deal. But now your purifiedlove discerns and desires, your will is set towards, somethingwhich thought cannot really assimilate--still less explain. "Contemplation, " says Ruysbroeck, "is a knowing that is in nowise . . . Therein all the workings of the reason fail. " Thatreason has been trained to deal with the stuff of temporal existence. It will only make mincemeat of your experience of Eternity ifyou give it a chance; trimming, transforming, rationalisingthat ineffable vision, trying to force it into a symbolicsystem with which the intellect can cope. This is why the greatcontemplatives utter again and again their solemn warning againstthe deceptiveness of thought when it ventures to deal with thespiritual intuitions of man; crying with the author of _The Cloudof Unknowing_, "Look that _nothing_ live in thy working mindbut a naked intent stretching"--the voluntary tension of yourever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real. "Love, and _do_ what you like, " said the wise Augustine: so littledoes mere surface activity count, against the deep motive thatbegets it. 

The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that the heart'sdesire--if it be intense and industrious--is a better earnest ofpossible fulfilment than the most elegant theories of the spiritualworld; this is the perpetual theme of all the Christian mystics. Bysuch love, they think, the worlds themselves were made. By aneager outstretching towards Reality, they tell us, we tend to movetowards Reality, to enter into its rhythm: by a humble andunquestioning surrender to it we permit its entrance into oursouls. This twofold act, in which we find the double character ofall true love--which both gives and takes, yields and demands--isassured, if we be patient and single-hearted, of ultimatesuccess. At last our ignorance shall be done away; and we shall"apprehend" the real and the eternal, as we apprehend thesunshine when the sky is free from cloud. Therefore "Smite uponthat thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love"--and suddenly it shall part, and disclose the blue. 

"Smite, " "press, " "push, " "strive"--these are strong words: yetthey are constantly upon the lips of the contemplatives whendescribing the earlier stages of their art. Clearly, the abolition ofdiscursive thought is not to absolve you from the obligations ofindustry. You are to "energise enthusiastically" upon new planes, where you shall see more intensely, hear more intensely, touchand taste more intensely than ever before: for the modes ofcommunion which these senses make possible to you are now tooperate as parts of the one single state of perfect intuition, ofloving knowledge by union, to which you are growing up. Andgradually you come to see that, if this be so, it is the ardent willthat shall be the prime agent of your undertaking: a will whichhas now become the active expression of your deepest and purestdesires. About this the recollected and simplified self is to gatheritself as a centre; and thence to look out--steadily, deliberately--with eyes of love towards the world. 

To "look with the eyes of love" seems a vague and sentimentalrecommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion issummed in it, and exact and important results flow from thisexercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of completehumility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without cleveranalysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrenderyour I-hood; see things at last as the artist does, for their sake, notfor your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out tothe unity that is in them: and you achieve the "Simple Vision" ofthe poet and the mystic--that synthetic and undistortedapprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single visionof practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, andeverything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to whichrecollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light, are poured from the outward world. The conscious love whichachieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate--"As long asthou livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though thou wiltnot!" But the _will_ which that love has enkindled can holdattention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unrealand egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness, and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakenedspirit, its appointed task, cutting a way into new levels of Reality. 

Therefore this transitional stage in the development of thecontemplative powers--in one sense the completion of theirelementary schooling, in another the beginning of their trueactivities--is concerned with the toughening and further trainingof that will which self-simplification has detached from its oldconcentration upon the unreal wants and interests of the self. Merged with your intuitive love, this is to become the true agentof your encounter with Reality; for that Simple Eye of Intention, which is so supremely your own, and in the last resort the makerof your universe and controller of your destiny, is nothing elsebut a synthesis of such energetic will and such uncorrupt desire, turned and held in the direction of the Best. 

CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION

Concentration, recollection, a profound self-criticism, the stillingof his busy surface-intellect, his restless emotions of enmity anddesire, the voluntary achievement of an attitude of disinterestedlove--by these strange paths the practical man has now been led, in order that he may know by communion something of thegreater Life in which he is immersed and which he has so longand so successfully ignored. He has managed in his own smallway something equivalent to those drastic purifications, thosesearching readjustments, which are undertaken by the heroicseekers for Reality; the arts whereby they defeat the tyranny of"the I, the Me, the Mine" and achieve the freedom of a wider life. Now, perhaps, he may share to some extent in that illumination, that extended and intensified perception of things, which theydeclare to be the heritage of the liberated consciousness. 

This illumination shall be gradual. The attainment of it dependsnot so much upon a philosophy accepted, or a new gift of visionsuddenly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing andwidening of character; a progressive growth towards the Real, anever more profound harmonisation of the self's life with thegreater and inclusive rhythms of existence. It shall thereforedevelop in width and depth as the sphere of that self'sintuitive love extends. As your own practical sympathy with andunderstanding of other lives, your realisation of them, may benarrowed and stiffened to include no more than the family group, or spread over your fellow-workers, your class, your city, party, country, or religion--even perhaps the whole race--till you feelyourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffering with it, andpartake of its whole conscious life; so here. Self-mergence is agradual process, dependent on a progressive unlimiting ofpersonality. The apprehension of Reality which rewards it isgradual too. In essence, it is one continuous out-flowingmovement towards that boundless heavenly consciousness wherethe "flaming ramparts" which shut you from true communionwith all other selves and things is done away; an unbrokenprocess of expansion and simplification, which is nothing moreor less than the growth of the spirit of love, the full flowering ofthe patriotic sense. By this perpetually-renewed casting down ofthe hard barriers of individuality, these willing submissions to thecompelling rhythm of a larger existence than that of the solitaryindividual or even of the human group--by this perpetualwidening, deepening, and unselfing of your attentiveness--youare to enlarge your boundaries and become the citizen of agreater, more joyous, more poignant world, the partaker of amore abundant life. The limits of this enlargement have not yetbeen discovered. The greatest contemplatives, returning fromtheir highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is"unwalled. "

But this growth into higher realities, this blossoming of yourcontemplative consciousness--though it be, like all else we knowin life, an unbroken process of movement and change--must bebroken up and reduced to the series of concrete forms which wecall "order" if our inelastic minds are to grasp it. So, we willconsider it as the successive achievement of those three levels ormanifestations of Reality, which we have agreed to call theNatural World of Becoming, the Metaphysical World of Being, and--last and highest--that Divine Reality within which theseopposites are found as one. Though these three worlds ofexperience are so plaited together, that intimations from thedeeper layers of being constantly reach you through the naturalscene, it is in this order of realisation that you may best think ofthem, and of your own gradual upgrowth to the full stature ofhumanity. To elude nature, to refuse her friendship, and attemptto leap the river of life in the hope of finding God on the otherside, is the common error of a perverted mysticality. It is as fatalin result as the opposite error of deliberately arresteddevelopment, which, being attuned to the wonderful rhythms ofnatural life, is content with this increase of sensibility; and, becoming a "nature-mystic, " asks no more. 

So you are to begin with that first form of contemplation whichthe old mystics sometimes called the "discovery of God in Hiscreatures. " Not with some ecstatic adventure in supersensuousregions, but with the loving and patient exploration of the worldthat lies at your gates; the "ebb and flow and ever-during power"of which your own existence forms a part. You are to push backthe self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included inthe widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in everymanifestation of life--even those which you have petulantlyclassified as cruel or obscene--the ardent self-expression of thatImmanent Being whose spark burns deep in your own soul. 

The Indian mystics speak perpetually of the visible universe asthe _Lila_ or Sport of God: the Infinite deliberately expressingHimself in finite form, the musical manifestation of His creativejoy. All gracious and all courteous souls, they think, will gladlyjoin His play; considering rather the wonder and achievement ofthe whole--its vivid movement, its strange and terrible evocationsof beauty from torment, nobility from conflict and death, itsmingled splendour of sacrifice and triumph--than their personalconquests, disappointments, and fatigues. In the first form ofcontemplation you are to realise the movement of this game, inwhich you have played so long a languid and involuntary part, and find your own place in it. It is flowing, growing, changing, making perpetual unexpected patterns within the evolvingmelody of the Divine Thought. In all things it is incomplete, unstable; and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring on thebattlefield, living and breeding in the slum, adventurous andstudious, sensuous and pure--more, your great comrades, thehills, the trees, the rivers, the darting birds, the scuttering insects, the little soft populations of the grass--all these are playing withyou. They move one to another in delicate responsive measures, now violent, now gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet everweaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient to the musicof that invisible Choragus whom Boehme and Plotinus knew. What is that great wind which blows without, in continuous andineffable harmonies? Part of you, practical man. There is but onemusic in the world: and to it you contribute perpetually, whetheryou will or no, your one little ditty of no tone. 

 "Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music: The hills and the sea and the earth dance: The world of man dances in laughter and tears. "

It seems a pity to remain in ignorance of this, to keep as it were aplate-glass window between yourself and your fellow-dancers--all those other thoughts of God, perpetually becoming, changingand growing beside you--and commit yourself to the unsocialattitude of the "cat that walks by itself. "

Begin therefore at once. Gather yourself up, as the exercises ofrecollection have taught you to do. Then--with attention nolonger frittered amongst the petty accidents and interests of yourpersonal life, but poised, tense, ready for the work you shalldemand of it--stretch out by a distinct act of loving will towardsone of the myriad manifestations of life that surround you: andwhich, in an ordinary way, you hardly notice unless you happento need them. Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its imagetowards you. Deliberate--more, impassioned--attentiveness, anattentiveness which soon transcends all consciousness ofyourself, as separate from and attending to the thing seen; this isthe condition of success. As to the object of contemplation, itmatters little. From Alp to insect, anything will do, provided thatyour attitude be right: for all things in this world towards whichyou are stretching out are linked together, and one trulyapprehended will be the gateway to the rest. 

Look with the eye of contemplation on the most dissipated tabbyof the streets, and you shall discern the celestial quality of life setlike an aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his stridentmew an echo of

 "The deep enthusiastic joy, The rapture of the hallelujah sent From all that breathes and is. "

The sooty tree up which he scrambles to escape your earnest gazeis holy too. It contains for you the whole divine cycle of theseasons; upon the plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to beheard. But you must look at these things as you would look intothe eyes of a friend: ardently, selflessly, without considering hisreputation, his practical uses, his anatomical peculiarities, or thevices which might emerge were he subjected to psycho-analysis. 

Such a simple exercise, if entered upon with singleness of heart, will soon repay you. By this quiet yet tense act of communion, this loving gaze, you will presently discover a relationship--farmore intimate than anything you imagined--between yourself andthe surrounding "objects of sense"; and in those objects of sense aprofound significance, a personal quality, and actual power ofresponse, which you might in cooler moments think absurd. Making good your correspondences with these fellow-travellers, you will learn to say with Whitman:

 "You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadside! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me. "

A subtle interpenetration of your spirit with the spirit of those"unseen existences, " now so deeply and thrillingly felt by you, will take place. Old barriers will vanish: and you will becomeaware that St. Francis was accurate as well as charming when hespoke of Brother Wind and Sister Water; and that Stevenson wasobviously right when he said, that since:

 "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we ought all to be happy as kings. "

Those glad and vivid "things" will speak to you. They will offer younews at least as definite and credible as that which the paper-boyis hawking in the street: direct messages from that Beautywhich the artist reports at best at second hand. Because of yournew sensitiveness, anthems will be heard of you from everygutter; poems of intolerable loveliness will bud for you on everyweed. Best and greatest, your fellowmen will shine for you withnew significance and light. Humility and awe will be evoked inyou by the beautiful and patient figures of the poor, their longdumb heroisms, their willing acceptance of the burden of life. Allthe various members of the human group, the little children andthe aged, those who stand for energy, those dedicated to skill, tothought, to plainest service, or to prayer, will have for you freshvivid significance, be felt as part of your own wider being. Alladventurous endeavours, all splendour of pain and all beauty ofplay--more, that grey unceasing effort of existence which makesup the groundwork of the social web, and the ineffective hopes, enthusiasms, and loves which transfuse it--all these will be seenand felt by you at last as full of glory, full of meaning; for youwill see them with innocent, attentive, disinterested eyes, feelthem as infinitely significant and adorable parts of theTranscendent Whole in which you also are immersed. 

This discovery of your fraternal link with all living things, thisdown-sinking of your arrogant personality into the great generousstream of life, marks an important stage in your apprehension ofthat Science of Love which contemplation is to teach. You arenot to confuse it with pretty fancies about nature, such as allimaginative persons enjoy; still less, with a self-conscious anddeliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable condition ofawareness; a direct perception, not an opinion or an idea. Forthose who attain it, the span of the senses is extended. These livein a world which is lit with an intenser light; has, as George Foxinsisted, "another smell than before. " They hear all about themthe delicate music of growth, and see the "new colour" of whichthe mystics speak. 

Further, you will observe that this act, and the attitude which isproper to it, differs in a very important way even from thatspecial attentiveness which characterised the stage of meditation, and which seems at first sight to resemble it in many respects. Then, it was an idea or image from amongst the common stock--one of those conceptual labels with which the human paste-brushhas decorated the surface of the universe--which you wereencouraged to hold before your mind. Now, turning away fromthe label, you shall surrender yourself to the direct messagepoured out towards you by the _thing_. Then, you considered:now, you are to absorb. This experience will be, in the veryhighest sense, the experience of sensation without thought: theessential sensation, the "savouring" to which some of the mysticsinvite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses offer us atransient sacrament. So here at last, in this intimate communion, this "simple seeing, " this total surrender of you to the impress ofthings, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense: andso using them, because you are concentrating upon them, accepting their reports in simplicity. You have, in thiscontemplative outlook, carried the peculiar methods of artisticapprehension to their highest stage: with the result that thesense-world has become for you, as Erigena said that all creatureswere, "a theophany, or appearance of God. " Not, you observe, asymbol, but a showing: a very different thing. You have begunnow the Plotinian ascent from multiplicity to unity, and thereforebegin to perceive in the Many the clear and actual presence of theOne: the changeless and absolute Life, manifesting itself in allthe myriad nascent, crescent, cadent lives. Poets, gazing thus atthe "flower in the crannied wall" or the "green thing that stands inthe way, " have been led deep into the heart of its life; there todiscern the secret of the universe. 

All the greater poems of Wordsworth and Walt Whitman representan attempt to translate direct contemplative experience ofthis kind into words and rhythms which might convey itssecret to other men: all Blake's philosophy is but a desperateeffort to persuade us to exchange the false world of "Nature" onwhich we usually look--and which is not really Nature at all--forthis, the true world, to which he gave the confusing name of"Imagination. " For these, the contemplation of the World ofBecoming assumes the intense form which we call genius: evento read their poems is to feel the beating of a heart, the upleap ofa joy, greater than anything that we have known. Yet your ownlittle efforts towards the attainment of this level of consciousnesswill at least give to you, together with a more vivid universe, awholly new comprehension of their works; and that of other poetsand artists who have drunk from the chalice of the Spirit of Life. These works are now observed by you to be the only artisticcreations to which the name of Realism is appropriate; and it isby the standard of reality that you shall now criticise them, recognising in utterances which you once dismissed as rhetoricthe desperate efforts of the clear-sighted towards the exactdescription of things veritably seen in that simplified state ofconsciousness which Blake called "imagination uncorrupt. " Itwas from those purified and heightened levels of perception towhich the first form of contemplation inducts the soul, that Julianof Norwich, gazing upon "a little thing, the quantity of an hazelnut, " found in it the epitome of all that was made; for therein sheperceived the royal character of life. So small and helpless in itsmightiest forms, so august even in its meanest, that life in itswholeness was then realised by her as the direct outbirth of, andthe meek dependant upon, the Energy of Divine Love. She felt atonce the fugitive character of its apparent existence, theperdurable Reality within which it was held. "I marvelled, " shesaid, "how it might last, for methought it might suddenly havefallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in myunderstanding: _It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it_. And so All-thing hath the being by the love of God. " To thissame apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finiteexpression with its Origin, this search for the inner significanceof every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balancedcontemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale, reached out when she exclaimed in an hour of self-examination, "I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in mycats. "

Yet it is not the self-tormenting strife of introspective andself-conscious aspiration, but rather an unrelaxed, diligent intention, a steady acquiescence, a simple and loyal surrender to the greatcurrents of life, a holding on to results achieved in your bestmoments, that shall do it for you: a surrender not limp butdeliberate, a trustful self-donation, a "living faith. " "A pleasingstirring of love, " says _The Cloud of Unknowing_, not adesperate anxious struggle for more light. True contemplationcan only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations:quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything togain. Though the way may be long, the material of your mindintractable, to the eager lover of Reality ultimate success isassured. The strong tide of Transcendent Life will inevitablyinvade, clarify, uplift the consciousness which is open to receiveit; a movement from without--subtle yet actual--answering eachwilled movement from within. "Your opening and His entering, "says Eckhart, "are but one moment. " When, therefore, you putaside your preconceived ideas, your self-centred scale of values, and let intuition have its way with you, you open up by this actnew levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the most practicalof all activities; for then and then only will your diurnalexistence, and the natural scene in which that existence is set, begin to give up to you its richness and meaning. Its paradoxesand inequalities will be disclosed as true constituents of itsbeauty, an inconceivable splendour will be shaken out from itsdingiest folds. Then, and only then, escaping the single vision ofthe selfish, you will begin to guess all that your senses weremeant to be. 

 "I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken. "

CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION

"And here, " says Ruysbroeck of the self which has reached thispoint, "there begins a hunger and a thirst which shall never morebe stilled. "

In the First Form of Contemplation that self has been striving toknow better its own natural plane of existence. It has stretchedout the feelers of its intuitive love into the general stream ofduration of which it is a part. Breaking down the fences ofpersonality, merging itself in a larger consciousness, ithas learned to know the World of Becoming from within--as acitizen, a member of the great society of life, not merely as aspectator. But the more deeply and completely you becomeimmersed in and aware of this life, the greater the extension ofyour consciousness; the more insistently will rumours andintimations of a higher plane of experience, a closer unity andmore complete synthesis, begin to besiege you. You feel thathitherto you nave received the messages of life in a series ofdisconnected words and notes, from which your mind constructedas best it could certain coherent sentences and tunes--laws, classifications, relations, and the rest. But now you reachout towards the ultimate sentence and melody, which existindependently of your own constructive efforts; and realise thatthe words and notes which so often puzzled you by displaying anintensity that exceeded the demands of your little world, onlyhave beauty and meaning just because and in so far as youdiscern them to be the partial expressions of a greater wholewhich is still beyond your reach. 

You have long been like a child tearing up the petals of flowersin order to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results ofthis murderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of theworld. When the bits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called itscience. Now at last you have perceived the greater truth andloveliness of the living plant from which you broke them: have, in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with itsreality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant doesand must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things andforces which feed and support it; of the whole universe thattouches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants--though this were far better than your old game of indexing yourown poor photographs of them--will never give you access to theUnity, the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests itselfthrough them. To suppose that it can do so is the cardinal error ofthe "nature mystic": an error parallel with that of the psychologistwho looks for the soul in "psychic states. "

The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the moreperfect your union with the world of growth and change, thequicker, the more subtle your response to its countlesssuggestions; so much the more acute will become your cravingfor Something More. You will now find and feel the Infinite andEternal, making as it were veiled and sacramental contacts withyou under these accidents--through these its ceaseless creativeactivities--and you will want to press through and beyond them, to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect and unmediated unionwith, the Substance of all That Is. With the great widening anddeepening of your life that has ensued from the abolition of anarrow selfhood, your entrance into the larger consciousness ofliving things, there has necessarily come to you an instinctiveknowledge of a final and absolute group-relation, transcendingand including all lesser unions in its sweep. To this, the secondstage of contemplation, in which human consciousness entersinto its peculiar heritage, something within you now seems tourge you on. 

If you obey this inward push, pressing forward with the "sharpdart of your longing love, " forcing the point of your wilfulattention further and further into the web of things, such anever-deepening realisation, such an extension of your consciouslife, will indeed become possible to you. Nothing but your ownapathy, your feeble and limited desire, limits this realisation. Here there is a strict relation between demand and supply--yourachievement shall be in proportion to the greatness of yourdesire. The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Realitywithout does not vary. Only the extent to which you are able toreceive it depends upon your courage and generosity, the measurein which you give yourself to its embrace. Those minds which seta limit to their self-donation must feel as they attain it, not a senseof satisfaction but a sense of constriction. It is useless to offeryour spirit a garden--even a garden inhabited by saints andangels--and pretend that it has been made free of the universe. You will not have peace until you do away with all banks andhedges, and exchange the garden for the wilderness that isunwalled; that wild strange place of silence where "lovers losethemselves. "

Yet you must begin this great adventure humbly; and take, asJulian of Norwich did, the first stage of your new outward-goingjourney along the road that lies nearest at hand. When Julianlooked with the eye of contemplation upon that "little thing"which revealed to her the oneness of the created universe, herdeep and loving sight perceived in it successively threeproperties, which she expressed as well as she might under thesymbols of her own theology: "The first is that God made it; thesecond is that God loveth it; the third is that God keepeth it. "Here are three phases in the ever-widening contemplativeapprehension of Reality. Not three opinions, but three facts, forwhich she struggles to find words. The first is that each separateliving thing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree of life, andthere destined to mature, age, and die, is the outbirth of anotherpower, of a creative push: that the World of Becoming in all itsrichness and variety is not ultimate, but formed by Somethingother than, and utterly transcendent to, itself. This, of course, thereligious mind invariably takes for granted: but we are concernedwith immediate experience rather than faith. To feel and knowthose two aspects of Reality which we call "created" and"uncreated, " nature and spirit--to be as sharply aware of them, assure of them, as we are of land and sea--is to be made free of thesupersensual world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's side, and see that Poem of which you have deciphered separate phrasesin the earlier form of contemplation. Then you were learning toread: and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas, anastonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much greater thesignificance of every detail would appear to you, how much moretruly you would possess its life, were you acquainted with thePoem: not as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but as anon-successional whole. 

From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge of the heartwhich comes from a humble and disinterested acceptance of life;that this Creation, this whole changeful natural order, with all itsapparent collisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from anardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual donation, whichgenerates it, upholds it, drives it; for "_all-thing_ hath the beingby the love of God. " Blake's anguished question here receives itsanswer: the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the tigertoo. Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gracious, terrible, or malignant, is enwrapped in love: and is part of a worldproduced, not by mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire. 

Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable;nothing, however perverted, irredeemable. The blasphemousother-worldliness of the false mystic who conceives of matter asan evil thing and flies from its "deceits, " is corrected by thisloving sight. Hence, the more beautiful and noble a thing appearsto us, the more we love it--so much the more truly do we see it:for then we perceive within it the Divine ardour surging uptowards expression, and share that simplicity and purity of visionin which most saints and some poets see all things "as they are inGod. "

Lastly, this love-driven world of duration--this work withinwhich the Divine Artist passionately and patiently expresses Hisinfinite dream under finite forms--is held in another, mightierembrace. It is "kept, " says Julian. Paradoxically, the perpetualchangeful energies of love and creation which inspire it aregathered up and made complete within the unchanging fact ofBeing: the Eternal and Absolute, within which the world ofthings is set as the tree is set in the supporting earth, the enfoldingair. There, finally, is the rock and refuge of the seekingconsciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the flux. Therethat flux exists in its wholeness, "all at once"; in a manner whichwe can never comprehend, but which in hours of withdrawal wemay sometimes taste and feel. It is in man's moments of contactwith this, when he penetrates beyond all images, however lovely, however significant, to that ineffable awareness which themystics call "Naked Contemplation"--since it is stripped of all theclothing with which reason and imagination drape and disguiseboth our devils and our gods--that the hunger and thirst of theheart is satisfied, and we receive indeed an assurance of ultimateReality. This assurance is not the cool conclusion of a successfulargument. It is rather the seizing at last of Something which wehave ever felt near us and enticing us: the unspeakably simplebecause completely inclusive solution of all the puzzles of life. 

As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality ofthe natural world, in order that it might give itself to you, andyour possession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender ofselfhood, next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last bya union of love; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of thatsame process, you are to mount up to higher unions still. Heldtight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetualrhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life--compelledto pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die--there is yet, as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, somethingin you which endures through and therefore transcends this worldof change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread andmerge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to oneintense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of--aninstinct for--another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, asyet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for theInfinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunningmind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of allyour best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of yourheroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentativeefforts to still that strange hunger for some final object ofdevotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some totalself-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your littleactivity can be merged. 

St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only withheld from thisdesired vision of the Divine Essence, this discovery of thePure Act (which indeed is everywhere pressing in on him andsupporting him), by the apparent necessity which he is under ofturning to bodily images, of breaking up his continuous andliving intuition into Conceptual scraps; in other words, becausehe cannot live the life of sensation without thought. But it is notthe man, it is merely his mental machinery which is under this"necessity. " This it is which translates, analyses, incorporates infinite images the boundless perceptions of the spirit: passingthrough its prism the White Light of Reality, and shattering it to asuccession of coloured rays. Therefore the man who would knowthe Divine Secret must unshackle himself more thoroughly thanever before from the tyranny of the image-making power. As it isnot by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to knowGod. 

"For of all other creatures and their works, " says the author of_The Cloud of Unknowing_, "yea, and of the works of God's self, may a man through grace have full-head of knowing, and well hecan think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. Andtherefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and chooseto my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may wellbe loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden;but by thought never. "

"Gotten and holden": homely words, that suggest rather theoutstretching of the hand to take something lying at your verygates, than the long outward journey or terrific ascent of thecontemplative soul. Reality indeed, the mystics say, is "near andfar"; far from our thoughts, but saturating and supporting ourlives. Nothing would be nearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter, were the doors of our perception truly cleansed. You have thenbut to focus attention upon your own deep reality, "realise yourown soul, " in order to find it. "We dwell in Him and He in us":you participate in the Eternal Order now. The vision of theDivine Essence--the participation of its own small activity in theSupernal Act--is for the spark of your soul a perpetual process. On the apex of your personality, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit, melts and merges in it: from and by this encounter its life arisesand is sustained. But you have been busy from your childhoodwith other matters. All the urgent affairs of "life, " as you absurdlycalled it, have monopolised your field of consciousness. Thus allthe important events of your real life, physical and spiritual--themysterious perpetual growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bitsof the universe into the unstable body which you confuse withyourself, the hum and whirr of the machine which preserves yourcontacts with the material world, the more delicate movementswhich condition your correspondences with, and growth within, the spiritual order--all these have gone on unperceived by you. All the time you have been kept and nourished, like the "LittleThing, " by an enfolding and creative love; yet of this you are lessconscious than you are of the air that you breathe. 

Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you learned andestablished, as a patent and experienced fact, your fraternalrelation with all the other children of God, entering into therhythm of their existence, participating in their stress and theirjoy; will you not at least try to make patent this your filialrelation too? This actualisation of your true status, your place inthe Eternal World, is waiting for you. It represents the next phasein your gradual achievement of Reality. The method by whichyou will attain to it is strictly analogous to that by which youobtained a more vivid awareness of the natural world in whichyou grow and move. Here too it shall be direct intuitive contact, sensation rather than thought, which shall bring you certitude--"tasting food, not talking about it, " as St. Bonaventura says. 

Yet there is a marked difference between these two stages. In thefirst, the deliberate inward retreat and gathering together of yourfaculties which was effected by recollection, was the prelude to anew coming forth, an outflow from the narrow limits of a merelypersonal life to the better and truer apprehension of the createdworld. Now, in the second stage, the disciplined and recollectedattention seems to take an opposite course. It is directed towardsa plane of existence with which your bodily senses have noattachments: which is not merely misrepresented by yourordinary concepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. Itmust therefore sink inwards towards its own centre, "away fromall that can be thought or felt, " as the mystics say, "away fromevery image, every notion, every thing, " towards that strangecondition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross calls the"Night of Sense. " Do this steadily, checking each vagrantinstinct, each insistent thought, however "spiritual" it may seem;pressing ever more deeply inwards towards that ground, thatsimple and undifferentiated Being from which your diversefaculties emerge. Presently you will find yourself, emptied andfreed, in a place stripped bare of all the machinery of thought;and achieve the condition of simplicity which those samespecialists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love, " and whichthey declare to be above all human images and ideas--a state ofconsciousness in which "all the workings of the reason fail. "Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense andvivid silence: a silence which exists in itself, through and in spiteof the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this worldof silence you seem as it were to lose yourself, "to ebb and toflow, to wander and be lost in the Imageless Ground, " saysRuysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensations of the self inthis, its first initiation into the "wayless world, beyond image, "where "all is, yet in no wise. "

Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud ofUnknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it iswell to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, astrange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin tounderstand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, "Be still, andknow. " You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim strangestate of which you can say nothing, since it offers no material toyour image-making mind. 

But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate, from another is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowfulquestionings are answered without utterance; it is the All, andyou are within it and part of it, and know that it is good. It callsforth the utmost adoration of which you are capable; and, mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended now, saythe mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are becomepart of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it wereupon its bosom and--though never perhaps before has your soulbeen so truly active--seems to you a stillness, a rest. 

The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lowerlife of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will nowappear to you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact, which you have verified in your own experience. You perceivethat these are the two complementary ways of apprehending anduniting with Reality--the one as a dynamic process, the other asan eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not conflict. You know that the flow, the broken-up world of change andmultiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of thetime-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to thedevelopment of the higher side of your consciousness, you arenow lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple, transcendent life "broken, yet not divided, " which gives to thistime-world all its meaning and validity. And you know, withoutderogation from the realness of that life of flux within which youfirst made good your attachments to the universe, that you arealso a true constituent of the greater whole; that since you areman, you are also spirit, and are living Eternal Life now, in themidst of time. 

The effect of this form of contemplation, in the degree in whichthe ordinary man may learn to practise it, is like the suddenchange of atmosphere, the shifting of values, which we experiencewhen we pass from the busy streets into a quiet church; wherea lamp burns, and a silence reigns, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Thence is poured forth a stillness which strikesthrough the tumult without. Eluding the flicker of the arc-lamps, thence through an upper window we may glimpse a perpetual star. 

The walls of the church, limiting the range of our attention, shutting out the torrent of life, with its insistent demands andappeals, make possible our apprehension of this deep eternalpeace. The character of our consciousness, intermediate betweenEternity and Time, and ever ready to swing between them, makessuch a device, such a concrete aid to concentration, essential tous. But the peace, the presence, is everywhere--for us, not for it, is the altar and the sanctuary required--and your deliberate, humble practice of contemplation will teach you at last to find it;outside the sheltering walls of recollection as well as within. Youwill realise then what Julian meant, when she declared theultimate property of all that was made to be that "God keepethit": will _feel_ the violent consciousness of an enfoldingPresence, utterly transcending the fluid changeful nature-life, andincomprehensible to the intelligence which that nature-life hasdeveloped and trained. And as you knew the secret of thatnature-life best by surrendering yourself to it, by entering itscurrents, and refusing to analyse or arrange: so here, by adeliberate giving of yourself to the silence, the rich "nothingness, "the "Cloud, " you will draw nearest to the Reality it concealsfrom the eye of sense. "Lovers put out the candle and draw thecurtains, " says Patmore, "when they wish to see the God and theGoddess: and in the higher communion, the night of thought isthe light of perception. "

Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of that intuitiveawareness, that meek and simple self-mergence, which themystics call sometimes, according to its degree and specialcircumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, represents the utmost that human consciousness can do of itselftowards the achievement of union with Reality. To some it bringsjoy and peace, to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of thelowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at last canmeasure itself by the august standards of the Infinite. Though thetrained and diligent will of the contemplative can, if control ofthe attention be really established, recapture this state ofawareness, retreat into the Quiet again and again, yet it is ofnecessity a fleeting experience; for man is immersed in duration, subject to it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease withthe cessation of physical life--perhaps not then. Perpetualabsorption in the Transcendent is a human impossibility, and theeffort to achieve it is both unsocial and silly. But this experience, this "ascent to the Nought, " changes for ever the proportions ofthe life that once has known it; gives to it depth and height, andprepares the way for those further experiences, that greattransfiguration of existence which comes when the personalactivity of the finite will gives place to the great and compellingaction of another Power. 

CHAPTER IX

THE THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION

The hard separation which some mystical writers insist uponmaking between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation, hasbeen on the whole productive of confusion rather than clearness:for the word "supernatural" has many unfortunate associations forthe mind of the plain man. It at once suggests to him visions andecstasies, superstitious beliefs, ghosts, and other disagreeableinterferences with the order which he calls "natural"; and inclineshim to his old attitude of suspicion in respect of all mysticalthings. But some word we must have, to indicate the realcleavage which exists between the second and third stages in thedevelopment of the contemplative consciousness: the real changewhich, if you would go further on these interior paths, must nowtake place in the manner of your apprehension of Reality. Hitherto, all that you have attained has been--or at least hasseemed to you--the direct result of your own hard work. Adifficult self-discipline, the slowly achieved control of yourvagrant thoughts and desires, the steady daily practice ofrecollection, a diligent pushing out of your consciousness fromthe superficial to the fundamental, an unselfish loving attention;all this has been rewarded by the gradual broadening anddeepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into themovements of a larger life, You have been a knocker, a seeker, an asker: have beat upon the Cloud of Unknowing "with a sharpdart of longing love. " A perpetual effort of the will hascharacterised your inner development. Your contemplation, infact, as the specialists would say, has been "active, " not"infused. "

But now, having achieved an awareness--obscure and indescribableindeed, yet actual--of the enfolding presence of Reality, under those two forms which the theologians call the "immanence"and the "transcendence" of the Divine, a change is to takeplace in the relation between your finite human spirit andthe Infinite Life in which at last it knows itself to dwell. All thatwill now come to you--and much perhaps will come--will happenas it seems without effort on your own part: though really it willbe the direct result of that long stress and discipline which hasgone before, and has made it possible for you to feel the subtlecontact of deeper realities. It will depend also on the steadycontinuance--often perhaps through long periods of darkness andboredom--of that poise to which you have been trained: thestretching-out of the loving and surrendered will into the dimnessand silence, the continued trustful habitation of the soul in theatmosphere of the Essential World. You are like a travellerarrived in a new country. The journey has been a long one; andthe hardships and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the perpetualconscious pressing forward, have at last come to seem the chieffeatures of your inner life. Now, with their cessation, you feelcuriously lost; as if the chief object of your existence had beentaken away. No need to push on any further: yet, though there isno more that you can do of yourself, there is much that may andmust be done to you. The place that you have come to seemsstrange and bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons ofhuman thought. There are no familiar landmarks, nothing onwhich you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro, " as the mysticssay, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence anddarkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those whogo to live in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Yourstate, then, should now be wisely passive; in order that the greatinfluences which surround you may take and adjust your spirit, that the unaccustomed light, which now seems to you a darkness, may clarify your eyes, and that you may be transformed from avisitor into an inhabitant of that supernal Country which St. Augustine described as "no mere vision, but a home. "

You are therefore to let yourself go; to cease all conscious, anxious striving and pushing. Finding yourself in this place ofdarkness and quietude, this "Night of the Spirit, " as St. John ofthe Cross has called it, you are to dwell there meekly; askingnothing, seeking nothing, but with your doors flung wide opentowards God. And as you do thus, there will come to you an everclearer certitude that this darkness enveils the goal for which youhave been seeking from the first; the final Reality with which youare destined to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ardentand most sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your effortsreach it. This realisation of your own complete impotence, of theresistance which the Transcendent--long sought and faithfullyserved--now seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love, your ardour, your deliberate self-donation, is at once the mostpainful and most essential phase in the training of the humansoul. It brings you into that state of passive suffering which is tocomplete the decentralisation of your character, test the purity ofyour love, and perfect your education in humility. 

Here, you must oppose more thoroughly than ever before theinstincts and suggestions of your separate, clever, energetic self;which, hating silence and dimness, is always trying to takethe methods of Martha into the domain of Mary, and seldomdiscriminates between passivity and sloth. Perhaps you will find, when you try to achieve this perfect self-abandonment, that afurther, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper, more searchingpurification than that which was forced upon you by your firstexperience of the recollective state is needed. The last fragmentsof selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfaction--thefundamental human tendency to drag down the Simple Fact andmake it ours, instead of offering ourselves to it--must be soughtout and killed. In this deep contemplation, this profound Quiet, your soul gradually becomes conscious of a constriction, adreadful narrowness of personality; something still existing initself, still tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and keepingit from that absolute surrender which is the only way to peace. An attitude of perfect generosity, complete submission, willingacquiescence in anything that may happen--even in failure anddeath--is here your only hope: for union with Reality can only bea union of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universallife. You must, so far as you are able, give yourself up to, "dieinto, " melt into the Whole; abandon all efforts to lay hold of It. More, you must be willing that it should lay hold of you. "A purebare going forth, " says Tauler, trying to describe the sensations ofthe self at this moment. "None, " says Ruysbroeck, putting thissame experience, this meek outstreaming of the bewildered spirit, into other language, "is sure of Eternal Life, unless he has diedwith his own attributes wholly into God. "

It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utterself-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken fromyou, nothing given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, amighty transformation will result. From the transitional plane ofdarkness, you will be reborn into another "world, " another stageof realisation: and find yourself, literally, to be other than youwere before. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence of the changenow effected consists in the fact that "God's _action_ takes theplace of man's _activity_"--that the surrendered self "does not act, but receives. " By this they mean to describe, as well as ourconcrete language will permit, the new and vivid consciousnesswhich now invades the contemplative; the sense which he has ofbeing as it were helpless in the grasp of another Power, so utterlypart of him, so completely different from him--so rich andvarious, so transfused with life and feeling, so urgent and soall-transcending--that he can only think of it as God. It is forthis that the dimness and steadily increasing passivity of thestage of Quiet has been preparing him; and it is out of thiswilling quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the newexperiences come. 

 "O night that didst lead thus, O night more lovely than the dawn of light, O night that broughtest us Lover to lover's sight-- Lover with loved in marriage of delight, "

says St. John of the Cross in the most wonderful of all mysticalpoems. "He who has had experience of this, " says St. Teresa ofthe same stage of apprehension, "will understand it in somemeasure: but it cannot be more clearly described because whatthen takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that thesoul is represented as being close to God; and that there abide aconviction thereof so certain and strong, that it cannot possiblyhelp believing so. "

This sense, this conviction, which may be translated by theimagination into many different forms, is the substance of thegreatest experiences and highest joys of the mystical saints. Theintensity with which it is realised will depend upon the ardour, purity, and humility of the experiencing soul: but even those whofeel it faintly are convinced by it for evermore. In some great andgenerous spirits, able to endure the terrific onslaught of Reality, it may even reach a vividness by which all other things areobliterated; and the self, utterly helpless under the inundations ofthis transcendent life-force, passes into that simple state ofconsciousness which is called Ecstasy. 

But you are not to be frightened by these special manifestations;or to suppose that here the road is barred against you. Thoughthese great spirits have as it were a genius for Reality, asusceptibility to supernal impressions, so far beyond your ownsmall talent that there seems no link between you: yet you have, since you are human, a capacity for the Infinite too. With lessintensity, less splendour, but with a certitude which no argumentswill ever shake, this sense of the Living Fact, and of itsmysterious contacts with and invasions of the human spirit, mayassuredly be realised by you. This realisation--sometimes feltunder the symbols of personality, sometimes under those of animpersonal but life-giving Force, Light, Energy, or Heat--is theruling character of the third phase of contemplation; and thereward of that meek passivity, that "busy idleness" as the mysticssometimes call it, which you have been striving to attain. Sooneror later, if you are patient, it will come to you through thedarkness: a mysterious contact, a clear certitude of intercourseand of possession--perhaps so gradual in its approach that thebreak, the change from the ever-deepening stillness and peace ofthe second phase, is hardly felt by you; perhaps, if your nature beardent and unstable, with a sudden shattering violence, in a"storm of love. "

In either case, the advent of this experience is incalculable, andcompletely outside your own control. So far, to use St. Teresa'swell-known image, you have been watering the garden of yourspirit by hand; a poor and laborious method, yet one in whichthere is a definite relation between effort and result. But now thewatering-can is taken from you, and you must depend upon therain: more generous, more fruitful, than anything which your ownefforts could manage, but, in its incalculable visitations, utterlybeyond your control. Here all one can say is this: that if youacquiesce in the heroic demands which the spiritual life nowmakes upon you, if you let yourself go, eradicate the last traces ofself-interest even of the most spiritual kind--then, you haveestablished conditions under which the forces of the spiritualworld can work on you, heightening your susceptibilities, deepening and purifying your attention, so that you are able totaste and feel more and more of the inexhaustible riches ofReality. 

Thus dying to your own will, waiting for what is given, infused, you will presently find that a change in your apprehension hasindeed taken place: and that those who said self-loss was the onlyway to realisation taught no pious fiction but the truth. Thehighest contemplative experience to which you have yet attainedhas seemed above all else a still awareness. The cessation of yourown striving, a resting upon and within the Absolute World--these were its main characteristics for your consciousness. Butnow, this Ocean of Being is no longer felt by you as anemptiness, a solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it to beinstinct with a movement and life too great for you to apprehend. You are thrilled by a mighty energy, uncontrolled by you, unsolicited by you: its higher vitality is poured into your soul. You enter upon an experience for which all the terms of power, thought, motion, even of love, are inadequate: yet which containswithin itself the only complete expression of all these things. Your strength is now literally made perfect in weakness: becauseof the completeness of your dependence, a fresh life is infusedinto you, such as your old separate existence never knew. Moreover, to that diffused and impersonal sense of the Infinite, inwhich you have dipped yourself, and which swallows up andcompletes all the ideas your mind has ever built up with thehelp of the categories of time and space, is now added theconsciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends, completes all that you mean by the categories of personality andof life. Those ineffective, half-conscious attempts towards freeaction, clear apprehension, true union, which we dignify by thenames of will, thought, and love are now seen matched by anAbsolute Will, Thought, and Love; instantly recognised by thecontemplating spirit as the highest reality it yet has known, andevoking in it a passionate and a humble joy. 

This unmistakable experience has been achieved by the mysticsof every religion; and when we read their statements, we knowthat all are speaking of the same thing. None who have had ithave ever been able to doubt its validity. It has always becomefor them the central fact, by which all other realities mustbe tested and graduated. It has brought to them the deepconsciousness of sources of abundant life now made accessible toman; of the impact of a mighty energy, gentle, passionate, self-giving, creative, which they can only call Absolute Love. Sometimes they feel this strange life moving and stirring withinthem. Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege them. Inevery case, they are the passive objects upon which it works. It isnow another Power which seeks the separated spirit and demandsit; which knocks at the closed door of the narrow personality;which penetrates the contemplative consciousness through andthrough, speaking, stirring, compelling it; which sometimes, byits secret irresistible pressure, wins even the most recalcitrantin spite of themselves. Sometimes this Power is felt as animpersonal force, the unifying cosmic energy, the indrawing lovewhich gathers all things into One; sometimes as a sudden accessof vitality, a light and heat, enfolding and penetrating the self andmaking its languid life more vivid and more real; sometimes as apersonal and friendly Presence which counsels and entreats thesoul. 

In each case, the mystics insist again that this is God; that hereunder these diverse manners the soul has immediate intercoursewith Him. But we must remember that when they make thisdeclaration, they are speaking from a plane of consciousness farabove the ideas and images of popular religion; and from a placewhich is beyond the judiciously adjusted horizon of philosophy. They mean by this word, not a notion, however august; but anexperienced Fact so vivid, that against it the so-called facts ofdaily life look shadowy and insecure. They say that this Fact is"immanent"; dwelling in, transfusing, and discoverable throughevery aspect of the universe, every movement of the game oflife--as you have found in the first stage of contemplation. There youmay hear its melody and discern its form. And further, that It is"transcendent"; in essence exceeding and including the sum ofthose glimpses and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence inlife, and in Its simplest manifestations above and beyondanything to which reason can attain--"the Nameless Being, ofWhom nought can be said. " This you discovered to be true in thesecond stage. But in addition to this, they say also, that thisall-pervasive, all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melodyis heard in all movement, and within Whose Being "the worldsare being told like beads, " calls the human spirit to an immediateintercourse, a _unity_, a fruition, a divine give-and-take, forwhich the contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, ofmarriage, of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes in thefully conscious soul a passionate and a humble love. "He devoursus and He feeds us!" exclaims Ruysbroeck. "Here, " says St. Thomas Aquinas, "the soul in a wonderful and unspeakablemanner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herselfdevoured, embraces and is violently embraced: and by the knot oflove she unites herself with God, and is with Him as the Alonewith the Alone. "

The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the rhapsodies whichextol the spirit's Lover, Friend, Companion, Bridegroom; whichdescribe the "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound ofHeaven chasing the separated soul, the onslaughts, demands, andcaresses of this "stormy, generous, and unfathomable love"--allthis is an attempt, often of course oblique and symbolic inmethod, to express and impart this transcendent secret, todescribe that intense yet elusive state in which alone union withthe living heart of Reality is possible. "How delicately Thouteachest love tome!" cries St. John of the Cross; and here indeedwe find all the ardours of all earthly lovers justified by animperishable Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that wetruly love, and beyond all these things both seeks us and compelsus, "giving more than we can take and asking more than we canpay. "

You do not, you never will know, _what_ this Objective is: for asDionysius teaches, "if any one saw God and understood what hesaw, then it was not God that he saw, but something that belongsto Him. " But you do know now that it exists, with an intensitywhich makes all other existences unreal; save in so far as theyparticipate in this one Fact. "Some contemplate the Formless, andothers meditate on Form: but the wise man knows that Brahma isbeyond both. " As you yield yourself more and more completelyto the impulses of this intimate yet unseizable Presence, so muchthe sweeter and stronger--so much the more constant and steady--will your intercourse with it become. The imperfect music ofyour adoration will be answered and reinforced by another music, gentle, deep, and strange; your out-going movement, thestretching forth of your desire from yourself to something other, will be answered by a movement, a stirring, within you yet notconditioned by you. The wonder and variety of this intercourse isnever-ending. It includes in its sweep every phase of human loveand self-devotion, all beauty and all power, all suffering andeffort, all gentleness and rapture: here found in synthesis. Goingforth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world ofhigh contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at lastmade real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblestexperiences of the world of growth and change. 

You see now what it is that you have been doing in the course ofyour mystical development. As your narrow heart stretchedto a wider sympathy with life, you have been surrenderingprogressively to larger and larger existences, more and morecomplete realities: have been learning to know them, to sharetheir very being, through the magic of disinterested love. First, the manifested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt by youin its wonder and wholeness, once you learned to yield yourselfto its rhythms, received in simplicity the undistorted messages ofsense. Then, the actual unchanging ground of life, the eternal andunconditioned Whole, transcending all succession: a worldinaccessible alike to senses and intelligence, but felt--vaguely, darkly, yet intensely--by the quiet and surrendered consciousness. But now you are solicited, whether you will or no, by a greaterReality, the final inclusive Fact, the Unmeasured Love, which "isthrough all things everlastingly": and yielding yourselfto it, receiving and responding to its obscure yet ardentcommunications, you pass beyond the cosmic experience to thepersonal encounter, the simple yet utterly inexpressible union ofthe soul with its God. 

And this threefold union with Reality, as your attention isfocussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its richsimplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: foryou are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is nowto characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your owndwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, thesense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal ofcontact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual self-donation, shallanimate it too. When the greater love overwhelms the lesser, andyour small self-consciousness is lost in the consciousness of theWhole, it will be felt as an intense stillness, a quiet fruition ofReality. Then, your very selfhood seems to cease, as it does in allyour moments of great passion; and you are "satisfied andoverflowing, and with Him beyond yourself eternally fulfilled. "Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground, your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeperand deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, andseeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of theInfinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewedencounter than a final achievement. Since you are a child of Timeas well as of Eternity, such effort and satisfaction, active andpassive love are both needed by you, if your whole life is to bebrought into union with the inconceivably rich yet simple One inWhom these apparent opposites are harmonised. Thereforeseeking and finding, work and rest, conflict and peace, feeding onGod and self-immersion in God, spiritual marriage and spiritualdeath--these contradictory images are all wanted, if we are torepresent the changing moods of the living, growing humanspirit; the diverse aspects under which it realises the simple factof its intercourse with the Divine. 

Each new stage achieved in the mystical development of thespirit has meant, not the leaving behind of the previousstages, but an adding on to them: an ever greater extension ofexperience, and enrichment of personality. So that the total resultof this change, this steady growth of your transcendental self, isnot an impoverishment of the sense-life in the supposed interestsof the super-sensual, but the addition to it of another life--a hugewidening and deepening of the field over which your attentioncan play. Sometimes the mature contemplative consciousnessnarrows to an intense point of feeling, in which it seemsindeed "alone with the Alone": sometimes it spreads to a vastapprehension of the Universal Life, or perceives the commonthings of sense aflame with God. It moves easily and with nosense of incongruity from hours of close personal communionwith its Friend and Lover to self-loss in the "deep yet dazzlingdarkness" of the Divine Abyss: or, re-entering that living worldof change which the first form of contemplation disclosed to it, passes beyond those discrete manifestations of Reality to realisethe Whole which dwells in and inspires every part. Thusascending to the mysterious fruition of that Reality which isbeyond image, and descending again to the loving contemplationand service of all struggling growing things, it now finds andadores everywhere--in the sky and the nest, the soul and thevoid--one Energetic Love which "is measureless, since it is allthat exists, " and of which the patient up-climb of the individualsoul, the passionate outpouring of the Divine Mind, form thecompleting opposites. 

CHAPTER X

THE MYSTICAL LIFE

And here the practical man, who has been strangely silent duringthe last stages of our discourse, shakes himself like a terrierwhich has achieved dry land again after a bath; and asks oncemore, with a certain explosive violence, his dear old question, "What is the _use_ of all this?"

"You have introduced me, " he says further, "to some curiousstates of consciousness, interesting enough in their way; and to alot of peculiar emotions, many of which are no doubt mostvaluable to poets and so on. But it is all so remote from daily life. How is it going to fit in with ordinary existence? How, above all, is it all going to help _me_?"

Well, put upon its lowest plane, this new way of attending to life--this deepening and widening of outlook--may at least be ashelpful to you as many things to which you have unhesitatinglyconsecrated much time and diligence in the past: your longjourneys to new countries, for instance, or long hours spent inacquiring new "facts, " relabelling old experiences, gaining skillin new arts and games. These, it is true, were quite worth theeffort expended on them: for they gave you, in exchange for yourlabour and attention, a fresh view of certain fragmentary things, anew point of contact with the rich world of possibilities, a tinyenlargement of your universe in one direction or another. Yourlove and patient study of nature, art, science, politics, business--even of sport--repaid you thus. But I have offered you, inexchange for a meek and industrious attention to anotheraspect of the world, hitherto somewhat neglected by you, anenlargement which shall include and transcend all these; and beconditioned only by the perfection of your generosity, courage, and surrender. 

Nor are you to suppose that this enlargement will be limited tocertain new spiritual perceptions, which the art of contemplationhas made possible for you: that it will merely draw the curtainfrom a window out of which you have never looked. This newwide world is not to be for you something seen, but somethinglived in: and you--since man is a creature of responses--willinsensibly change under its influence, growing up into a moreperfect conformity with it. Living in this atmosphere of Reality, you will, in fact, yourself become more real. Hence, if you acceptin a spirit of trust the suggestions which have been made to you--and I acknowledge that here at the beginning an attitude of faithis essential--and if you practise with diligence the arts which Ihave described: then, sooner or later, you will inevitably findyourself deeply and permanently changed by them--will perceivethat you have become a "new man. " Not merely have you acquirednew powers of perception and new ideas of Reality; but a quietand complete transformation, a strengthening and maturing ofyour personality has taken place. 

You are still, it is true, living the ordinary life of the body. Youare immersed in the stream of duration; a part of the human, thesocial, the national group. The emotions, instincts, needs, of thatgroup affect you. Your changing scrap of vitality contributes toits corporate life; and contributes the more effectively since anew, intuitive sympathy has now made its interests your own. Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you andtaking from you--conditioning, you as it does in countless obliqueand unapparent ways--you are still compelled to react to manysuggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled, to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhapsafterwards, by habit, custom, the good old average way ofmisunderstanding the world. To this extent, the crowd-spirit hasyou in its grasp. 

Yet in spite of all this, you are now released from that crowd'styrannically overwhelming consciousness as you never werebefore. You feel yourself now a separate vivid entity, a real, whole man: dependent on the Whole, and gladly so dependent, yet within that Whole a free self-governing thing. Perhaps youalways fancied that your will was free--that you were actually, asyou sometimes said, the "captain of your soul. " If so, this wasmerely one amongst the many illusions which supported yourold, enslaved career. As a matter of fact, you were driven along aroad, unaware of anything that lay beyond the hedges, pressed onevery side by other members of the flock; getting perhaps acertain satisfaction out of the deep warm stir of the collective life, but ignorant of your destination, and with your personal initiativelimited to the snatching of grass as you went along, the pushingof your way to the softer side of the track. These operation? madeup together that which you called Success. But now, because youhave achieved a certain power of gathering yourself together, perceiving yourself as a person, a spirit, and observing yourrelation with these other individual lives--because too, hearingnow and again the mysterious piping of the Shepherd, you realiseyour own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, inits relation to that living guide--you have a far deeper, truerknowledge than ever before both of the general and the individualexistence; and so are able to handle life with a surer hand. 

Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetuallysupported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itselfin the mild contemplation of the great world through whichyou move. True, it is said of the Shepherd that he carries thelambs in his bosom: but the sheep are expected to walk, and putup with the inequalities of the road, the bunts and blunders of theflock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort that you are called. Since the transcendental aspect of your being has been broughtinto focus you are now raised out of the mere push-forward, theblind passage through time of the flock, into a position of creativeresponsibility. You are aware of personal correspondences withthe Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broaderworld. The sky and the hedges, the wide lands through which youare moving, the corporate character and meaning of the group towhich you belong--all these are now within the circle of yourconsciousness; and each little event, each separate demand orinvitation which comes to you is now seen in a truer proportion, because you bring to it your awareness of the Whole. Yourjourney ceases to be an automatic progress, and takes on some ofthe characters of a free act: for "things" are now under you, youare no longer under them. 

You will hardly deny that this is a practical gain: that thiswidening and deepening of the range over which your powers ofperception work makes you more of a man than you were before, and thus adds to rather than subtracts from your total practicalefficiency. It is indeed only when he reaches these levels, andfeels within himself this creative freedom--this full actualisationof himself--on the one hand: on the other hand the sense of aworld-order, a love and energy on which he depends and withwhose interests he is now at one, that man becomes fully human, capable of living the real life of Eternity in the midst of the worldof time. 

And what, when you have come to it, do you suppose to be yourown function in this vast twofold scheme? Is it for nothing, doyou think, that you are thus a meeting-place of two orders?Surely it is your business, so far as you may, to express in actionsomething of the real character of that universe within which younow know yourself to live? Artists, aware of a more vivid andmore beautiful world than other men, are always driven by theirlove and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into directmanifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm, which they have been able to apprehend: and, doing this, theytaste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with theReal. For them, the duty of creation is tightly bound up with thegift of love. In their passionate outflowing to the universe whichoffers itself under one of its many aspects to their adoration, thatother-worldly fruition of beauty is always followed, balanced, completed, by a this-world impulse to creation: a desire to fixwithin the time-order, and share with other men, the vision bywhich they were possessed. Each one, thus bringing new aspectsof beauty, new ways of seeing and hearing within the reach of therace, does something to amend the sorry universe of commonsense, the more hideous universe of greed, and redeem hisfellows from their old, slack servitude to a lower range ofsignificances. It is in action, then, that these find their truest andsafest point of insertion into the living, active world of Reality: insharing and furthering its work of manifestation they know itssecrets best. For them contemplation and action are not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a life that is _one_--a life thatrushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful, only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a newintensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it, or at least some little bit of it, "nearer to the heart's desire. "

Again, the great mystics tell us that the "vision of God in Hisown light"--the direct contact of the soul's substance with theAbsolute--to which awful experience you drew as near as thequality of your spirit would permit in the third degree ofcontemplation, is the prelude, not to a further revelation of theeternal order given to you, but to an utter change, a vividlife springing up within you, which they sometimes call the"transforming union" or the "birth of the Son in the soul. " By thisthey mean that the spark of spiritual stuff, that high special poweror character of human nature, by which you first desired, thentended to, then achieved contact with Reality, is as it werefertilised by this profound communion with its origin; becomesstrong and vigorous, invades and transmutes the whole personality, and makes of it, not a "dreamy mystic" but an active andimpassioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom. 

So that when these full-grown, fully vital mystics try to tell usabout the life they have achieved, it is always an intensely activelife that they describe. They say, not that they "dwell in restfulfruition, " though the deep and joyous knowledge of this, perhapstoo the perpetual longing for an utter self-loss in it, is alwayspossessed by them--but that they "go up _and down_ the ladderof contemplation. " They stretch up towards the Point, the uniqueReality to which all the intricate and many-coloured lines of lifeflow, and in which they are merged; and rush out towards thosevarious lives in a passion of active love and service. This doubleactivity, this swinging between rest and work--this alone, theysay, is truly the life of man; because this alone represents onhuman levels something of that inexhaustibly rich yet simple life, "ever active yet ever at rest, " which they find in God. When hegets to this, then man has indeed actualised his union withReality; because then he is a part of the perpetual creative act, theeternal generation of the Divine thought and love. Thereforecontemplation, even at its highest, dearest, and most intimate, isnot to be for you an end in itself. It shall only be trulyyours when it impels you to action: when the double movement ofTranscendent Love, drawing inwards to unity and fruition, andrushing out again to creative acts, is realised in you. You are tobe a living, ardent tool with which the Supreme Artist works: oneof the instruments of His self-manifestation, the perpetual processby which His Reality is brought into concrete expression. 

Now the expression of vision, of reality, of beauty, at an artist'shands--the creation of new life in all forms--has two factors: theliving moulding creative spirit, and the material in which itworks. Between these two there is inevitably a difference oftension. The material is at best inert, and merely patient of theinforming idea; at worst, directly recalcitrant to it. Hence, according to the balance of these two factors, the amount ofresistance offered by stuff to tool, a greater or less energy mustbe expended, greater or less perfection of result will be achieved. You, accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic, and theresponsibilities that go with it, have by this act taken sides oncefor all with creative spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxedeffort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more significant life. The adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair ofred hassocks and authorised hymn books; but a burning andconsuming fire. You will find, then, that the world, going its owngait, busily occupied with its own system of correspondences--yielding to every gust of passion, intent on the satisfaction ofgreed, the struggle for comfort or for power--will oppose yournew eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably withthe exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to getup. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharperpower when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: foryou need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea liesthrough a Nay, " and righteous warfare is the only way to a livingand a lasting peace. 

Further, you will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff ofyour external world, the method and machinery of the commonlife, is not merely passively but actively inconsistent with yoursharp interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is diseased aswell as indolent. All man's perverse ways of seeing his universe, all the perverse and hideous acts which have sprung from them--these have set up reactions, have produced deep disorders in theworld of things. Man is free, and holds the keys of hell as well asthe keys of heaven. Within the love-driven universe which youhave learned to see as a whole, you will therefore find egotism, rebellion, meanness, brutality, squalor: the work of separatedselves whose energies are set athwart the stream. But everyaspect of life, however falsely imagined, can still be "saved, "turned to the purposes of Reality: for "all-thing hath the being bythe love of God. " Its oppositions are no part of its realness;and therefore they can be overcome. Is there not here, then, abundance of practical work for you to do; work which is thedirect outcome of your mystical experience? Are there not here, as the French proverb has it, plenty of cats for you to comb? Andisn't it just here, in the new foothold it gives you, the new clearvision and certitude--in its noble, serious, and invulnerable faith--that mysticism is "useful"; even for the most scientific of socialreformers, the most belligerent of politicians, the leastsentimental of philanthropists?

To "bring Eternity into Time, " the "invisible into concreteexpression"; to "be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand isto a man"--these are the plainly expressed desires of all the greatmystics. One and all, they demand earnest and deliberate action, the insertion of the purified and ardent will into the world ofthings. The mystics are artists; and the stuff in which they workis most often human life. They want to heal the disharmonybetween the actual and the real: and since, in the white-hotradiance of that faith, hope, and charity which burns in them, theydiscern such a reconciliation to be possible, they are able to workfor it with a singleness of purpose and an invincible optimismdenied to other men. This was the instinct which drove St. Francis of Assist to the practical experience of that poverty whichhe recognised as the highest wisdom; St. Catherine of Siena fromcontemplation to politics; Joan of Arc to the salvation of France;St. Teresa to the formation of an ideal religious family; Fox to theproclaiming of a world-religion in which all men should beguided by the Inner Light; Florence Nightingale to battle withofficials, vermin, dirt, and disease in the soldiers' hospitals;Octavia Hill to make in London slums something a little nearer"the shadows of the angels' houses" than that which the practicallandlord usually provides. 

All these have felt sure that a great part in the drama of creationhas been given to the free spirit of man: that bit by bit, throughand by him, the scattered worlds of love and thought and actionshall be realised again as one. It is for those who have found thethread on which those worlds are strung, to bring this knowledgeout of the hiddenness; to use it, as the old alchemists declaredthat they could use their tincture, to transmute all baser; metalsinto gold. 

So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so various in itsopportunities, that you can hardly fail to find something to do. Itis your business to actualise within the world of time and space--perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic action, perhapsonly by small ones in field and market, tram and tube, office anddrawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the commonlife--that more real life, that holy creative energy, which thisworld manifests as a whole but indifferently. You shall work formercy, order, beauty, significance: shall mend where you findthings broken, make where you find the need. "Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, " said St. Thomas in his great mystical hymn: andthe practical side of that adoration consists in the bringing of theReal Presence from its hiddenness, and exhibiting it before theeyes of other men. Hitherto you have not been very active in thismatter: yet it is the purpose for which you exist, and yourcontemplative consciousness, if you educate it, will soon makethis fact clear to you. The teeming life of nature has yielded up toyour loving attention many sacramental images of Reality: seenin the light of charity, it is far more sacred and significant thanyou supposed. What about _your_ life? Is that a theophany too?"Each oak doth cry I AM, " says Vaughan. Do you proclaim byyour existence the grandeur, the beauty, the intensity, the livingwonder of that Eternal Reality within which, at this moment, youstand? Do your hours of contemplation and of action harmonise?

If they did harmonise--if everybody's did--then, by theseindividual adjustments the complete group-consciousness ofhumanity would be changed, brought back into conformity withthe Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be actualisedwithin the temporal order at last. Then, that world of falseimagination, senseless conflicts, and sham values, into which ourchildren are now born, would be annihilated. The whole race, notmerely a few of its noblest, most clearsighted spirits, would be"in union with God"; and men, transfused by His light and heat, direct and willing agents of His Pure Activity, would achieve thatcompleteness of life which the mystics dare to call "deification. "This is the substance of that redemption of the world, whichall religions proclaim or demand: the consummation which iscrudely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the prophets andseers. It is the true incarnation of the Divine Wisdom: and youmust learn to see with Paul the pains and disorders of creation--your own pains, efforts, and difficulties too--as incidents in thetravail of that royal birth. Patriots have sometimes been asked to"think imperially. " Mystics are asked to think celestially; andthis, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, butwhen dealing with the concrete accidents, the evil and sadness, the cruelty, failure, and degeneration of life. 

So, what is being offered to you is not merely a choice amongstnew states of consciousness, new emotional experiences--thoughthese are indeed involved in it--but, above all else, a larger andintenser life, a career, a total consecration to the interests of theReal. This life shall not be abstract and dreamy, made up, assome imagine, of negations. It shall be violently practical andaffirmative; giving scope for a limitless activity of will, heart, andmind working within the rhythms of the Divine Idea. It shall costmuch, making perpetual demands on your loyalty, trust, andself-sacrifice: proving now the need and the worth of that training inrenunciation which was forced on you at the beginning of yourinterior life. It shall be both deep and wide, embracing in its spanall those aspects of Reality which the gradual extension of yourcontemplative powers has disclosed to you: making "the innerand outer worlds to be indivisibly One. " And because theemphasis is now for ever shifted from the accidents to thesubstance of life, it will matter little where and how this career isactualised--whether in convent or factory, study or battlefield, multitude or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctuations ofcircumstance will no longer dominate you; since "it is Love thatpayeth for all. "

Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening up of the universe, the vivid consciousness of a living Reality and your relation withit, which came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be aconstant or a governable feature of your experience. Even underthe most favourable circumstances, you shall and must moveeasily and frequently between that spiritual fruition and activework in the world of men. Often enough it will slip from youutterly; often your most diligent effort will fail to recapture it, andonly its fragrance will remain. The more intense those contactshave been, the more terrible will be your hunger and desolationwhen they are thus withdrawn: for increase of susceptibilitymeans more pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist knows. But you will find in all that happens to you, all that opposes andgrieves you--even in those inevitable hours of darkness when thedoors of true perception seem to close, and the cruel tangles ofthe world are all that you can discern--an inward sense of securitywhich will never cease. All the waves that buffet you about, shaking sometimes the strongest faith and hope, are yet parts andaspects of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that Oceanwould receive you; and there you would find, overwhelming andtransfusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all life andjoy. Whether you realise it in its personal or impersonalmanifestation, the universe is now friendly to you; and as he is asuspicious and unworthy lover who asks every day for reneweddemonstrations of love, so you do not demand from it perpetualreassurances. It is enough, that once it showed you its heart. Alink of love now binds you to it for evermore: in spite ofderelictions, in spite of darkness and suffering, your will isharmonised with the Will that informs the Whole. 

We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism wasthe art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Scienceof Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward andtowards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretchingout, is a condition of _being_, not of _seeing_. As the bodilysenses have been produced under pressure of man's physicalenvironment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of hispleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment tothose aspects of the natural world which concern him--so the useand meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too. These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man acertain measure of Reality: not in order that he may gaze upon it, but in order that he may react to it, learn to live in, with, and forit; growing and stretching into more perfect harmony with theEternal Order, until at last, like the blessed ones of Dante's vision, the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance ofthe Enkindling Light.