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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Practical Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Practical Mysticism
+       A Little Book for Normal People
+
+
+Author: Evelyn Underhill
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 8, 2007  [eBook #21774]
+Most recently updated: October 6, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL MYSTICISM***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Ruth Hart ruthhart@twilightoracle.com
+
+
+
+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 York
+E.P. Dutton & Company
+681 Fifth Avenue
+Copyright 1915 by
+E.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 to
+press in the first weeks of the great war. Many will feel that in
+such a time of conflict and horror, when only the most ignorant,
+disloyal, or apathetic can hope for quietness of mind, a book
+which deals with that which is called the "contemplative" attitude
+to existence is wholly out of place. So obvious, indeed, is this
+point of view, that I had at first thought of postponing its
+publication. On the one hand, it seems as though the dreams of a
+spiritual renaissance, which promised so fairly but a little time
+ago, had perished in the sudden explosion of brute force. On the
+other hand, the thoughts of the English race are now turned, and
+rightly, towards the most concrete forms of action--struggle and
+endurance, practical sacrifices, difficult and long-continued
+effort--rather than towards the passive attitude of self-surrender
+which is all that the practice of mysticism seems, at first sight, to
+demand. Moreover, that deep conviction of the dependence of all
+human worth upon eternal values, the immanence of the Divine
+Spirit within the human soul, which lies at the root of a mystical
+concept of life, is hard indeed to reconcile with much of the
+human history now being poured red-hot from the cauldron of
+war. For all these reasons, we are likely during the present crisis
+to witness a revolt from those superficially mystical notions
+which threatened to become too popular during the immediate
+past.
+
+Yet, the title deliberately chosen for this book--that of "Practical"
+Mysticism--means nothing if the attitude and the discipline which
+it recommends be adapted to fair weather alone: if the principles
+for which it stands break down when subjected to the pressure of
+events, and cannot be reconciled with the sterner duties of the
+national life. To accept this position is to reduce mysticism to the
+status of a spiritual plaything. On the contrary, if the experiences
+on which it is based have indeed the transcendent value for
+humanity which the mystics claim for them--if they reveal to us a
+world of higher truth and greater reality than the world of
+concrete happenings in which we seem to be immersed--then that
+value is increased rather than lessened when confronted by the
+overwhelming disharmonies and sufferings of the present time. It
+is significant that many of these experiences are reported to us
+from periods of war and distress: that the stronger the forces of
+destruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual vision
+which opposed them. We learn from these records that the
+mystical consciousness has the power of lifting those who
+possess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, can
+disturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck.
+Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldly
+calm, isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life.
+Rather, it gives them renewed vitality; administering to the
+human spirit not--as some suppose--a soothing draught, but the
+most powerful of stimulants. Stayed upon eternal realities, that
+spirit will be far better able to endure and profit by the stern
+discipline which the race is now called to undergo, than those
+who are wholly at the mercy of events; better able to discern the
+real from the illusory issues, and to pronounce judgment on the
+new problems, new difficulties, new fields of activity now
+disclosed. Perhaps it is worth while to remind ourselves that the
+two women who have left the deepest mark upon the military
+history of France and England--Joan of Arc and Florence
+Nightingale--both acted under mystical compulsion. So, too, did
+one of the noblest of modern soldiers, General Gordon. Their
+national value was directly connected with their deep spiritual
+consciousness: their intensely practical energies were the flowers
+of a contemplative life.
+
+We are often told, that in the critical periods of history it is the
+national soul which counts: that "where there is no vision, the
+people perish." No nation is truly defeated which retains its
+spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does
+not emerge with soul unstained. If this be so, it becomes a part of
+true patriotism to keep the spiritual life, both of the individual
+citizen and of the social group, active and vigorous; its vision of
+realities unsullied by the entangled interests and passions of the
+time. This is a task in which all may do their part. The spiritual
+life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world
+of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised
+it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into
+possession of all his powers. It is therefore the function of a
+practical mysticism to increase, not diminish, the total efficiency,
+the wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to practise it. It
+will help them to enter, more completely than ever before, into
+the life of the group to which they belong. It will teach them to
+see the world in a truer proportion, discerning eternal beauty
+beyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them in
+a charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer on
+them an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, even in
+the hour of greatest desolation, "There lives the dearest freshness
+deep down things." As a contribution, then, to these purposes,
+this little book is now published. It is addressed neither to the
+learned nor to the devout, who are already in possession of a
+wide literature dealing from many points of view with the
+experiences and philosophy of the mystics. Such readers are
+warned that they will find here nothing but the re-statement of
+elementary and familiar propositions, and invitations to a
+discipline immemorially old. Far from presuming to instruct
+those to whom first-hand information is both accessible and
+palatable, I write only for the larger class which, repelled by the
+formidable appearance of more elaborate works on the subject,
+would yet like to know what is meant by mysticism, and what it
+has to offer to the average man: how it helps to solve his
+problems, how it harmonises with the duties and ideals of his
+active life. For this reason, I presuppose in my readers no
+knowledge whatever of the subject, either upon the philosophic,
+religious, or historical side. Nor, since I wish my appeal to be
+general, do I urge the special claim of any one theological
+system, any one metaphysical school. I have merely attempted to
+put the view of the universe and man's place in it which is
+common to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and to
+suggest the practical conditions under which ordinary persons
+may participate in their experience. Therefore the abnormal states
+of consciousness which sometimes appear in connection with
+mystical genius are not discussed: my business being confined to
+the description of a faculty which all men possess in a greater or
+less degree.
+
+The reality and importance of this faculty are considered in the
+first three chapters. In the fourth and fifth is described the
+preliminary training of attention necessary for its use; in the
+sixth, the general self-discipline and attitude toward life which it
+involves. The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters treat in an
+elementary way of the three great forms of contemplation; and in
+the tenth, the practical value of the life in which they have been
+actualised is examined. Those kind enough to attempt the perusal
+of the book are begged to read the first sections with some
+attention 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 the
+universe which is now loosely called "mystical," find themselves
+beset by a multitude of persons who are constantly asking--some
+with real fervour, some with curiosity, and some with disdain--
+"What _is_ mysticism?" When referred to the writings of the
+mystics themselves, and to other works in which this question
+appears to be answered, these people reply that such books are
+wholly incomprehensible to them.
+
+On the other hand, the genuine inquirer will find before long a
+number of self-appointed apostles who are eager to answer his
+question in many strange and inconsistent ways, calculated to
+increase rather than resolve the obscurity of his mind. He will
+learn that mysticism is a philosophy, an illusion, a kind of
+religion, a disease; that it means having visions, performing
+conjuring 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 it
+emancipates him from all dogmas--sometimes from all morality--
+and at the same time that it is very superstitious. One expert tells
+him that it is simply "Catholic piety," another that Walt Whitman
+was a typical mystic; a third assures him that all mysticism comes
+from the East, and supports his statement by an appeal to the
+mango trick. At the end of a prolonged course of lectures,
+sermons, tea-parties, and talks with earnest persons, the inquirer
+is still heard saying--too often in tones of exasperation--"What
+_is_ mysticism?"
+
+I dare not pretend to solve a problem which has provided so
+much good hunting in the past. It is indeed the object of this little
+essay to persuade the practical man to the one satisfactory course:
+that of discovering the answer for himself. Yet perhaps it will
+give confidence if I confess pears to cover all the ground; or at
+least, all that part of the ground which is worth covering. It will
+hardly stretch to the mango trick; but it finds room at once for the
+visionaries and the philosophers, for Walt Whitman and the
+saints.
+
+Here is the definition:--
+
+_Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a
+person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or
+who aims at and believes in such attainment_.
+
+It is not expected that the inquirer will find great comfort in this
+sentence when first it meets his eye. The ultimate question,
+"What is Reality?"--a question, perhaps, which never occurred to
+him before--is already forming in his mind; and he knows that it
+will 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 one
+side. All that he is asked to consider now is this: that the
+word "union" represents not so much a rare and unimaginable
+operation, as something which he is doing, in a vague, imperfect
+fashion, at every moment of his conscious life; and doing with
+intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments of that
+life. We know a thing only by uniting with it; by assimilating it;
+by an interpenetration of it and ourselves. It gives itself to us, just
+in so far as we give ourselves to it; and it is because our outflow
+towards things is usually so perfunctory and so languid, that our
+comprehension of things is so perfunctory and languid too. The
+great Sufi who said that "Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is to
+escape the flame of separation" spoke the literal truth. Wisdom is
+the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those
+who "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, the
+patriot knows his country, the artist knows the subject of his art,
+the lover his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which is
+inconceivable as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Real
+knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive sympathy more or
+less intense, is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of
+touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic
+thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension,
+the union: and we, in our muddle-headed way, have persuaded
+ourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge--that it is, in
+fact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it. But when
+we get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitive
+activities through which our mental kitchen gets its supplies, we
+see that the distinction between mystic and non-mystic is not
+merely that between the rationalist and the dreamer, between
+intellect and intuition. The question which divides them is really
+this: What, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall
+consciousness seize upon--with what aspects of the universe shall
+it "unite"?
+
+It is notorious that the operations of the average human
+consciousness 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 the
+objects amongst which the practical man supposes himself to
+dwell. For him the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged: he
+conceives not the living lovely, wild, swift-moving creature
+which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the
+deplorable dish which he calls "things as they really are." So
+complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the
+facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough
+"understanding," garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which
+the principle of life and growth has been ejected, and whereof
+only the most digestible portions have been retained. He is not
+"mystical."
+
+But sometimes it is suggested to him that his knowledge is not
+quite so thorough as he supposed. Philosophers in particular have
+a way of pointing out its clumsy and superficial character; of
+demonstrating the fact that he habitually mistakes his own private
+sensations for qualities inherent in the mysterious objects of the
+external world. From those few qualities of colour, size, texture,
+and the rest, which his mind has been able to register and
+classify, he makes a label which registers the sum of his own
+experiences. This he knows, with this he "unites"; for it is his
+own creature. It is neat, flat, unchanging, with edges well
+defined: a thing one can trust. He forgets the existence of other
+conscious creatures, provided with their own standards of reality.
+Yet the sea as the fish feels it, the borage as the bee sees it, the
+intricate sounds of the hedgerow as heard by the rabbit, the
+impact of light on the eager face of the primrose, the landscape as
+known in its vastness to the wood-louse and ant--all these
+experiences, denied to him for ever, have just as much claim to
+the attribute of Being as his own partial and subjective
+interpretations of things.
+
+Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most
+part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin
+of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the
+infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply
+do not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then that
+symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some great
+emotion, some devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, lifts
+us to another level of consciousness; and we are aware for a
+moment of the difference between the neat collection of discrete
+objects and experiences which we call the world, and the height,
+the depth, the breadth of that living, growing, changing Fact, of
+which thought, life, and energy are parts, and in which we "live
+and move and have our being." Then we realise that our whole
+life is enmeshed in great and living forces; terrible because
+unknown. Even the power which lurks in every coal-scuttle,
+shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declares
+itself in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and growth, is
+supersensual. We do but perceive its results. The more sacred
+plane of life and energy which seems to be manifested in
+the 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: sudden
+irresistible inroads from it, all that our hearts can apprehend. The
+material for an intenser life, a wider, sharper consciousness, a
+more profound understanding of our own existence, lies at our
+gates. But we are separated from it, we cannot assimilate it;
+except in abnormal moments, we hardly know that it is. We now
+begin to attach at least a fragmentary meaning to the statement
+that "mysticism is the art of union with Reality." We see that the
+claim of such a poet as Whitman to be a mystic lies in the fact
+that he has achieved a passionate communion with deeper levels
+of life than those with which we usually deal--has thrust past the
+current notion to the Fact: that the claim of such a saint as Teresa
+is bound up with her declaration that she has achieved union with
+the Divine Essence itself. The visionary is a mystic when his
+vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the
+senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond
+thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a
+mystic when he knows his actions to be a part of a greater
+activity. Blake, Plotinus, Joan of Arc, and John of the Cross--
+there is a link which binds all these together: but if he is to make
+use of it, the inquirer must find that link for himself. All four
+exhibit different forms of the working of the contemplative
+consciousness; a faculty which is proper to all men, though few
+take the trouble to develop it. Their attention to life has changed
+its character, sharpened its focus: and as a result they see, some a
+wider landscape, some a more brilliant, more significant, more
+detailed world than that which is apparent to the less educated,
+less observant vision of common sense. The old story of Eyes and
+No-Eyes is really the story of the mystical and unmystical types.
+"No-Eyes" has fixed his attention on the fact that he is obliged to
+take a walk. For him the chief factor of existence is his own
+movement along the road; a movement which he intends to
+accomplish as efficiently and comfortably as he can. He asks not
+to know what may be on either side of the hedges. He ignores the
+caress of the wind until it threatens to remove his hat. He trudges
+along, steadily, diligently; avoiding the muddy pools, but
+oblivious of the light which they reflect. "Eyes" takes the walk
+too: and for him it is a perpetual revelation of beauty and wonder.
+The sunlight inebriates him, the winds delight him, the very effort
+of the journey is a joy. Magic presences throng the roadside, or
+cry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The rich
+world through which he moves lies in the fore-ground of his
+consciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step.
+"No-Eyes," when told of his adventures, usually refuses to
+believe that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that his
+companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by
+agreeable hallucinations. We shall never persuade him to the
+contrary unless we persuade him to look for himself.
+
+Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is
+here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and
+brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from
+the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels
+of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which
+the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This
+amount of mystical perception--this "ordinary contemplation," as
+the specialists call it--is possible to all men: without it, they are
+not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human
+activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime
+experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the
+ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers
+of 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 than
+other men--so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may
+participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to
+the strength and purity of their desire. "For heaven ghostly," says
+_The Cloud of Unknowing_, "is as nigh down as up, and up as
+down; behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other.
+Inasmuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then
+that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the
+next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet." None
+therefore is condemned, save by his own pride, sloth, or
+perversity, to the horrors of that which Blake called "single
+vision"--perpetual and undivided attention to the continuous
+cinematograph performance, which the mind has conspired with
+the 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 world
+of single vision is the only world he knows: that it appears to him
+to be real, solid, and self-consistent: and that until the existence--
+at least, the probability--of other planes of reality is made clear to
+him, all talk of uniting with them is mere moonshine, which
+confirms his opinion of mysticism as a game fit only for idle
+women and inferior poets. Plainly, then, it is the first business of
+the missionary to create, if he can, some feeling of dissatisfaction
+with the world within which the practical man has always lived
+and acted; to suggest something of its fragmentary and subjective
+character. We turn back therefore to a further examination
+of the truism--so obvious to those who are philosophers, so
+exasperating to those who are not--that man dwells, under normal
+conditions, 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 a
+construction which the mind has made from some few amongst
+the wealth of materials at its disposal.
+
+The relation of this universe to the world of fact is not unlike the
+relation between a tapestry picture and the scene which it
+imitates. You, practical man, are obliged to weave your image of
+the outer world upon the hard warp of your own mentality; which
+perpetually imposes its own convention, and checks the free
+representation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various and
+full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the
+world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of
+static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle
+curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery
+cannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countless
+suggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real
+world presents to you, you snatch one here and there. Of these
+you weave together those which are the most useful, the most
+obvious, the most often repeated: which make a tidy and coherent
+pattern when seen on the right side. Shut up with this symbolic
+picture, you soon drop into the habit of behaving to it as though it
+were 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 the
+many short ends, the clumsy joins and patches, this simple
+philosophy might be disturbed. You would be forced to acknowledge
+the conventional character of the picture you have made
+so cleverly, the wholesale waste of material involved in the
+weaving of it: for only a few amongst the wealth of impressions
+we receive are seized and incorporated into our picture of the
+world. Further, it might occur to you that a slight alteration in the
+rhythm of the senses would place at your disposal a complete
+new range of material; opening your eyes and ears to sounds,
+colours, and movements now inaudible and invisible, removing
+from your universe those which you now regard as part of the
+established order of things. Even the strands which you have
+made use of might have been combined in some other way; with
+disastrous results to the "world of common sense," yet without
+any diminution of their own reality.
+
+Nor can you regard these strands themselves as ultimate. As the
+most prudent of logicians might venture to deduce from a skein
+of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw
+stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which
+transcends the reproductive powers of your loom. Even the
+camera of the photographer, more apt at contemplation than the
+mind of man, has shown us how limited are these powers in some
+directions, and enlightened us as to a few of the cruder errors of
+the person who accepts its products at face-value; or, as he would
+say, believes his own eyes. It has shown us, for instance, that the
+galloping race-horse, with legs stretched out as we are used to see
+it, is a mythical animal, probably founded on the mental image of
+a running dog. No horse has ever galloped thus: but its real action
+is too quick for us, and we explain it to ourselves as something
+resembling the more deliberate dog-action which we have caught
+and registered as it passed. The plain man's universe is full of
+race-horses which are really running dogs: of conventional
+waves, first seen in pictures and then imagined upon the sea: of
+psychological situations taken from books and applied to human
+life: of racial peculiarities generalised from insufficient data, and
+then "discovered" in actuality: of theological diagrams and
+scientific "laws," flung upon the background of eternity as the
+magic 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 process
+of thought--concept--cogitation, from which Keats prayed with so
+great an ardour to escape, when he exclaimed in words which
+will seem to you, according to the temper of your mind, either an
+invitation to the higher laziness or one of the most profound
+aspirations of the soul, "O for a life of sensations rather than
+thoughts!" He felt--as all the poets have felt with him--that
+another, lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders, alive
+with ultimate music, awaited those who could free themselves
+from the fetters of the mind, lay down the shuttle and the
+weaver's comb, and reach out beyond the conceptual image to
+intuitive contact with the Thing.
+
+There are certain happy accidents which have the power of
+inducting man for a moment into this richer and more vital
+world. These stop, as one old mystic said, the "wheel of his
+imagination," the dreadful energy of his image-making power
+weaving up and transmuting the incoming messages of sense.
+They snatch him from the loom and place him, in the naked
+simplicity of his spirit, face to face with that Other than himself
+whence the materials of his industry have come. In these hours
+human 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 that
+never 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 with
+Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of
+communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way
+which the reason can never understand, that Totality of which
+fragments are known by the lover, the musician, and the artist. If
+the doors of perception were cleansed, said Blake, everything
+would appear to man as it is--Infinite. But the doors of perception
+are 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: too
+arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its
+way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that
+transition: for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of
+the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture,
+a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild
+birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with
+wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of
+the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they
+have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world
+of morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger,
+and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of
+life.
+
+There will be many who feel a certain scepticism as to the
+possibility of the undertaking here suggested to them; a prudent
+unwillingness to sacrifice their old comfortably upholstered
+universe, on the mere promise that they will receive a new
+heaven and a new earth in exchange. These careful ones may like
+to remind themselves that the vision of the world presented to us
+by all the great artists and poets--those creatures whose very
+existence would seem so strange to us, were we not accustomed
+to them--perpetually demonstrates the many-graded character of
+human consciousness; the new worlds which await it, once it
+frees itself from the tyranny of those labour-saving contrivances
+with which it usually works. Leaving on one side the more subtle
+apprehensions which we call "spiritual," even the pictures of the
+old Chinese draughtsmen and the modern impressionists, of
+Watteau and of Turner, of Manet, Degas, and Cezanne; the
+poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman--these, and
+countless others, assure you that their creators have enjoyed
+direct communion, not with some vague world of fancy, but with
+a visible natural order which you have never known. These have
+seized and woven into their pictures strands which never
+presented themselves to you; significant forms which elude you,
+tones and relations to which you are blind, living facts for which
+your conventional world provides no place. They prove by their
+works that Blake was right when he said that "a fool sees not the
+same tree that a wise man sees"; and that psychologists, insisting
+on the selective action of the mind, the fact that our preconceptions
+govern the character of our universe, do but teach the most
+demonstrable of truths. Did you take them seriously, as you
+should, their ardent reports might well disgust you with the
+dull and narrow character of your own consciousness.
+
+What is it, then, which distinguishes the outlook of great poets
+and artists from the arrogant subjectivism of common sense?
+Innocence and humility distinguish it. These persons prejudge
+nothing, criticise nothing. To some extent, their attitude to the
+universe is that of children: and because this is so, they
+participate to that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According to
+their measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a
+life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on
+thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that
+ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the
+essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a
+few great mystics appear to have possessed--not indeed in its
+entirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, "one with
+the Reality of things." The greater the artist is, the wider and
+deeper is the range of this pure sensation: the more sharply he is
+aware of the torrent of life and loveliness, the rich profusion of
+possible beauties and shapes. He always wants to press deeper
+and deeper, to let the span of his perception spread wider and
+wider; till he unites with the whole of that Reality which he feels
+all about him, and of which his own life is a part. He is always
+tending, in fact, to pass over from the artistic to the mystical
+state. In artistic experience, then, in the artist's perennial effort
+to actualise the ideal which Keats expressed, we may find a point of
+departure for our exploration of the contemplative life.
+
+What would it mean for a soul that truly captured it; this life in
+which the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, the
+messages the world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticated
+universe into which our clever brains transmute them? Plainly, it
+would mean the achievement of a new universe, a new order of
+reality: escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life,
+where everything is classified and labelled, and all the graded
+fluid facts which have no label are ignored. It would mean an
+innocence of eye and innocence of ear impossible for us to
+conceive; the impassioned contemplation of pure form, freed
+from all the meanings with which the mind has draped and
+disguised it; the recapturing of the lost mysteries of touch and
+fragrance, most wonderful amongst the avenues of sense. It
+would mean the exchanging of the neat conceptual world our
+thoughts build up, fenced in by the solid ramparts of the possible,
+for the inconceivable richness of that unwalled world from which
+we have subtracted it. It would mean that we should receive from
+every flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the label
+"flower" has been affixed, but the full impact of its unimaginable
+beauty and wonder, the direct sensation of life having communion
+with life: that the scents of ceasing rain, the voice of
+trees, the deep softness of the kitten's fur, the acrid touch of sorrel
+on the tongue, should be in themselves profound, complete, and
+simple experiences, calling forth simplicity of response in our
+souls.
+
+Thus understood, the life of pure sensation is the meat and drink
+of poetry, and one of the most accessible avenues to that union
+with Reality which the mystic declares to us as the very object of
+life. But the poet must take that living stuff direct from the field
+and river, without sophistication, without criticism, as the life of
+the soul is taken direct from the altar; with an awe that admits not
+of analysis. He must not subject it to the cooking, filtering
+process of the brain. It is because he knows how to elude this
+dreadful sophistication of Reality, because his attitude to the
+universe is governed by the supreme artistic virtues of humility
+and love, that poetry is what it is: and I include in the sweep of
+poetic art the coloured poetry of the painter, and the wordless
+poetry 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 or
+less than trust my senses: and this too on the authority of those
+impracticable dreamers the poets. Now it is notorious that our
+senses deceive us. Every one knows that; and even your own
+remarks have already suggested it. How, then, can a wholesale
+and uncritical acceptance of my sensations help me to unite with
+Reality? Many of these sensations we share with the animals: in
+some, the animals obviously surpass us. Will you suggest that my
+terrier, smelling his way through an uncoordinated universe, is a
+better mystic than I?"
+
+To this I reply, that the terrier's contacts with the world are
+doubtless crude and imperfect; yet he has indeed preserved a
+directness of apprehension which you have lost. He gets, and
+responds to, the real smell; not a notion or a name. Certainly the
+senses, when taken at face-value, do deceive us: yet the deception
+resides not so much in them, as in that conceptual world which
+we insist on building up from their reports, and for which we
+make them responsible. They deceive us less when we receive
+these reports uncooked and unclassified, as simple and direct
+experiences. Then, behind the special and imperfect stammerings
+which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we
+sometimes discern a _whole fact_--at once divinely simple and
+infinitely 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 immense
+significance; imparting to that aspect of the world which we are
+able to perceive all the significance, all the character which it
+possesses. The more of the artist there is in us, the more intense
+that significance, that character will seem: the more complete,
+too, will be our conviction that our uneasiness, the vagueness of
+our reactions to things, would be cured could we reach and unite
+with the fact, instead of our notion of it. And it is just such an act
+of union, reached through the clarified channels of sense and
+unadulterated by the content of thought, which the great artist or
+poet achieves.
+
+We seem in these words to have come far from the mystic, and
+that contemplative consciousness wherewith he ascends to the
+contact of Truth. As a matter of fact, we are merely considering
+that consciousness in its most natural and accessible form: for
+contemplation is, on the one hand, the essential activity of all
+artists; on the other, the art through which those who choose to
+learn and practise it may share in some fragmentary degree,
+according to their measure, the special experience of the mystic
+and the poet. By it they may achieve that virginal outlook upon
+things, that celestial power of communion with veritable life,
+which comes when that which we call "sensation" is freed from
+the tyranny of that which we call "thought." The artist is no more
+and no less than a contemplative who has learned to express
+himself, and who tells his love in colour, speech, or sound: the
+mystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special and
+exalted kind, who tries to express something of the revelation he
+has received, mediates between Reality and the race. In the game
+of give and take which goes on between the human consciousness
+and the external world, both have learned to put the emphasis
+upon the message from without, rather than on their own reaction
+to and rearrangement of it. Both have exchanged the false
+imagination which draws the sensations and intuitions of the self
+into 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 I
+going to do this? How shall I detach myself from the artificial
+world to which I am accustomed? Where is the brake that shall
+stop 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 have
+already acknowledged the need of such mental drill, such
+deliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of life.
+You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing and
+sharpening of attention which you call a "business training," a
+"legal education," the "acquirement of a scientific method." But
+this new undertaking will involve the development and the
+training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in
+the past; the acquirement of a method you have never used
+before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and
+discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of
+you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of
+the golf course.
+
+The education of the mystical sense begins in self-simplification.
+The feeling, willing, seeing self is to move from the various and
+the analytic to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence which
+may cause hard breathing and mopping of the brows on the part
+of the practical man. Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these
+pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of
+rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this
+message so needed by your time--or rather, by your want of time--
+is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the
+advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe
+the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of
+the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The essence
+of mystical contemplation is summed in these two experiences--
+union with the flux of life, and union with the Whole in which all
+lesser realities are resumed--and these experiences are well
+within your reach. Though it is likely that the accusation will
+annoy you, you are already in fact a potential contemplative: for
+this 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 actual
+contemplative too. Has it never happened to you to lose yourself
+for a moment in a swift and satisfying experience for which you
+found no name? When the world took on a strangeness, and you
+rushed out to meet it, in a mood at once exultant and ashamed?
+Was there not an instant when you took the lady who now orders
+your dinner into your arms, and she suddenly interpreted to you
+the whole of the universe? a universe so great, charged with so
+terrible an intensity, that you have hardly dared to think of it
+since. Do you remember that horrid moment at the concert, when
+you became wholly unaware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpenny
+seat? Those were onsets of involuntary contemplation; sudden
+partings of the conceptual veil. Dare you call them the least
+significant, moments of your life? Did you not then, like the
+African saint, "thrill with love and dread," though you were not
+provided with a label for that which you adored?
+
+It will not help you to speak of these experiences as "mere
+emotion." Mere emotion then inducted you into a world which
+you recognised as more valid--in the highest sense, more rational--
+than that in which you usually dwell: a world which had a
+wholeness, a meaning, which exceeded the sum of its parts. Mere
+emotion then brought you to your knees, made you at once proud
+and humble, showed you your place. It simplified and unified
+existence: it stripped off the little accidents and ornaments which
+perpetually deflect our vagrant attention, and gathered up the
+whole being of you into one state, which felt and knew a Reality
+that your intelligence could not comprehend. Such an emotion is
+the driving power of spirit, an august and ultimate thing: and
+this your innermost inhabitant felt it to be, whilst your eyes were
+open to the light.
+
+Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mystical
+experience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality into
+the _one_ which is really you--into the "unity of your spirit," as
+the mystics say--the great forces of love, beauty, wonder, grief,
+may do for you now and again. These lift you perforce from the
+consideration of the details to the contemplation of the All: turn
+you from the tidy world of image to the ineffable world of fact.
+But they are fleeting and ungovernable experiences, descending
+with dreadful violence on the soul. Are you willing that your
+participation in Reality shall depend wholly on these incalculable
+visitations: on the sudden wind and rain that wash your windows,
+and let in the vision of the landscape at your gates? You can, if
+you like, keep those windows clear. You can, if you choose to
+turn your attention that way, learn to look out of them. These are
+the two great phases in the education of every contemplative: and
+they are called in the language of the mystics the purification of
+the senses and the purification of the will.
+
+Those who are so fortunate as to experience in one of its many
+forms the crisis which is called "conversion" are seized, as it
+seems to them, by some power stronger than themselves and
+turned perforce in the right direction. They find that this
+irresistible power has cleansed the windows of their homely coat
+of grime; and they look out, literally, upon a new heaven and new
+earth. The long quiet work of adjustment which others must
+undertake before any certitude rewards them is for these
+concentrated into one violent shattering and rearranging of the
+self, which can now begin its true career of correspondence with
+the Reality it has perceived. To persons of this type I do not
+address 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 between
+ourselves and the external world: and through this we discern, as
+in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged to see. We see it in
+the way in which our neighbours see it; sometimes through a
+pink veil, sometimes through a grey. Religion, indigestion,
+priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes. The prismatic
+colours of a fashionable school of art may stain them. Inevitably,
+too, we see the narrow world our windows show us, not "in
+itself," but in relation to our own needs, moods, and preferences;
+which exercise a selective control upon those few aspects of the
+whole which penetrate to the field of consciousness and dictate
+the order in which we arrange them, for the universe of the
+natural man is strictly egocentric. We continue to name the living
+creatures with all the placid assurance of Adam: and whatsoever
+we call them, that is the name thereof. Unless we happen to be
+artists--and then but rarely--we never know the "thing seen" in its
+purity; never, from birth to death, look at it with disinterested
+eyes. Our vision and understanding of it are governed by all that
+we bring with us, and mix with it, to form an amalgam with
+which the mind can deal. To "purify" the senses is to release
+them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric
+judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception.
+This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for
+classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish
+question, "What does it mean to _me_?" learn to dip ourselves in
+the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by
+comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.
+
+Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence of all purification
+is self-simplification; the doing away of the unnecessary and
+unreal, the tangles and complications of consciousness: and we
+must remember that when these masters of the spiritual life speak
+of purity, they have in their minds no thin, abstract notion of a
+rule of conduct stripped of all colour and compounded chiefly of
+refusals, such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set up.
+Their purity is an affirmative state; something strong, clean, and
+crystalline, capable of a wholeness of adjustment to the
+wholeness of a God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a lens
+from which all irrelevancies and excrescences, all the beams and
+motes of egotism and prejudice, have been removed; so that it
+may reflect a clear image of the one Transcendent Fact within
+which 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 and
+mind, are resumed within that Transcendent Fact, as all the
+colours of the spectrum are included in white light: and we
+possess them best by passing beyond them, by following back the
+many to the One.
+
+The "Simple Eye" of Contemplation, about which the mystic
+writers say so much, is then a synthetic sense; which sees that
+white light in which all colour is, without discrete analysis of its
+properties. The Simple Ear which discerns the celestial melody,
+hears that Tone in which all music is resumed; thus achieving
+that ecstatic life of "sensation without thought" which Keats
+perceived to be the substance of true happiness.
+
+But you, practical man, have lived all your days amongst the
+illusions of multiplicity. Though you are using at every instant
+your innate tendency to synthesis and simplification, since this
+alone creates the semblance of order in your universe--though
+what you call seeing and hearing are themselves great unifying
+acts--yet your attention to life has been deliberately adjusted to a
+world of frittered values and prismatic refracted lights: full of
+incompatible interests, of people, principles, things. Ambitions
+and affections, tastes and prejudices, are fighting for your
+attention. Your poor, worried consciousness flies to and fro
+amongst them; it has become a restless and a complicated thing.
+At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of
+bees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to
+be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as
+hopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon the
+periphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of
+appearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you are
+not able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one with
+the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists:
+the permanent being which persists through and behind the flow
+and change of your conscious states. You have been snatched to
+that centre once or twice. Turn your consciousness inward to it
+deliberately. Retreat to that point whence all the various lines of
+your activities flow, and to which at last they must return. Since
+this alone of all that you call your "selfhood" is possessed of
+eternal reality, it is surely a counsel of prudence to acquaint
+yourself with its peculiarities and its powers. "Take your seat
+within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus," cries the Eastern
+visionary. "Hold thou to thy Centre," says his Christian brother,
+"and all things shall be thine." This is a practical recipe, not a
+pious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but you
+can do it if you will: standing back, as it were, from the vague
+and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital
+energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain
+detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it:
+can discern too, if you be at all inclined to mystical adventure, the
+stages of the road along which you must pass on your way
+towards harmony with the Real.
+
+This universe, these possibilities, are far richer, yet far simpler
+than you have supposed. Seen from the true centre of personality,
+instead of the usual angle of self-interest, their scattered parts
+arrange themselves in order: you begin to perceive those
+graduated levels of Reality with which a purified and intensified
+consciousness can unite. So, too, the road is more logically
+planned, falls into more comprehensible stages, than those who
+dwell in a world of single vision are willing to believe.
+
+Now it is a paradox of human life, often observed even by the
+most concrete and unimaginative of philosophers, that man seems
+to be poised between two contradictory orders of Reality. Two
+planes of existence--or, perhaps, two ways of apprehending
+existence--lie within the possible span of his consciousness. That
+great pair of opposites which metaphysicians call Being and
+Becoming, Eternity and Time, Unity and Multiplicity, and others
+mean, when they speak of the Spiritual and the Natural Worlds,
+represents the two extreme forms under which the universe can
+be realised by him. The greatest men, those whose consciousness
+is extended to full span, can grasp, be aware of, both. They
+know 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 the
+parochial and the patriotic sense. More than this, a deep instinct
+sometimes assures them that the inner spring or secret of that
+Whole Fact is also the inner spring and secret of their individual
+lives: and that here, in this third factor, the disharmonies between
+the part and the whole are resolved. As they know themselves to
+dwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcending
+it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably
+exceeds all that they know to be--as the soul of the musician
+controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody,
+but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadences
+must play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid life, that
+"inward light" which these men find at their own centres when
+they seek for it, is for them an earnest of the Uncreated Light, the
+ineffable splendour of God, dwelling at, and energising within
+the heart of things: for this spark is at once one with, yet separate
+from, the Universal Soul.
+
+So then, man, in the person of his greatest and most living
+representatives, feels himself to have implicit correspondences
+with three levels of existence; which we may call the Natural, the
+Spiritual, and the Divine. The road on which he is to travel
+therefore, the mystical education which he is to undertake, shall
+successively unite him with these three worlds; stretching his
+consciousness to the point at which he finds them first as three,
+and at last as One. Under normal circumstances even the first of
+them, the natural world of Becoming, is only present to him--
+unless he be an artist--in a vague and fragmentary way. He is, of
+course, aware of the temporal order, a ceaseless change and
+movement, birth, growth, and death, of which he is a part. But the
+rapture and splendour of that everlasting flux which India calls
+the Sport of God hardly reaches his understanding; he is too busy
+with his own little movements to feel the full current of the
+stream.
+
+But under those abnormal circumstances on which we have
+touched, a deeper level of his consciousness comes into focus; he
+hears the music of surrounding things. Then he rises, through and
+with his awareness of the great life of Nature, to the knowledge
+that he is part of another greater life, transcending succession. In
+this his durational spirit is immersed. Here all the highest values
+of existence are stored for him: and it is because of his existence
+within this Eternal Reality, his patriotic relationship to it, that the
+efforts and experiences of the time-world have significance for
+him. It is from the vantage point gained when he realises his
+contacts with this higher order, that he can see with the clear eye
+of the artist or the mystic the World of Becoming itself--
+recognise its proportions--even reach out to some faint intuition
+of its ultimate worth. So, if he would be a whole man, if he would
+realise all that is implicit in his humanity, he must actualise his
+relationship with this supernal plane of Being: and he shall do it,
+as we have seen, by simplification, by a deliberate withdrawal of
+attention from the bewildering multiplicity of things, a deliberate
+humble surrender of his image-making consciousness. He already
+possesses, at that gathering point of personality which the old
+writers sometimes called the "apex" and sometimes the "ground"
+of the soul, a medium of communication with Reality. But this
+spiritual principle, this gathering point of his selfhood, is just that
+aspect of him which is furthest removed from the active surface
+consciousness. He treats it as the busy citizen treats his national
+monuments. It is there, it is important, a possession which adds
+dignity to his existence; but he never has time to go in. Yet as the
+purified sense, cleansed of prejudice and self-interest, can give us
+fleeting communications from the actual broken-up world of
+duration at our gates: so the purified and educated will can
+wholly withdraw the self's attention from its usual concentration
+on small useful aspects of the time-world, refuse to react to its
+perpetually 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 first
+stage in the training of the contemplative consciousness.
+
+We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Reality
+will involve certain stages of preparation as well as stages
+of attainment; and these stages of preparation--for some
+disinterested souls easy and rapid, for others long and full of
+pain--may be grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining and
+simplifying 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 the
+formidable name of Purgation. So the practical mysticism of the
+plain man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold scheme of
+training and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the self
+for union with Reality, and the last three unite it successively
+with the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finally
+with that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute
+and the religious mystic calls God.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION
+
+Recollection, the art which the practical man is now invited to
+learn, is in essence no more and no less than the subjection of the
+attention to the control of the will. It is not, therefore, a purely
+mystical activity. In one form or another it is demanded of all
+who would get control of their own mental processes; and does or
+should represent the first great step in the education of the human
+consciousness. So slothful, however, is man in all that concerns
+his higher faculties, that few deliberately undertake this education
+at all. They are content to make their contacts with things by a
+vague, unregulated power, ever apt to play truant, ever apt to fail
+them. Unless they be spurred to it by that passion for ultimate
+things which expresses itself in religion, philosophy, or art, they
+seldom learn the secret of a voluntary concentration of the mind.
+
+Since the philosopher's interests are mainly objective, and the
+artist seldom cogitates on his own processes, it is, in the end, to
+the initiate of religion that we are forced to go, if we would learn
+how to undertake this training for ourselves. The religious
+contemplative has this further attraction for us: that he is by
+nature a missionary as well. The vision which he has achieved is
+the vision of an intensely loving heart; and love, which cannot
+keep itself to itself, urges him to tell the news as widely and as
+clearly as he may. In his works, he is ever trying to reveal the
+secret of his own deeper life and wider vision, and to help his
+fellow men to share it: hence he provides the clearest, most
+orderly, most practical teachings on the art of contemplation that
+we are likely to find. True, our purpose in attempting this art may
+seem to us very different from his: though if we carry out the
+principles involved to their last term, we shall probably find that
+they have brought us to the place at which he aimed from the
+first. But the method, in its earlier stages, must be the same;
+whether we call the Reality which is the object of our quest
+aesthetic, cosmic, or divine. The athlete must develop much the
+same muscles, endure much the same discipline, whatever be the
+game he means to play.
+
+So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire of her what
+was the method by which she taught her daughters to gather
+themselves together, to capture and hold the attitude most
+favourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us--
+and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christian
+contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure
+of long experience--that the process is a gradual one. The method
+to be employed is a slow, patient training of material which the
+licence of years has made intractable; not the sudden easy turning
+of the mind in a new direction, that it may minister to a new
+fancy for "the mystical view of things." Recollection begins, she
+says, in the deliberate and regular practice of meditation; a
+perfectly natural form of mental exercise, though at first a hard
+one.
+
+Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking and
+contemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value from
+this transitional character. The real mystical life, which is the
+truly practical life, begins at the beginning; not with supernatural
+acts and ecstatic apprehensions, but with the normal faculties of
+the normal man. "I do not require of you," says Teresa to her
+pupils in meditation, "to form great and curious considerations in
+your 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 Eye
+of Eternity--was the essence of contemplation itself: and indeed
+one of the best definitions has described that art as a "loving
+sight," a "peering into heaven with the ghostly eye." But the self
+who is yet at this early stage of the pathway to Reality is not
+asked to look at anything new, to peer into the deeps of things:
+only to gaze with a new and cleansed vision on the ordinary
+intellectual images, the labels and the formula, the "objects" and
+ideas--even the external symbols--amongst which it has always
+dwelt. It is not yet advanced to the seeing of fresh landscapes: it
+is only able to re-examine the furniture of its home, and obtain
+from this exercise a skill, and a control of the attention, which
+shall afterwards be applied to greater purposes. Its task is here to
+_consider_ that furniture, as the Victorines called this preliminary
+training: to take, that is, a more starry view of it: standing back
+from 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: all
+sentient beings may find subjects of meditation to their taste, for
+there lies a universal behind every particular of thought, however
+concrete it may appear, and within the most rational propositions
+the 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 be
+used to nourish our spirits too. Who has not watched the intent
+meditations of a comfortable cat brooding upon the Absolute
+Mouse? You, if you have a philosophic twist, may transcend such
+relative 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 various
+tapestries of the sky. Even your own emotional life will provide
+you with the ideas of love, joy, peace, mercy, conflict, desire.
+You may range, with Kant, from the stars to the moral law. If
+your turn be to religion, the richest and most evocative of fields is
+open to your choice: from the plaster image to the mysteries of
+Faith.
+
+But, the choice made, it must be held and defended during the
+time of meditation against all invasions from without, however
+insidious their encroachments, however "spiritual" their disguise.
+It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again and again, as
+distractions seem to snatch it from your grasp. A restless
+boredom, a dreary conviction of your own incapacity, will
+presently attack you. This, too, must be resisted at sword-point.
+The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditation
+will be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convince
+you how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, how
+miserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from the
+captaincy of your own soul. It should convince, too, the most
+common-sense of philosophers of the distinction between real
+time, the true stream of duration which is life, and the sequence
+of seconds so carefully measured by the clock. Never before has
+the stream flowed so slowly, or fifteen minutes taken so long to
+pass. 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 achievement
+of it, presently it will happen to you to find that you have
+indeed--though how you know not--entered upon a fresh plane of
+perception, altered your relation with things.
+
+First, the subject of your meditation begins, as you surrender to
+its influence, to exhibit unsuspected meaning, beauty, power. A
+perpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase of
+attention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is the
+one agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It
+ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were into the deeps
+of it, rest in it, "unite" with it; and learn, in this still, intent
+communion, something of its depth and breadth and height, as we
+learn by direct intercourse to know our friends.
+
+Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you
+from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. You will hear the
+busy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody, and know
+yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You have set a
+ring of silence between you and it; and behold! within that
+silence you are free. You will look at the coloured scene, and it
+will seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst countless
+possible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your reach. And
+gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a _You_, who
+can thus hold at arm's length, be aware of, look at, an idea--a
+universe--other than itself. By this voluntary painful act of
+concentration, this first step upon the ladder which goes--as the
+mystics would say--from "multiplicity to unity," you have to
+some extent withdrawn yourself from that union with unrealities,
+with notions and concepts, which has hitherto contented you; and
+at once all the values of existence are changed. "The road to a
+Yea lies through a Nay." You, in this preliminary movement of
+recollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the claim
+which the world of appearance makes to a total possession of
+your consciousness: and are thus making possible some contact
+between that consciousness and the World of Reality.
+
+Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back upon
+yourself. 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--which
+invade your heart as you look. So doing patiently, day after day,
+constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the
+struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there
+is 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 own
+soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this
+real _You_ is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which
+you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on
+the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when
+you have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of making
+this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the
+initial stage of the contemplative life has been won. It is not
+much more of an achievement than that first proud effort in
+which the baby stands upright for a moment and then relapses to
+the more natural and convenient crawl: but it holds within it the
+same earnest of future development.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SELF-ADJUSTMENT
+
+So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have retreated behind
+all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness
+with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest
+and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the
+psychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act,
+you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly
+practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of
+correspondences with the world of normal men, and hungers for
+communion with a spiritual universe. And this thing so foreign to
+your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with
+it, you recognise as the true Self whose existence you always
+took for granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in its
+scattered manifestations. "That art thou."
+
+This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorine
+mystics, is the necessary prelude to all illumination. Only at its
+summit do we discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the
+pathway to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a
+sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to
+dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there
+to make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery which
+shall veil the naked truth. True and complete self-knowledge,
+indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone. Few can bear to
+contemplate themselves face to face; for the vision is strange and
+terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of the
+seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and
+most drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude towards
+himself and all other things. Likely enough, if you really knew
+yourself--saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercy
+of its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspection
+and measured against eternal values; your unacknowledged
+self-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates--you would be
+compelled to remodel your whole existence, and become for the
+first time a practical man.
+
+But you have done what you can in this direction; have at last
+discovered your own deeper being, your eternal spark, the agent
+of 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-revelation
+involve for you?
+
+You will have noticed, as with practice your familiarity with the
+state of Recollection has increased, that the kind of consciousness
+which it brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands of
+you, conflict sharply with the consciousness and the attitude
+which you have found so appropriate to your ordinary life in the
+past. They make this old attitude appear childish, unworthy, at
+last absurd. By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reality you
+are at once brought face to face with that dreadful revelation of
+disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which the blunt
+moralists call "conviction of sin." Never again need those
+moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest
+pursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration upon
+the game of getting on. None the less, this attitude persists. Again
+and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation
+is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the
+world. This game which you have played so long has formed and
+conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions,
+leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to play
+another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different
+sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses
+to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic
+remodelling of character which the mystics call "Purgation," the
+second stage in the training of the human consciousness for
+participation in Reality.
+
+It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a
+superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will,
+your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the
+wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become
+accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain
+valueless things, certain specific positions. For years your
+treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of
+Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if they
+still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your
+heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You
+are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which
+knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with
+the Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony
+between the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the
+buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of
+meditation--pushing out, as it were, towards the light--and the
+various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the
+surface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: they
+conflict at every turn. It becomes apparent to you that the
+declaration of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by all the mystics,
+concerning a "higher" and a "lower" life, and the cleavage that
+exists between them, has a certain justification even in the
+experience of the ordinary man.
+
+That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all human personality
+was thus two-fold: thus capable of correspondence with two
+orders of existence. The "higher life" was always tending towards
+union with Reality; towards the gathering of it self up into One.
+The "lower life," framed for correspondence with the outward
+world of multiplicity, was always tending to fall downwards, and
+fritter the powers of the self among external things. This is but a
+restatement, in terms of practical existence, of the fact which
+Recollection brought home to us: that the human self is
+transitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of living towards
+either Eternity or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautiful
+theories on these subjects: another when the unresolved dualism
+of your own personality (though you may not give it this
+high-sounding name) becomes the main fact of consciousness,
+perpetually reasserts itself as a vital problem, and refuses to take
+academic rank.
+
+This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues on
+being pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attention
+between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that
+there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you
+have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the
+life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live--these
+disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and
+then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between
+their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until
+these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between
+them resolved. You are sure now that there is another, more
+durable and more "reasonable," life possible to the human
+consciousness than that on which it usually spends itself. But it is
+also clear to you that you must yourself be something more, or
+other, 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 of
+recollection a first quick vision of that plane of being which
+Augustine called "the land of peace," the "beauty old and new."
+You know for evermore that it exists: that the real thing within
+yourself belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time invited
+and enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to feel and know in every
+fibre of your being the mystical need of "union with Reality"; and
+to realise that the natural scene which you have accepted so
+trustfully cannot provide the correspondences toward which you
+are stretching out.
+
+Nevertheless, it is to correspondences with this natural order that
+you have given for many years your full attention, your desire,
+your will. The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed
+possession of the conscious field, has grown strong, and
+cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladly
+exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from
+a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the
+rich stream of life, a defensive shell of "fixed ideas." It is useless
+to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force.
+That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell
+from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end. A
+conflict of some kind--a severance of old habits, old notions, old
+prejudices--is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to the
+form which the new adjustments must take.
+
+Now although in a general way we may regard the practical
+man's attitude to existence as a limpet-like adherence to the
+unreal; yet, from another point of view, fixity of purpose and
+desire is the last thing we can attribute to him. His mind is full of
+little whirlpools, twists and currents, conflicting systems,
+incompatible desires. One after another, he centres himself on
+ambition, love, duty, friendship, social convention, politics,
+religion, self-interest in one of its myriad forms; making of each a
+core round which whole sections of his life are arranged. One
+after another, these things either fail him or enslave him.
+Sometimes they become obsessions, distorting his judgment,
+narrowing his outlook, colouring his whole existence. Sometimes
+they develop inconsistent characters which involve him in public
+difficulties, private compromises and self-deceptions of every
+kind. They split his attention, fritter his powers. This state of
+affairs, which usually passes for an "active life," begins to take on
+a different complexion when looked at with the simple eye of
+meditation. Then we observe that the plain man's world is in a
+muddle, just because he has tried to arrange its major interests
+round himself as round a centre; and he is neither strong enough
+nor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched little
+whirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming, interrupting--as he
+imagines, in his own interest--its even flow: and within that
+whirlpool are numerous petty complexes and counter-currents,
+amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a continual
+state of unrest. The man who makes a success of his life, in any
+department, is he who has chosen one from amongst these claims
+and interests, and devoted to it his energetic powers of heart and
+will; "unifying" himself about it, and from within it resisting all
+counter-claims. He has one objective, one centre; has killed out
+the lesser ones, and simplified himself.
+
+Now the artist, the discoverer, the philosopher, the lover, the
+patriot--the true enthusiast for any form of life--can only achieve
+the full reality to which his special art or passion gives access by
+innumerable renunciations. He must kill out the smaller centres
+of interest, in order that his whole will, love, and attention may
+pour itself out towards, seize upon, unite with, that special
+manifestation of the beauty and significance of the universe to
+which he is drawn. So, too, a deliberate self-simplification, a
+"purgation" of the heart and will, is demanded of those who
+would develop the form of consciousness called "mystical." All
+your power, all your resolution, is needed if you are to succeed in
+this adventure: there must be no frittering of energy, no mixture
+of motives. We hear much of the mystical temperament, the
+mystical vision. The mystical character is far more important: and
+its chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and
+self-control. It is towards the perfecting of these military virtues,
+not to the production of a pious softness, that the discipline of
+asceticism is largely directed; and the ascetic foundation, in one
+form or another, is the only enduring foundation of a sane
+contemplative life.
+
+You cannot, until you have steadied yourself, found a poise, and
+begun to resist some amongst the innumerable claims which the
+world of appearance perpetually makes upon your attention
+and your desire, make much use of the new power which Recollection
+has disclosed to you; and this Recollection itself, so long
+as it remains merely a matter of attention and does not involve
+the heart, is no better than a psychic trick. You are committed
+therefore, as the fruit of your first attempts at self-knowledge,
+to a deliberate--probably a difficult--rearrangement of
+your character; to the stern course of self-discipline, the
+voluntary acts of choice on the one hand and of rejection on the
+other, which ascetic writers describe under the formidable names
+of Detachment and Mortification. By Detachment they mean the
+eviction of the limpet from its crevice; the refusal to anchor
+yourself to material things, to regard existence from the personal
+standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity. By Mortification,
+they mean the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currents
+of your own conflicting passions, interests, desires; the killing out
+of all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollection
+would condemn, and which create the fundamental opposition
+between your interior and exterior life.
+
+What then, in the last resort, is the source of this opposition; the
+true reason of your uneasiness, your unrest? The reason lies, not
+in any real incompatibility between the interests of the temporal
+and the eternal orders; which are but two aspects of one Fact, two
+expressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself; in your attitude
+towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb "to
+have": all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual
+demands, appetites, wants. That "love of life" of which we
+sometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love. We are quick to snap
+at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding which
+we dignify by the name of pessimism. The mystic knows not this
+attitude of demand. He tells us again and again, that "he is rid of
+all his asking"; that "henceforth the heat of having shall never
+scorch him more." Compare this with your normal attitude to the
+world, practical man: your quiet certitude that you are well within
+your rights in pushing the claims of "the I, the Me, the Mine";
+your habit, if you be religious, of asking for the weather and the
+government that you want, of persuading the Supernal Powers to
+take a special interest in your national or personal health and
+prosperity. How often in each day do you deliberately revert to an
+attitude of disinterested adoration? Yet this is the only attitude in
+which true communion with the universe is possible. The very
+mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued
+possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet
+you have not: wealth, honour, success, social position, love,
+friendship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right to
+some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a
+certain immunity from failure or humiliation. You resent
+anything which opposes you in these matters. You become
+restless when you see other selves more skilful in the game of
+acquisition than yourself. You hold tight against all comers your
+own share of the spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boring
+responsibilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil; are greedy
+of pleasure and excitement, devoted to the art of having a good
+time. If you possess a social sense, you demand these things not
+only for yourself but for your tribe--the domestic or racial group
+to which you belong. These dispositions, so ordinary that they
+almost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers the
+Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth,
+Gluttony, and Lust. Perhaps you would rather call them--as
+indeed they are--the seven common forms of egotism. They
+represent the natural reactions to life of the self-centred human
+consciousness, enslaved by the "world of multiplicity"; and
+constitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as
+these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel
+things as they are; but only as they affect ourselves, our family,
+our party, our business, our church, our empire--the I, the Me, the
+Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detached
+and purified heart can view all things--the irrational cruelty of
+circumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life,
+the acts and beliefs of enemy and friend--in true proportion; and
+reckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore the
+mystics tell us perpetually that "selfhood must be killed" before
+Reality can be attained.
+
+"Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but none other thing
+than _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 relation
+which constitutes "sin" is the separation of the individual spirit
+from the whole; the ridiculous megalomania which makes each
+man the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turning inwards
+and condensation of his energies and desires, till they do indeed
+form a "lump"; a hard, tight core about which all the currents of
+his existence swirl. This heavy weight within the heart resists
+every outgoing impulse of the spirit; and tends to draw all things
+inward and downward to itself, never to pour itself forth in
+love, enthusiasm, sacrifice. "So long," says the _Theologia
+Germanica_, "as a man seeketh his own will and his own highest
+good, 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 highest
+good, and how then should he find it? For so long as he doeth
+this, he seeketh himself, and dreameth that he is himself the
+highest good. . . . But whosoever seeketh, loveth, and pursueth
+goodness, as goodness and for the sake of goodness, and maketh
+that his end--for nothing but the love of goodness, not for love of
+the 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 for
+their own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is the
+secret of union with Reality and the condition of all real
+knowledge. This brings with it the precious quality of suppleness,
+the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the great
+rhythms of life; and this will only come when the ungainly
+"lump" of sin is broken, and the verb "to have," which expresses
+its reaction to existence, is ejected from the centre of your
+consciousness. Then your attitude to life will cease to be
+commercial, and become artistic. Then the guardian at the gate,
+scrutinising and sorting the incoming impressions, will no longer
+ask, "What use is this to _me_?" before admitting the angel of
+beauty or significance who demands your hospitality. Then
+things 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 be
+inwardly free and mighty in thyself, and all things be under thee,
+and thou not under them; that thou be lord and governor of thy
+deeds, not servant." It is therefore by the withdrawal of your will
+from its feverish attachment to things, till "they are under thee
+and thou not under them," that you will gradually resolve the
+opposition between the recollective and the active sides of your
+personality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which
+the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect
+freedom--for these are two aspects of one thing--will become
+possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and
+throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at
+last arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit;
+where the various forces of your character--brute energy, keen
+intellect, desirous heart--long dissipated amongst a thousand little
+wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a
+strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can
+force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+LOVE AND WILL
+
+This steady effort towards the simplifying of your tangled
+character, its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal,
+is not to dispense you from that other special training of the
+attention which the diligent practice of meditation and
+recollection effects. Your pursuit of the one must never involve
+neglect of the other; for these are the two sides--one moral, the
+other mental--of that unique process of self-conquest which
+Ruysbroeck calls "the gathering of the forces of the soul into the
+unity of the spirit": the welding together of all your powers, the
+focussing of them upon one point. Hence they should never,
+either in theory or practice, be separated. Only the act of
+recollection, the constantly renewed retreat to the quiet centre of
+the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more
+valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of
+self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of
+the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent
+character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at
+self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human
+tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes
+possible the further development of the contemplative power.
+
+So it is through and by these two great changes in your attitude
+towards things--first, the change of attention, which enables you
+to perceive a truer universe; next, the deliberate rearrangement of
+your ideas, energies, and desires in harmony with that which you
+have seen--that a progressive uniformity of life and experience is
+secured to you, and you are defended against the dangers of an
+indolent and useless mysticality. Only the real, say the mystics,
+can know Reality, for "we behold that which we are," the
+universe which we see is conditioned by the character of the
+mind that sees it: and this realness--since that which you seek is
+no mere glimpse of Eternal Life, but complete possession of it--
+must apply to every aspect of your being, the rich totality of
+character, all the "forces of the soul," not to some thin and
+isolated "spiritual sense" alone. This is why recollection and
+self-simplification--perception of, and adaptation to, the Spiritual
+World in which we dwell--are the essential preparations for
+the mystical life, and neither can exist in a wholesome and
+well-balanced form without the other. By them the mind, the will, the
+heart, which so long had dissipated their energies over a thousand
+scattered notions, wants, and loves, are gradually detached from
+their old exclusive preoccupation with the ephemeral interests of
+the self, or of the group to which the self belongs.
+
+You, if you practise them, will find after a time--perhaps a long
+time--that the hard work which they involve has indeed brought
+about a profound and definite change in you. A new suppleness
+has taken the place of that rigidity which you have been
+accustomed to mistake for strength of character: an easier attitude
+towards the accidents of life. Your whole scale of values has
+undergone a silent transformation, since you have ceased to fight
+for your own hand and regard the nearest-at-hand world as the
+only one that counts. You have become, as the mystics would
+say, "free from inordinate attachments," the "heat of having" does
+not scorch you any more; and because of this you possess great
+inward liberty, a sense of spaciousness and peace. Released from
+the obsessions which so long had governed them, will, heart, and
+mind are now all bent to the purposes of your deepest being:
+"gathered in the unity of the spirit," they have fused to become an
+agent with which it can act.
+
+What form, then, shall this action take? It shall take a practical
+form, shall express itself in terms of movement: the pressing
+outwards of the whole personality, the eager and trustful
+stretching of it towards the fresh universe which awaits you. As
+all scattered thinking was cut off in recollection, as all vagrant
+and unworthy desires have been killed by the exercises of
+detachment; so now all scattered willing, all hesitations between
+the indrawing and outflowing instincts of the soul, shall be
+checked and resolved. You are to _push_ with all your power: not
+to absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love. With this
+"conative act," as the psychologists would call it, the true
+contemplative life begins. Contemplation, you see, has no very
+close connection with dreaminess and idle musing: it is more like
+the intense effort of vision, the passionate and self-forgetful act
+of communion, presupposed in all creative art. It is, says one old
+English mystic, "a blind intent stretching . . . a privy love
+pressed" in the direction of Ultimate Beauty, athwart all the
+checks, hindrances, and contradictions of the restless world: a
+"loving stretching out" towards Reality, says the great
+Ruysbroeck, than whom none has gone further on this path.
+Tension, ardour, are of its essence: it demands the perpetual
+exercise of industry and courage.
+
+We observe in such definitions as these a strange neglect of that
+glory of man, the Pure Intellect, with which the spiritual prig
+enjoys to believe that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It
+almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the
+supremacy of feeling over thought; and reached out towards
+some new and higher range of sensation, rather than towards new
+and more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to assure us that
+man's most sublime thoughts of the Transcendent are but a little
+better than his worst: that loving intuition is the only certain
+guide. "By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought
+never."
+
+Yet here you are not to fall into the clumsy error of supposing
+that the things which are beyond the grasp of reason are
+necessarily unreasonable things. Immediate feeling, so far as it is
+true, does not oppose but transcends and completes the highest
+results of thought. It contains within itself the sum of all the
+processes through which thought would pass in the act of
+attaining the same goal: supposing thought to have reached--as it
+has not--the high pitch at which it was capable of thinking its way
+all along this road.
+
+In the preliminary act of gathering yourself together, and in those
+unremitting explorations through which you came to "a knowing
+and a feeling of yourself as you are," thought assuredly had its
+place. There the powers of analysis, criticism, and deduction
+found work that they could do. But now it is the love and will--
+the feeling, the intent, the passionate desire--of the self, which
+shall govern your activities and make possible your success. Few
+would care to brave the horrors of a courtship conducted upon
+strictly intellectual lines: and contemplation is an act of love, the
+wooing, not the critical study, of Divine Reality. It is an eager
+outpouring of ourselves towards a Somewhat Other for which we
+feel a passion of desire; a seeking, touching, and tasting, not a
+considering and analysing, of the beautiful and true wherever
+found. It is, as it were, a responsive act of the organism to those
+Supernal Powers without, which touch and stir it. Deep humility
+as towards those Powers, a willing surrender to their control, is
+the first condition of success. The mystics speak much of these
+elusive contacts; felt more and more in the soul, as it becomes
+increasingly sensitive to the subtle movements of its spiritual
+environment.
+
+    "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 not
+to be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderly
+forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every
+"mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental
+aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited:
+nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of
+spiritual silliness. All the powers of the self, raised to their
+intensest form, shall be used in it; though used perhaps in a new
+way. These, the three great faculties of love, thought, and will--
+with which you have been accustomed to make great show on the
+periphery of consciousness--you have, as it were, drawn inwards
+during the course of your inward retreat: and by your education
+in detachment have cured them of their tendency to fritter their
+powers amongst a multiplicity of objects. Now, at the very heart
+of personality, you are alone with them; you hold with you in that
+"Interior Castle," and undistracted for the moment by the
+demands of practical existence, the three great tools wherewith
+the soul deals with life.
+
+As regards the life you have hitherto looked upon as "normal,"
+love--understood in its widest sense, as desire, emotional
+inclination--has throughout directed your activities. You did
+things, sought things, learned things, even suffered things,
+because at bottom you wanted to. Will has done the work to
+which love spurred it: thought has assimilated the results of their
+activities and made for them pictures, analyses, "explanations" of
+the world with which they had to deal. But now your purified
+love discerns and desires, your will is set towards, something
+which thought cannot really assimilate--still less explain.
+"Contemplation," says Ruysbroeck, "is a knowing that is in no
+wise . . . therein all the workings of the reason fail." That
+reason has been trained to deal with the stuff of temporal existence.
+It will only make mincemeat of your experience of Eternity if
+you give it a chance; trimming, transforming, rationalising
+that ineffable vision, trying to force it into a symbolic
+system with which the intellect can cope. This is why the great
+contemplatives utter again and again their solemn warning against
+the deceptiveness of thought when it ventures to deal with the
+spiritual intuitions of man; crying with the author of _The Cloud
+of Unknowing_, "Look that _nothing_ live in thy working mind
+but a naked intent stretching"--the voluntary tension of your
+ever-growing, ever-moving personality pushing out towards the Real.
+"Love, and _do_ what you like," said the wise Augustine: so little
+does mere surface activity count, against the deep motive that
+begets it.
+
+The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that the heart's
+desire--if it be intense and industrious--is a better earnest of
+possible fulfilment than the most elegant theories of the spiritual
+world; this is the perpetual theme of all the Christian mystics. By
+such love, they think, the worlds themselves were made. By an
+eager outstretching towards Reality, they tell us, we tend to move
+towards Reality, to enter into its rhythm: by a humble and
+unquestioning surrender to it we permit its entrance into our
+souls. This twofold act, in which we find the double character of
+all true love--which both gives and takes, yields and demands--is
+assured, if we be patient and single-hearted, of ultimate
+success. At last our ignorance shall be done away; and we shall
+"apprehend" the real and the eternal, as we apprehend the
+sunshine when the sky is free from cloud. Therefore "Smite upon
+that 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: yet
+they are constantly upon the lips of the contemplatives when
+describing the earlier stages of their art. Clearly, the abolition of
+discursive thought is not to absolve you from the obligations of
+industry. You are to "energise enthusiastically" upon new planes,
+where you shall see more intensely, hear more intensely, touch
+and taste more intensely than ever before: for the modes of
+communion which these senses make possible to you are now to
+operate as parts of the one single state of perfect intuition, of
+loving knowledge by union, to which you are growing up. And
+gradually you come to see that, if this be so, it is the ardent will
+that shall be the prime agent of your undertaking: a will which
+has now become the active expression of your deepest and purest
+desires. About this the recollected and simplified self is to gather
+itself 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 sentimental
+recommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion is
+summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this
+exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete
+humility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without clever
+analysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender
+your I-hood; see things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not
+for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to
+the unity that is in them: and you achieve the "Simple Vision" of
+the poet and the mystic--that synthetic and undistorted
+apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision
+of practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, and
+everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry,
+prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which
+recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light,
+are poured from the outward world. The conscious love which
+achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate--"As long as
+thou livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though thou wilt
+not!" But the _will_ which that love has enkindled can hold
+attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal
+and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness,
+and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakened
+spirit, its appointed task, cutting a way into new levels of Reality.
+
+Therefore this transitional stage in the development of the
+contemplative powers--in one sense the completion of their
+elementary schooling, in another the beginning of their true
+activities--is concerned with the toughening and further training
+of that will which self-simplification has detached from its old
+concentration upon the unreal wants and interests of the self.
+Merged with your intuitive love, this is to become the true agent
+of your encounter with Reality; for that Simple Eye of Intention,
+which is so supremely your own, and in the last resort the maker
+of your universe and controller of your destiny, is nothing else
+but 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 stilling
+of his busy surface-intellect, his restless emotions of enmity and
+desire, the voluntary achievement of an attitude of disinterested
+love--by these strange paths the practical man has now been led,
+in order that he may know by communion something of the
+greater Life in which he is immersed and which he has so long
+and so successfully ignored. He has managed in his own small
+way something equivalent to those drastic purifications, those
+searching readjustments, which are undertaken by the heroic
+seekers 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 they
+declare to be the heritage of the liberated consciousness.
+
+This illumination shall be gradual. The attainment of it depends
+not so much upon a philosophy accepted, or a new gift of vision
+suddenly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing and
+widening of character; a progressive growth towards the Real, an
+ever more profound harmonisation of the self's life with the
+greater and inclusive rhythms of existence. It shall therefore
+develop in width and depth as the sphere of that self's
+intuitive love extends. As your own practical sympathy with and
+understanding of other lives, your realisation of them, may be
+narrowed 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 feel
+yourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffering with it, and
+partake of its whole conscious life; so here. Self-mergence is a
+gradual process, dependent on a progressive unlimiting of
+personality. The apprehension of Reality which rewards it is
+gradual too. In essence, it is one continuous out-flowing
+movement towards that boundless heavenly consciousness where
+the "flaming ramparts" which shut you from true communion
+with all other selves and things is done away; an unbroken
+process of expansion and simplification, which is nothing more
+or less than the growth of the spirit of love, the full flowering of
+the patriotic sense. By this perpetually-renewed casting down of
+the hard barriers of individuality, these willing submissions to the
+compelling rhythm of a larger existence than that of the solitary
+individual or even of the human group--by this perpetual
+widening, deepening, and unselfing of your attentiveness--you
+are to enlarge your boundaries and become the citizen of a
+greater, more joyous, more poignant world, the partaker of a
+more abundant life. The limits of this enlargement have not yet
+been discovered. The greatest contemplatives, returning from
+their highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is
+"unwalled."
+
+But this growth into higher realities, this blossoming of your
+contemplative consciousness--though it be, like all else we know
+in life, an unbroken process of movement and change--must be
+broken up and reduced to the series of concrete forms which we
+call "order" if our inelastic minds are to grasp it. So, we will
+consider it as the successive achievement of those three levels or
+manifestations of Reality, which we have agreed to call the
+Natural World of Becoming, the Metaphysical World of Being,
+and--last and highest--that Divine Reality within which these
+opposites are found as one. Though these three worlds of
+experience are so plaited together, that intimations from the
+deeper layers of being constantly reach you through the natural
+scene, it is in this order of realisation that you may best think of
+them, and of your own gradual upgrowth to the full stature of
+humanity. To elude nature, to refuse her friendship, and attempt
+to leap the river of life in the hope of finding God on the other
+side, is the common error of a perverted mysticality. It is as fatal
+in result as the opposite error of deliberately arrested
+development, which, being attuned to the wonderful rhythms of
+natural 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 which
+the old mystics sometimes called the "discovery of God in His
+creatures." Not with some ecstatic adventure in supersensuous
+regions, but with the loving and patient exploration of the world
+that lies at your gates; the "ebb and flow and ever-during power"
+of which your own existence forms a part. You are to push back
+the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included in
+the widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in every
+manifestation of life--even those which you have petulantly
+classified as cruel or obscene--the ardent self-expression of that
+Immanent Being whose spark burns deep in your own soul.
+
+The Indian mystics speak perpetually of the visible universe as
+the _Lila_ or Sport of God: the Infinite deliberately expressing
+Himself in finite form, the musical manifestation of His creative
+joy. All gracious and all courteous souls, they think, will gladly
+join His play; considering rather the wonder and achievement of
+the whole--its vivid movement, its strange and terrible evocations
+of beauty from torment, nobility from conflict and death, its
+mingled splendour of sacrifice and triumph--than their personal
+conquests, disappointments, and fatigues. In the first form of
+contemplation you are to realise the movement of this game, in
+which 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 evolving
+melody of the Divine Thought. In all things it is incomplete,
+unstable; and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring on the
+battlefield, living and breeding in the slum, adventurous and
+studious, sensuous and pure--more, your great comrades, the
+hills, the trees, the rivers, the darting birds, the scuttering insects,
+the little soft populations of the grass--all these are playing with
+you. They move one to another in delicate responsive measures,
+now violent, now gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet ever
+weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient to the music
+of that invisible Choragus whom Boehme and Plotinus knew.
+What is that great wind which blows without, in continuous and
+ineffable harmonies? Part of you, practical man. There is but one
+music in the world: and to it you contribute perpetually, whether
+you 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 a
+plate-glass window between yourself and your fellow-dancers--
+all those other thoughts of God, perpetually becoming, changing
+and growing beside you--and commit yourself to the unsocial
+attitude of the "cat that walks by itself."
+
+Begin therefore at once. Gather yourself up, as the exercises of
+recollection have taught you to do. Then--with attention no
+longer frittered amongst the petty accidents and interests of your
+personal life, but poised, tense, ready for the work you shall
+demand of it--stretch out by a distinct act of loving will towards
+one of the myriad manifestations of life that surround you: and
+which, in an ordinary way, you hardly notice unless you happen
+to need them. Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its image
+towards you. Deliberate--more, impassioned--attentiveness, an
+attentiveness which soon transcends all consciousness of
+yourself, as separate from and attending to the thing seen; this is
+the condition of success. As to the object of contemplation, it
+matters little. From Alp to insect, anything will do, provided that
+your attitude be right: for all things in this world towards which
+you are stretching out are linked together, and one truly
+apprehended will be the gateway to the rest.
+
+Look with the eye of contemplation on the most dissipated tabby
+of the streets, and you shall discern the celestial quality of life set
+like an aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his strident
+mew 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 gaze
+is holy too. It contains for you the whole divine cycle of the
+seasons; upon the plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to be
+heard. But you must look at these things as you would look into
+the eyes of a friend: ardently, selflessly, without considering his
+reputation, his practical uses, his anatomical peculiarities, or the
+vices 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--far
+more intimate than anything you imagined--between yourself and
+the surrounding "objects of sense"; and in those objects of sense a
+profound significance, a personal quality, and actual power of
+response, 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 become
+aware that St. Francis was accurate as well as charming when he
+spoke of Brother Wind and Sister Water; and that Stevenson was
+obviously 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 you
+news at least as definite and credible as that which the paper-boy
+is hawking in the street: direct messages from that Beauty
+which the artist reports at best at second hand. Because of your
+new sensitiveness, anthems will be heard of you from every
+gutter; poems of intolerable loveliness will bud for you on every
+weed. Best and greatest, your fellowmen will shine for you with
+new significance and light. Humility and awe will be evoked in
+you by the beautiful and patient figures of the poor, their long
+dumb heroisms, their willing acceptance of the burden of life. All
+the various members of the human group, the little children and
+the aged, those who stand for energy, those dedicated to skill, to
+thought, to plainest service, or to prayer, will have for you fresh
+vivid significance, be felt as part of your own wider being. All
+adventurous endeavours, all splendour of pain and all beauty of
+play--more, that grey unceasing effort of existence which makes
+up the groundwork of the social web, and the ineffective hopes,
+enthusiasms, and loves which transfuse it--all these will be seen
+and felt by you at last as full of glory, full of meaning; for you
+will see them with innocent, attentive, disinterested eyes, feel
+them as infinitely significant and adorable parts of the
+Transcendent Whole in which you also are immersed.
+
+This discovery of your fraternal link with all living things, this
+down-sinking of your arrogant personality into the great generous
+stream of life, marks an important stage in your apprehension of
+that Science of Love which contemplation is to teach. You are
+not to confuse it with pretty fancies about nature, such as all
+imaginative persons enjoy; still less, with a self-conscious and
+deliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable condition of
+awareness; a direct perception, not an opinion or an idea. For
+those who attain it, the span of the senses is extended. These live
+in a world which is lit with an intenser light; has, as George Fox
+insisted, "another smell than before." They hear all about them
+the delicate music of growth, and see the "new colour" of which
+the mystics speak.
+
+Further, you will observe that this act, and the attitude which is
+proper to it, differs in a very important way even from that
+special 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-brush
+has decorated the surface of the universe--which you were
+encouraged to hold before your mind. Now, turning away from
+the label, you shall surrender yourself to the direct message
+poured out towards you by the _thing_. Then, you considered:
+now, you are to absorb. This experience will be, in the very
+highest sense, the experience of sensation without thought: the
+essential sensation, the "savouring" to which some of the mystics
+invite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses offer us a
+transient sacrament. So here at last, in this intimate communion,
+this "simple seeing," this total surrender of you to the impress of
+things, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense: and
+so using them, because you are concentrating upon them,
+accepting their reports in simplicity. You have, in this
+contemplative outlook, carried the peculiar methods of artistic
+apprehension to their highest stage: with the result that the
+sense-world has become for you, as Erigena said that all creatures
+were, "a theophany, or appearance of God." Not, you observe, a
+symbol, but a showing: a very different thing. You have begun
+now the Plotinian ascent from multiplicity to unity, and therefore
+begin to perceive in the Many the clear and actual presence of the
+One: the changeless and absolute Life, manifesting itself in all
+the myriad nascent, crescent, cadent lives. Poets, gazing thus at
+the "flower in the crannied wall" or the "green thing that stands in
+the way," have been led deep into the heart of its life; there to
+discern the secret of the universe.
+
+All the greater poems of Wordsworth and Walt Whitman represent
+an attempt to translate direct contemplative experience of
+this kind into words and rhythms which might convey its
+secret to other men: all Blake's philosophy is but a desperate
+effort to persuade us to exchange the false world of "Nature" on
+which we usually look--and which is not really Nature at all--for
+this, the true world, to which he gave the confusing name of
+"Imagination." For these, the contemplation of the World of
+Becoming assumes the intense form which we call genius: even
+to read their poems is to feel the beating of a heart, the upleap of
+a joy, greater than anything that we have known. Yet your own
+little efforts towards the attainment of this level of consciousness
+will at least give to you, together with a more vivid universe, a
+wholly new comprehension of their works; and that of other poets
+and artists who have drunk from the chalice of the Spirit of Life.
+These works are now observed by you to be the only artistic
+creations to which the name of Realism is appropriate; and it is
+by the standard of reality that you shall now criticise them,
+recognising in utterances which you once dismissed as rhetoric
+the desperate efforts of the clear-sighted towards the exact
+description of things veritably seen in that simplified state of
+consciousness which Blake called "imagination uncorrupt." It
+was from those purified and heightened levels of perception to
+which the first form of contemplation inducts the soul, that Julian
+of Norwich, gazing upon "a little thing, the quantity of an hazel
+nut," found in it the epitome of all that was made; for therein she
+perceived the royal character of life. So small and helpless in its
+mightiest forms, so august even in its meanest, that life in its
+wholeness was then realised by her as the direct outbirth of, and
+the meek dependant upon, the Energy of Divine Love. She felt at
+once the fugitive character of its apparent existence, the
+perdurable Reality within which it was held. "I marvelled," she
+said, "how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have
+fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my
+understanding: _It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it_.
+And so All-thing hath the being by the love of God." To this
+same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite
+expression with its Origin, this search for the inner significance
+of every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced
+contemplatives 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 my
+cats."
+
+Yet it is not the self-tormenting strife of introspective and
+self-conscious aspiration, but rather an unrelaxed, diligent intention,
+a steady acquiescence, a simple and loyal surrender to the great
+currents of life, a holding on to results achieved in your best
+moments, that shall do it for you: a surrender not limp but
+deliberate, a trustful self-donation, a "living faith." "A pleasing
+stirring of love," says _The Cloud of Unknowing_, not a
+desperate anxious struggle for more light. True contemplation
+can 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 to
+gain. Though the way may be long, the material of your mind
+intractable, to the eager lover of Reality ultimate success is
+assured. The strong tide of Transcendent Life will inevitably
+invade, clarify, uplift the consciousness which is open to receive
+it; a movement from without--subtle yet actual--answering each
+willed movement from within. "Your opening and His entering,"
+says Eckhart, "are but one moment." When, therefore, you put
+aside your preconceived ideas, your self-centred scale of values,
+and let intuition have its way with you, you open up by this act
+new levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the most practical
+of all activities; for then and then only will your diurnal
+existence, and the natural scene in which that existence is set,
+begin to give up to you its richness and meaning. Its paradoxes
+and inequalities will be disclosed as true constituents of its
+beauty, an inconceivable splendour will be shaken out from its
+dingiest folds. Then, and only then, escaping the single vision of
+the selfish, you will begin to guess all that your senses were
+meant 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 this
+point, "there begins a hunger and a thirst which shall never more
+be stilled."
+
+In the First Form of Contemplation that self has been striving to
+know better its own natural plane of existence. It has stretched
+out the feelers of its intuitive love into the general stream of
+duration of which it is a part. Breaking down the fences of
+personality, merging itself in a larger consciousness, it
+has learned to know the World of Becoming from within--as a
+citizen, a member of the great society of life, not merely as a
+spectator. But the more deeply and completely you become
+immersed in and aware of this life, the greater the extension of
+your consciousness; the more insistently will rumours and
+intimations of a higher plane of experience, a closer unity and
+more complete synthesis, begin to besiege you. You feel that
+hitherto you nave received the messages of life in a series of
+disconnected words and notes, from which your mind constructed
+as best it could certain coherent sentences and tunes--laws,
+classifications, relations, and the rest. But now you reach
+out towards the ultimate sentence and melody, which exist
+independently of your own constructive efforts; and realise that
+the words and notes which so often puzzled you by displaying an
+intensity that exceeded the demands of your little world, only
+have beauty and meaning just because and in so far as you
+discern them to be the partial expressions of a greater whole
+which is still beyond your reach.
+
+You have long been like a child tearing up the petals of flowers
+in order to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results of
+this murderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of the
+world. When the bits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called it
+science. Now at last you have perceived the greater truth and
+loveliness of the living plant from which you broke them: have,
+in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its
+reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does
+and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities,
+which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and
+forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that
+touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants--
+though this were far better than your old game of indexing your
+own poor photographs of them--will never give you access to the
+Unity, the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests itself
+through them. To suppose that it can do so is the cardinal error of
+the "nature mystic": an error parallel with that of the psychologist
+who looks for the soul in "psychic states."
+
+The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more
+perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the
+quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless
+suggestions; so much the more acute will become your craving
+for Something More. You will now find and feel the Infinite and
+Eternal, making as it were veiled and sacramental contacts with
+you under these accidents--through these its ceaseless creative
+activities--and you will want to press through and beyond them,
+to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect and unmediated union
+with, the Substance of all That Is. With the great widening and
+deepening of your life that has ensued from the abolition of a
+narrow selfhood, your entrance into the larger consciousness of
+living things, there has necessarily come to you an instinctive
+knowledge of a final and absolute group-relation, transcending
+and including all lesser unions in its sweep. To this, the second
+stage of contemplation, in which human consciousness enters
+into its peculiar heritage, something within you now seems to
+urge you on.
+
+If you obey this inward push, pressing forward with the "sharp
+dart of your longing love," forcing the point of your wilful
+attention further and further into the web of things, such an
+ever-deepening realisation, such an extension of your conscious
+life, will indeed become possible to you. Nothing but your own
+apathy, your feeble and limited desire, limits this realisation.
+Here there is a strict relation between demand and supply--your
+achievement shall be in proportion to the greatness of your
+desire. The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Reality
+without does not vary. Only the extent to which you are able to
+receive it depends upon your courage and generosity, the measure
+in which you give yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set
+a limit to their self-donation must feel as they attain it, not a sense
+of satisfaction but a sense of constriction. It is useless to offer
+your spirit a garden--even a garden inhabited by saints and
+angels--and pretend that it has been made free of the universe.
+You will not have peace until you do away with all banks and
+hedges, and exchange the garden for the wilderness that is
+unwalled; that wild strange place of silence where "lovers lose
+themselves."
+
+Yet you must begin this great adventure humbly; and take, as
+Julian of Norwich did, the first stage of your new outward-going
+journey along the road that lies nearest at hand. When Julian
+looked with the eye of contemplation upon that "little thing"
+which revealed to her the oneness of the created universe, her
+deep and loving sight perceived in it successively three
+properties, which she expressed as well as she might under the
+symbols of her own theology: "The first is that God made it; the
+second is that God loveth it; the third is that God keepeth it."
+Here are three phases in the ever-widening contemplative
+apprehension of Reality. Not three opinions, but three facts, for
+which she struggles to find words. The first is that each separate
+living thing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree of life, and
+there destined to mature, age, and die, is the outbirth of another
+power, of a creative push: that the World of Becoming in all its
+richness and variety is not ultimate, but formed by Something
+other than, and utterly transcendent to, itself. This, of course, the
+religious mind invariably takes for granted: but we are concerned
+with immediate experience rather than faith. To feel and know
+those two aspects of Reality which we call "created" and
+"uncreated," nature and spirit--to be as sharply aware of them, as
+sure of them, as we are of land and sea--is to be made free of the
+supersensual world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's side,
+and see that Poem of which you have deciphered separate phrases
+in the earlier form of contemplation. Then you were learning to
+read: and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas, an
+astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much greater the
+significance of every detail would appear to you, how much more
+truly you would possess its life, were you acquainted with the
+Poem: not as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but as a
+non-successional whole.
+
+From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge of the heart
+which comes from a humble and disinterested acceptance of life;
+that this Creation, this whole changeful natural order, with all its
+apparent collisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from an
+ardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual donation, which
+generates it, upholds it, drives it; for "_all-thing_ hath the being
+by the love of God." Blake's anguished question here receives its
+answer: the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the tiger
+too. Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gracious, terrible,
+or malignant, is enwrapped in love: and is part of a world
+produced, not by mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire.
+
+Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable;
+nothing, however perverted, irredeemable. The blasphemous
+other-worldliness of the false mystic who conceives of matter as
+an evil thing and flies from its "deceits," is corrected by this
+loving sight. Hence, the more beautiful and noble a thing appears
+to 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 up
+towards expression, and share that simplicity and purity of vision
+in which most saints and some poets see all things "as they are in
+God."
+
+Lastly, this love-driven world of duration--this work within
+which the Divine Artist passionately and patiently expresses His
+infinite dream under finite forms--is held in another, mightier
+embrace. It is "kept," says Julian. Paradoxically, the perpetual
+changeful energies of love and creation which inspire it are
+gathered up and made complete within the unchanging fact of
+Being: the Eternal and Absolute, within which the world of
+things is set as the tree is set in the supporting earth, the enfolding
+air. There, finally, is the rock and refuge of the seeking
+consciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the flux. There
+that flux exists in its wholeness, "all at once"; in a manner which
+we can never comprehend, but which in hours of withdrawal we
+may sometimes taste and feel. It is in man's moments of contact
+with this, when he penetrates beyond all images, however lovely,
+however significant, to that ineffable awareness which the
+mystics call "Naked Contemplation"--since it is stripped of all the
+clothing with which reason and imagination drape and disguise
+both our devils and our gods--that the hunger and thirst of the
+heart is satisfied, and we receive indeed an assurance of ultimate
+Reality. This assurance is not the cool conclusion of a successful
+argument. It is rather the seizing at last of Something which we
+have ever felt near us and enticing us: the unspeakably simple
+because completely inclusive solution of all the puzzles of life.
+
+As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality of
+the natural world, in order that it might give itself to you, and
+your possession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender of
+selfhood, next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last by
+a union of love; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of that
+same process, you are to mount up to higher unions still. Held
+tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual
+rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life--compelled
+to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die--there is yet,
+as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something
+in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world
+of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and
+merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one
+intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of--an
+instinct for--another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as
+yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the
+Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning
+mind 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 all
+your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your
+heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative
+efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of
+devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total
+self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little
+activity can be merged.
+
+St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only withheld from this
+desired vision of the Divine Essence, this discovery of the
+Pure Act (which indeed is everywhere pressing in on him and
+supporting him), by the apparent necessity which he is under of
+turning to bodily images, of breaking up his continuous and
+living intuition into Conceptual scraps; in other words, because
+he cannot live the life of sensation without thought. But it is not
+the man, it is merely his mental machinery which is under this
+"necessity." This it is which translates, analyses, incorporates in
+finite images the boundless perceptions of the spirit: passing
+through its prism the White Light of Reality, and shattering it to a
+succession of coloured rays. Therefore the man who would know
+the Divine Secret must unshackle himself more thoroughly than
+ever before from the tyranny of the image-making power. As it is
+not 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 know
+God.
+
+"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 he
+can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And
+therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose
+to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well
+be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden;
+but by thought never."
+
+"Gotten and holden": homely words, that suggest rather the
+outstretching of the hand to take something lying at your very
+gates, than the long outward journey or terrific ascent of the
+contemplative soul. Reality indeed, the mystics say, is "near and
+far"; far from our thoughts, but saturating and supporting our
+lives. Nothing would be nearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter,
+were the doors of our perception truly cleansed. You have then
+but to focus attention upon your own deep reality, "realise your
+own soul," in order to find it. "We dwell in Him and He in us":
+you participate in the Eternal Order now. The vision of the
+Divine Essence--the participation of its own small activity in the
+Supernal 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 arises
+and is sustained. But you have been busy from your childhood
+with other matters. All the urgent affairs of "life," as you absurdly
+called it, have monopolised your field of consciousness. Thus all
+the important events of your real life, physical and spiritual--the
+mysterious perpetual growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits
+of the universe into the unstable body which you confuse with
+yourself, the hum and whirr of the machine which preserves your
+contacts with the material world, the more delicate movements
+which 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 "Little
+Thing," by an enfolding and creative love; yet of this you are less
+conscious than you are of the air that you breathe.
+
+Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you learned and
+established, as a patent and experienced fact, your fraternal
+relation with all the other children of God, entering into the
+rhythm of their existence, participating in their stress and their
+joy; will you not at least try to make patent this your filial
+relation too? This actualisation of your true status, your place in
+the Eternal World, is waiting for you. It represents the next phase
+in your gradual achievement of Reality. The method by which
+you will attain to it is strictly analogous to that by which you
+obtained a more vivid awareness of the natural world in which
+you 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 the
+first, the deliberate inward retreat and gathering together of your
+faculties which was effected by recollection, was the prelude to a
+new coming forth, an outflow from the narrow limits of a merely
+personal life to the better and truer apprehension of the created
+world. Now, in the second stage, the disciplined and recollected
+attention seems to take an opposite course. It is directed towards
+a plane of existence with which your bodily senses have no
+attachments: which is not merely misrepresented by your
+ordinary concepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. It
+must therefore sink inwards towards its own centre, "away from
+all that can be thought or felt," as the mystics say, "away from
+every image, every notion, every thing," towards that strange
+condition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross calls the
+"Night of Sense." Do this steadily, checking each vagrant
+instinct, each insistent thought, however "spiritual" it may seem;
+pressing ever more deeply inwards towards that ground, that
+simple and undifferentiated Being from which your diverse
+faculties emerge. Presently you will find yourself, emptied and
+freed, in a place stripped bare of all the machinery of thought;
+and achieve the condition of simplicity which those same
+specialists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love," and which
+they declare to be above all human images and ideas--a state of
+consciousness in which "all the workings of the reason fail."
+Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense and
+vivid silence: a silence which exists in itself, through and in spite
+of the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this world
+of silence you seem as it were to lose yourself, "to ebb and to
+flow, to wander and be lost in the Imageless Ground," says
+Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensations of the self in
+this, 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 of
+Unknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it is
+well to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a
+strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin to
+understand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, "Be still, and
+know." You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim strange
+state of which you can say nothing, since it offers no material to
+your 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 sorrowful
+questionings are answered without utterance; it is the All, and
+you are within it and part of it, and know that it is good. It calls
+forth the utmost adoration of which you are capable; and,
+mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended now, say
+the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are become
+part of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it were
+upon its bosom and--though never perhaps before has your soul
+been so truly active--seems to you a stillness, a rest.
+
+The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lower
+life of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will now
+appear to you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact,
+which you have verified in your own experience. You perceive
+that these are the two complementary ways of apprehending and
+uniting with Reality--the one as a dynamic process, the other as
+an eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not conflict.
+You know that the flow, the broken-up world of change and
+multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of the
+time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to the
+development of the higher side of your consciousness, you are
+now lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple,
+transcendent life "broken, yet not divided," which gives to this
+time-world all its meaning and validity. And you know, without
+derogation from the realness of that life of flux within which you
+first made good your attachments to the universe, that you are
+also a true constituent of the greater whole; that since you are
+man, you are also spirit, and are living Eternal Life now, in the
+midst of time.
+
+The effect of this form of contemplation, in the degree in which
+the ordinary man may learn to practise it, is like the sudden
+change of atmosphere, the shifting of values, which we experience
+when we pass from the busy streets into a quiet church; where
+a lamp burns, and a silence reigns, the same yesterday, to-day,
+and for ever. Thence is poured forth a stillness which strikes
+through 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 and
+appeals, make possible our apprehension of this deep eternal
+peace. The character of our consciousness, intermediate between
+Eternity and Time, and ever ready to swing between them, makes
+such a device, such a concrete aid to concentration, essential to
+us. 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. You
+will realise then what Julian meant, when she declared the
+ultimate property of all that was made to be that "God keepeth
+it": will _feel_ the violent consciousness of an enfolding
+Presence, utterly transcending the fluid changeful nature-life, and
+incomprehensible to the intelligence which that nature-life has
+developed and trained. And as you knew the secret of that
+nature-life best by surrendering yourself to it, by entering its
+currents, and refusing to analyse or arrange: so here, by a
+deliberate giving of yourself to the silence, the rich "nothingness,"
+the "Cloud," you will draw nearest to the Reality it conceals
+from the eye of sense. "Lovers put out the candle and draw the
+curtains," says Patmore, "when they wish to see the God and the
+Goddess: and in the higher communion, the night of thought is
+the light of perception."
+
+Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of that intuitive
+awareness, that meek and simple self-mergence, which the
+mystics call sometimes, according to its degree and special
+circumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark,
+represents the utmost that human consciousness can do of itself
+towards the achievement of union with Reality. To some it brings
+joy and peace, to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of the
+lowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at last can
+measure itself by the august standards of the Infinite. Though the
+trained and diligent will of the contemplative can, if control of
+the attention be really established, recapture this state of
+awareness, retreat into the Quiet again and again, yet it is of
+necessity a fleeting experience; for man is immersed in duration,
+subject to it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease with
+the cessation of physical life--perhaps not then. Perpetual
+absorption in the Transcendent is a human impossibility, and the
+effort to achieve it is both unsocial and silly. But this experience,
+this "ascent to the Nought," changes for ever the proportions of
+the life that once has known it; gives to it depth and height, and
+prepares the way for those further experiences, that great
+transfiguration of existence which comes when the personal
+activity of the finite will gives place to the great and compelling
+action of another Power.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
+
+The hard separation which some mystical writers insist upon
+making between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation, has
+been on the whole productive of confusion rather than clearness:
+for the word "supernatural" has many unfortunate associations for
+the mind of the plain man. It at once suggests to him visions and
+ecstasies, superstitious beliefs, ghosts, and other disagreeable
+interferences with the order which he calls "natural"; and inclines
+him to his old attitude of suspicion in respect of all mystical
+things. But some word we must have, to indicate the real
+cleavage which exists between the second and third stages in the
+development of the contemplative consciousness: the real change
+which, if you would go further on these interior paths, must now
+take place in the manner of your apprehension of Reality.
+Hitherto, all that you have attained has been--or at least has
+seemed to you--the direct result of your own hard work. A
+difficult self-discipline, the slowly achieved control of your
+vagrant thoughts and desires, the steady daily practice of
+recollection, a diligent pushing out of your consciousness from
+the superficial to the fundamental, an unselfish loving attention;
+all this has been rewarded by the gradual broadening and
+deepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into the
+movements of a larger life, You have been a knocker, a seeker,
+an asker: have beat upon the Cloud of Unknowing "with a sharp
+dart of longing love." A perpetual effort of the will has
+characterised your inner development. Your contemplation, in
+fact, as the specialists would say, has been "active," not
+"infused."
+
+But now, having achieved an awareness--obscure and indescribable
+indeed, 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 take
+place in the relation between your finite human spirit and
+the Infinite Life in which at last it knows itself to dwell. All that
+will now come to you--and much perhaps will come--will happen
+as it seems without effort on your own part: though really it will
+be the direct result of that long stress and discipline which has
+gone before, and has made it possible for you to feel the subtle
+contact of deeper realities. It will depend also on the steady
+continuance--often perhaps through long periods of darkness and
+boredom--of that poise to which you have been trained: the
+stretching-out of the loving and surrendered will into the dimness
+and silence, the continued trustful habitation of the soul in the
+atmosphere of the Essential World. You are like a traveller
+arrived in a new country. The journey has been a long one; and
+the hardships and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the perpetual
+conscious pressing forward, have at last come to seem the chief
+features of your inner life. Now, with their cessation, you feel
+curiously lost; as if the chief object of your existence had been
+taken away. No need to push on any further: yet, though there is
+no more that you can do of yourself, there is much that may and
+must be done to you. The place that you have come to seems
+strange and bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons of
+human thought. There are no familiar landmarks, nothing on
+which you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro," as the mystics
+say, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and
+darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those who
+go to live in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Your
+state, then, should now be wisely passive; in order that the great
+influences 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 a
+visitor 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 of
+darkness and quietude, this "Night of the Spirit," as St. John of
+the Cross has called it, you are to dwell there meekly; asking
+nothing, seeking nothing, but with your doors flung wide open
+towards God. And as you do thus, there will come to you an ever
+clearer certitude that this darkness enveils the goal for which you
+have been seeking from the first; the final Reality with which you
+are destined to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ardent
+and most sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your efforts
+reach it. This realisation of your own complete impotence, of the
+resistance which the Transcendent--long sought and faithfully
+served--now seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love,
+your ardour, your deliberate self-donation, is at once the most
+painful and most essential phase in the training of the human
+soul. It brings you into that state of passive suffering which is to
+complete the decentralisation of your character, test the purity of
+your love, and perfect your education in humility.
+
+Here, you must oppose more thoroughly than ever before the
+instincts and suggestions of your separate, clever, energetic self;
+which, hating silence and dimness, is always trying to take
+the methods of Martha into the domain of Mary, and seldom
+discriminates between passivity and sloth. Perhaps you will find,
+when you try to achieve this perfect self-abandonment, that a
+further, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper, more searching
+purification than that which was forced upon you by your first
+experience of the recollective state is needed. The last fragments
+of selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfaction--the
+fundamental human tendency to drag down the Simple Fact and
+make it ours, instead of offering ourselves to it--must be sought
+out and killed. In this deep contemplation, this profound Quiet,
+your soul gradually becomes conscious of a constriction, a
+dreadful narrowness of personality; something still existing in
+itself, still tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and keeping
+it from that absolute surrender which is the only way to peace.
+An attitude of perfect generosity, complete submission, willing
+acquiescence in anything that may happen--even in failure and
+death--is here your only hope: for union with Reality can only be
+a union of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universal
+life. You must, so far as you are able, give yourself up to, "die
+into," 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 pure
+bare going forth," says Tauler, trying to describe the sensations of
+the self at this moment. "None," says Ruysbroeck, putting this
+same experience, this meek outstreaming of the bewildered spirit,
+into other language, "is sure of Eternal Life, unless he has died
+with his own attributes wholly into God."
+
+It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter
+self-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from
+you, nothing given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a
+mighty transformation will result. From the transitional plane of
+darkness, you will be reborn into another "world," another stage
+of realisation: and find yourself, literally, to be other than you
+were before. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence of the change
+now effected consists in the fact that "God's _action_ takes the
+place of man's _activity_"--that the surrendered self "does not act,
+but receives." By this they mean to describe, as well as our
+concrete language will permit, the new and vivid consciousness
+which now invades the contemplative; the sense which he has of
+being as it were helpless in the grasp of another Power, so utterly
+part of him, so completely different from him--so rich and
+various, so transfused with life and feeling, so urgent and so
+all-transcending--that he can only think of it as God. It is for
+this that the dimness and steadily increasing passivity of the
+stage of Quiet has been preparing him; and it is out of this
+willing quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the new
+experiences 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 mystical
+poems. "He who has had experience of this," says St. Teresa of
+the same stage of apprehension, "will understand it in some
+measure: but it cannot be more clearly described because what
+then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the
+soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abide a
+conviction thereof so certain and strong, that it cannot possibly
+help believing so."
+
+This sense, this conviction, which may be translated by the
+imagination into many different forms, is the substance of the
+greatest experiences and highest joys of the mystical saints. The
+intensity with which it is realised will depend upon the ardour,
+purity, and humility of the experiencing soul: but even those who
+feel it faintly are convinced by it for evermore. In some great and
+generous spirits, able to endure the terrific onslaught of Reality,
+it may even reach a vividness by which all other things are
+obliterated; and the self, utterly helpless under the inundations of
+this transcendent life-force, passes into that simple state of
+consciousness 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. Though
+these great spirits have as it were a genius for Reality, a
+susceptibility to supernal impressions, so far beyond your own
+small talent that there seems no link between you: yet you have,
+since you are human, a capacity for the Infinite too. With less
+intensity, less splendour, but with a certitude which no arguments
+will ever shake, this sense of the Living Fact, and of its
+mysterious contacts with and invasions of the human spirit, may
+assuredly be realised by you. This realisation--sometimes felt
+under the symbols of personality, sometimes under those of an
+impersonal but life-giving Force, Light, Energy, or Heat--is the
+ruling character of the third phase of contemplation; and the
+reward of that meek passivity, that "busy idleness" as the mystics
+sometimes call it, which you have been striving to attain. Sooner
+or later, if you are patient, it will come to you through the
+darkness: a mysterious contact, a clear certitude of intercourse
+and of possession--perhaps so gradual in its approach that the
+break, the change from the ever-deepening stillness and peace of
+the second phase, is hardly felt by you; perhaps, if your nature be
+ardent and unstable, with a sudden shattering violence, in a
+"storm of love."
+
+In either case, the advent of this experience is incalculable, and
+completely outside your own control. So far, to use St. Teresa's
+well-known image, you have been watering the garden of your
+spirit by hand; a poor and laborious method, yet one in which
+there is a definite relation between effort and result. But now the
+watering-can is taken from you, and you must depend upon the
+rain: more generous, more fruitful, than anything which your own
+efforts could manage, but, in its incalculable visitations, utterly
+beyond your control. Here all one can say is this: that if you
+acquiesce in the heroic demands which the spiritual life now
+makes upon you, if you let yourself go, eradicate the last traces of
+self-interest even of the most spiritual kind--then, you have
+established conditions under which the forces of the spiritual
+world can work on you, heightening your susceptibilities,
+deepening and purifying your attention, so that you are able to
+taste and feel more and more of the inexhaustible riches of
+Reality.
+
+Thus dying to your own will, waiting for what is given, infused,
+you will presently find that a change in your apprehension has
+indeed taken place: and that those who said self-loss was the only
+way to realisation taught no pious fiction but the truth. The
+highest contemplative experience to which you have yet attained
+has seemed above all else a still awareness. The cessation of your
+own striving, a resting upon and within the Absolute World--
+these were its main characteristics for your consciousness. But
+now, this Ocean of Being is no longer felt by you as an
+emptiness, a solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it to be
+instinct 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 contains
+within itself the only complete expression of all these things.
+Your strength is now literally made perfect in weakness: because
+of the completeness of your dependence, a fresh life is infused
+into you, such as your old separate existence never knew.
+Moreover, to that diffused and impersonal sense of the Infinite, in
+which you have dipped yourself, and which swallows up and
+completes all the ideas your mind has ever built up with the
+help of the categories of time and space, is now added the
+consciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends,
+completes all that you mean by the categories of personality and
+of life. Those ineffective, half-conscious attempts towards free
+action, clear apprehension, true union, which we dignify by the
+names of will, thought, and love are now seen matched by an
+Absolute Will, Thought, and Love; instantly recognised by the
+contemplating spirit as the highest reality it yet has known, and
+evoking in it a passionate and a humble joy.
+
+This unmistakable experience has been achieved by the mystics
+of every religion; and when we read their statements, we know
+that all are speaking of the same thing. None who have had it
+have ever been able to doubt its validity. It has always become
+for them the central fact, by which all other realities must
+be tested and graduated. It has brought to them the deep
+consciousness of sources of abundant life now made accessible to
+man; 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 within
+them. Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege them. In
+every case, they are the passive objects upon which it works. It is
+now another Power which seeks the separated spirit and demands
+it; which knocks at the closed door of the narrow personality;
+which penetrates the contemplative consciousness through and
+through, speaking, stirring, compelling it; which sometimes, by
+its secret irresistible pressure, wins even the most recalcitrant
+in spite of themselves. Sometimes this Power is felt as an
+impersonal force, the unifying cosmic energy, the indrawing love
+which gathers all things into One; sometimes as a sudden access
+of vitality, a light and heat, enfolding and penetrating the self and
+making its languid life more vivid and more real; sometimes as a
+personal and friendly Presence which counsels and entreats the
+soul.
+
+In each case, the mystics insist again that this is God; that here
+under these diverse manners the soul has immediate intercourse
+with Him. But we must remember that when they make this
+declaration, they are speaking from a plane of consciousness far
+above the ideas and images of popular religion; and from a place
+which is beyond the judiciously adjusted horizon of philosophy.
+They mean by this word, not a notion, however august; but an
+experienced Fact so vivid, that against it the so-called facts of
+daily life look shadowy and insecure. They say that this Fact is
+"immanent"; dwelling in, transfusing, and discoverable through
+every aspect of the universe, every movement of the game of
+life--as you have found in the first stage of contemplation. There you
+may hear its melody and discern its form. And further, that It is
+"transcendent"; in essence exceeding and including the sum of
+those glimpses and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence in
+life, and in Its simplest manifestations above and beyond
+anything to which reason can attain--"the Nameless Being, of
+Whom nought can be said." This you discovered to be true in the
+second stage. But in addition to this, they say also, that this
+all-pervasive, all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melody
+is heard in all movement, and within Whose Being "the worlds
+are being told like beads," calls the human spirit to an immediate
+intercourse, a _unity_, a fruition, a divine give-and-take, for
+which the contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, of
+marriage, of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes in the
+fully conscious soul a passionate and a humble love. "He devours
+us and He feeds us!" exclaims Ruysbroeck. "Here," says St.
+Thomas Aquinas, "the soul in a wonderful and unspeakable
+manner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herself
+devoured, embraces and is violently embraced: and by the knot of
+love she unites herself with God, and is with Him as the Alone
+with the Alone."
+
+The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the rhapsodies which
+extol the spirit's Lover, Friend, Companion, Bridegroom; which
+describe the "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound of
+Heaven chasing the separated soul, the onslaughts, demands, and
+caresses of this "stormy, generous, and unfathomable love"--all
+this is an attempt, often of course oblique and symbolic in
+method, to express and impart this transcendent secret, to
+describe that intense yet elusive state in which alone union with
+the living heart of Reality is possible. "How delicately Thou
+teachest love to me!" cries St. John of the Cross; and here indeed
+we find all the ardours of all earthly lovers justified by an
+imperishable Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that we
+truly love, and beyond all these things both seeks us and compels
+us, "giving more than we can take and asking more than we can
+pay."
+
+You do not, you never will know, _what_ this Objective is: for as
+Dionysius teaches, "if any one saw God and understood what he
+saw, then it was not God that he saw, but something that belongs
+to Him." But you do know now that it exists, with an intensity
+which makes all other existences unreal; save in so far as they
+participate in this one Fact. "Some contemplate the Formless, and
+others meditate on Form: but the wise man knows that Brahma is
+beyond both." As you yield yourself more and more completely
+to the impulses of this intimate yet unseizable Presence, so much
+the sweeter and stronger--so much the more constant and steady--
+will your intercourse with it become. The imperfect music of
+your adoration will be answered and reinforced by another music,
+gentle, deep, and strange; your out-going movement, the
+stretching forth of your desire from yourself to something other,
+will be answered by a movement, a stirring, within you yet not
+conditioned by you. The wonder and variety of this intercourse is
+never-ending. It includes in its sweep every phase of human love
+and self-devotion, all beauty and all power, all suffering and
+effort, all gentleness and rapture: here found in synthesis. Going
+forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of
+high contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at last
+made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest
+experiences of the world of growth and change.
+
+You see now what it is that you have been doing in the course of
+your mystical development. As your narrow heart stretched
+to a wider sympathy with life, you have been surrendering
+progressively to larger and larger existences, more and more
+complete realities: have been learning to know them, to share
+their very being, through the magic of disinterested love. First,
+the manifested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt by you
+in its wonder and wholeness, once you learned to yield yourself
+to its rhythms, received in simplicity the undistorted messages of
+sense. Then, the actual unchanging ground of life, the eternal and
+unconditioned Whole, transcending all succession: a world
+inaccessible 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 greater
+Reality, the final inclusive Fact, the Unmeasured Love, which "is
+through all things everlastingly": and yielding yourself
+to it, receiving and responding to its obscure yet ardent
+communications, you pass beyond the cosmic experience to the
+personal encounter, the simple yet utterly inexpressible union of
+the soul with its God.
+
+And this threefold union with Reality, as your attention is
+focussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its rich
+simplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: for
+you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now
+to characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your own
+dwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, the
+sense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal of
+contact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual self-donation, shall
+animate it too. When the greater love overwhelms the lesser, and
+your small self-consciousness is lost in the consciousness of the
+Whole, it will be felt as an intense stillness, a quiet fruition of
+Reality. Then, your very selfhood seems to cease, as it does in all
+your moments of great passion; and you are "satisfied and
+overflowing, and with Him beyond yourself eternally fulfilled."
+Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground,
+your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper
+and deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, and
+seeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of the
+Infinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewed
+encounter than a final achievement. Since you are a child of Time
+as well as of Eternity, such effort and satisfaction, active and
+passive love are both needed by you, if your whole life is to be
+brought into union with the inconceivably rich yet simple One in
+Whom these apparent opposites are harmonised. Therefore
+seeking and finding, work and rest, conflict and peace, feeding on
+God and self-immersion in God, spiritual marriage and spiritual
+death--these contradictory images are all wanted, if we are to
+represent the changing moods of the living, growing human
+spirit; the diverse aspects under which it realises the simple fact
+of its intercourse with the Divine.
+
+Each new stage achieved in the mystical development of the
+spirit has meant, not the leaving behind of the previous
+stages, but an adding on to them: an ever greater extension of
+experience, and enrichment of personality. So that the total result
+of this change, this steady growth of your transcendental self, is
+not an impoverishment of the sense-life in the supposed interests
+of the super-sensual, but the addition to it of another life--a huge
+widening and deepening of the field over which your attention
+can play. Sometimes the mature contemplative consciousness
+narrows to an intense point of feeling, in which it seems
+indeed "alone with the Alone": sometimes it spreads to a vast
+apprehension of the Universal Life, or perceives the common
+things of sense aflame with God. It moves easily and with no
+sense of incongruity from hours of close personal communion
+with its Friend and Lover to self-loss in the "deep yet dazzling
+darkness" of the Divine Abyss: or, re-entering that living world
+of change which the first form of contemplation disclosed to it,
+passes beyond those discrete manifestations of Reality to realise
+the Whole which dwells in and inspires every part. Thus
+ascending to the mysterious fruition of that Reality which is
+beyond image, and descending again to the loving contemplation
+and service of all struggling growing things, it now finds and
+adores everywhere--in the sky and the nest, the soul and the
+void--one Energetic Love which "is measureless, since it is all
+that exists," and of which the patient up-climb of the individual
+soul, the passionate outpouring of the Divine Mind, form the
+completing opposites.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE MYSTICAL LIFE
+
+And here the practical man, who has been strangely silent during
+the last stages of our discourse, shakes himself like a terrier
+which has achieved dry land again after a bath; and asks once
+more, 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 curious
+states of consciousness, interesting enough in their way; and to a
+lot of peculiar emotions, many of which are no doubt most
+valuable 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 as
+helpful to you as many things to which you have unhesitatingly
+consecrated much time and diligence in the past: your long
+journeys to new countries, for instance, or long hours spent in
+acquiring new "facts," relabelling old experiences, gaining skill
+in new arts and games. These, it is true, were quite worth the
+effort expended on them: for they gave you, in exchange for your
+labour and attention, a fresh view of certain fragmentary things, a
+new point of contact with the rich world of possibilities, a tiny
+enlargement of your universe in one direction or another. Your
+love and patient study of nature, art, science, politics, business--
+even of sport--repaid you thus. But I have offered you, in
+exchange for a meek and industrious attention to another
+aspect of the world, hitherto somewhat neglected by you, an
+enlargement which shall include and transcend all these; and be
+conditioned only by the perfection of your generosity, courage,
+and surrender.
+
+Nor are you to suppose that this enlargement will be limited to
+certain new spiritual perceptions, which the art of contemplation
+has made possible for you: that it will merely draw the curtain
+from a window out of which you have never looked. This new
+wide world is not to be for you something seen, but something
+lived in: and you--since man is a creature of responses--will
+insensibly change under its influence, growing up into a more
+perfect conformity with it. Living in this atmosphere of Reality,
+you will, in fact, yourself become more real. Hence, if you accept
+in a spirit of trust the suggestions which have been made to you--
+and I acknowledge that here at the beginning an attitude of faith
+is essential--and if you practise with diligence the arts which I
+have described: then, sooner or later, you will inevitably find
+yourself deeply and permanently changed by them--will perceive
+that you have become a "new man." Not merely have you acquired
+new powers of perception and new ideas of Reality; but a quiet
+and complete transformation, a strengthening and maturing of
+your personality has taken place.
+
+You are still, it is true, living the ordinary life of the body. You
+are immersed in the stream of duration; a part of the human, the
+social, the national group. The emotions, instincts, needs, of that
+group affect you. Your changing scrap of vitality contributes to
+its corporate life; and contributes the more effectively since a
+new, intuitive sympathy has now made its interests your own.
+Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and
+taking from you--conditioning, you as it does in countless oblique
+and unapparent ways--you are still compelled to react to many
+suggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled,
+to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhaps
+afterwards, by habit, custom, the good old average way of
+misunderstanding the world. To this extent, the crowd-spirit has
+you in its grasp.
+
+Yet in spite of all this, you are now released from that crowd's
+tyrannically overwhelming consciousness as you never were
+before. 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 you
+always fancied that your will was free--that you were actually, as
+you sometimes said, the "captain of your soul." If so, this was
+merely one amongst the many illusions which supported your
+old, enslaved career. As a matter of fact, you were driven along a
+road, unaware of anything that lay beyond the hedges, pressed on
+every side by other members of the flock; getting perhaps a
+certain satisfaction out of the deep warm stir of the collective life,
+but ignorant of your destination, and with your personal initiative
+limited to the snatching of grass as you went along, the pushing
+of your way to the softer side of the track. These operations made
+up together that which you called Success. But now, because you
+have achieved a certain power of gathering yourself together,
+perceiving yourself as a person, a spirit, and observing your
+relation with these other individual lives--because too, hearing
+now and again the mysterious piping of the Shepherd, you realise
+your own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, in
+its relation to that living guide--you have a far deeper, truer
+knowledge than ever before both of the general and the individual
+existence; and so are able to handle life with a surer hand.
+
+Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetually
+supported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itself
+in the mild contemplation of the great world through which
+you move. True, it is said of the Shepherd that he carries the
+lambs in his bosom: but the sheep are expected to walk, and put
+up with the inequalities of the road, the bunts and blunders of the
+flock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort that you are called.
+Since the transcendental aspect of your being has been brought
+into focus you are now raised out of the mere push-forward, the
+blind passage through time of the flock, into a position of creative
+responsibility. You are aware of personal correspondences with
+the Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broader
+world. The sky and the hedges, the wide lands through which you
+are moving, the corporate character and meaning of the group to
+which you belong--all these are now within the circle of your
+consciousness; and each little event, each separate demand or
+invitation which comes to you is now seen in a truer proportion,
+because you bring to it your awareness of the Whole. Your
+journey ceases to be an automatic progress, and takes on some of
+the characters of a free act: for "things" are now under you, you
+are no longer under them.
+
+You will hardly deny that this is a practical gain: that this
+widening and deepening of the range over which your powers of
+perception work makes you more of a man than you were before,
+and thus adds to rather than subtracts from your total practical
+efficiency. It is indeed only when he reaches these levels, and
+feels within himself this creative freedom--this full actualisation
+of himself--on the one hand: on the other hand the sense of a
+world-order, a love and energy on which he depends and with
+whose interests he is now at one, that man becomes fully human,
+capable of living the real life of Eternity in the midst of the world
+of time.
+
+And what, when you have come to it, do you suppose to be your
+own function in this vast twofold scheme? Is it for nothing, do
+you think, that you are thus a meeting-place of two orders?
+Surely it is your business, so far as you may, to express in action
+something of the real character of that universe within which you
+now know yourself to live? Artists, aware of a more vivid and
+more beautiful world than other men, are always driven by their
+love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into direct
+manifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm,
+which they have been able to apprehend: and, doing this, they
+taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with the
+Real. For them, the duty of creation is tightly bound up with the
+gift of love. In their passionate outflowing to the universe which
+offers itself under one of its many aspects to their adoration, that
+other-worldly fruition of beauty is always followed, balanced,
+completed, by a this-world impulse to creation: a desire to fix
+within the time-order, and share with other men, the vision by
+which they were possessed. Each one, thus bringing new aspects
+of beauty, new ways of seeing and hearing within the reach of the
+race, does something to amend the sorry universe of common
+sense, the more hideous universe of greed, and redeem his
+fellows from their old, slack servitude to a lower range of
+significances. It is in action, then, that these find their truest and
+safest point of insertion into the living, active world of Reality: in
+sharing and furthering its work of manifestation they know its
+secrets best. For them contemplation and action are not opposites,
+but two interdependent forms of a life that is _one_--a life that
+rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful,
+only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new
+intensity 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 His
+own light"--the direct contact of the soul's substance with the
+Absolute--to which awful experience you drew as near as the
+quality of your spirit would permit in the third degree of
+contemplation, is the prelude, not to a further revelation of the
+eternal order given to you, but to an utter change, a vivid
+life springing up within you, which they sometimes call the
+"transforming union" or the "birth of the Son in the soul." By this
+they mean that the spark of spiritual stuff, that high special power
+or character of human nature, by which you first desired, then
+tended to, then achieved contact with Reality, is as it were
+fertilised by this profound communion with its origin; becomes
+strong and vigorous, invades and transmutes the whole personality,
+and makes of it, not a "dreamy mystic" but an active and
+impassioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom.
+
+So that when these full-grown, fully vital mystics try to tell us
+about the life they have achieved, it is always an intensely active
+life that they describe. They say, not that they "dwell in restful
+fruition," though the deep and joyous knowledge of this, perhaps
+too the perpetual longing for an utter self-loss in it, is always
+possessed by them--but that they "go up _and down_ the ladder
+of contemplation." They stretch up towards the Point, the unique
+Reality to which all the intricate and many-coloured lines of life
+flow, and in which they are merged; and rush out towards those
+various lives in a passion of active love and service. This double
+activity, this swinging between rest and work--this alone, they
+say, is truly the life of man; because this alone represents on
+human levels something of that inexhaustibly rich yet simple life,
+"ever active yet ever at rest," which they find in God. When he
+gets to this, then man has indeed actualised his union with
+Reality; because then he is a part of the perpetual creative act, the
+eternal generation of the Divine thought and love. Therefore
+contemplation, even at its highest, dearest, and most intimate, is
+not to be for you an end in itself. It shall only be truly
+yours when it impels you to action: when the double movement of
+Transcendent Love, drawing inwards to unity and fruition, and
+rushing out again to creative acts, is realised in you. You are to
+be a living, ardent tool with which the Supreme Artist works: one
+of the instruments of His self-manifestation, the perpetual process
+by which His Reality is brought into concrete expression.
+
+Now the expression of vision, of reality, of beauty, at an artist's
+hands--the creation of new life in all forms--has two factors: the
+living moulding creative spirit, and the material in which it
+works. Between these two there is inevitably a difference of
+tension. The material is at best inert, and merely patient of the
+informing idea; at worst, directly recalcitrant to it. Hence,
+according to the balance of these two factors, the amount of
+resistance offered by stuff to tool, a greater or less energy must
+be expended, greater or less perfection of result will be achieved.
+You, accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic, and the
+responsibilities that go with it, have by this act taken sides once
+for all with creative spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxed
+effort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more significant life.
+The adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair of
+red hassocks and authorised hymn books; but a burning and
+consuming fire. You will find, then, that the world, going its own
+gait, busily occupied with its own system of correspondences--
+yielding to every gust of passion, intent on the satisfaction of
+greed, the struggle for comfort or for power--will oppose your
+new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably with
+the exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to get
+up. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper
+power when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: for
+you need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea lies
+through a Nay," and righteous warfare is the only way to a living
+and a lasting peace.
+
+Further, you will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff of
+your external world, the method and machinery of the common
+life, is not merely passively but actively inconsistent with your
+sharp interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is diseased as
+well 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 the
+world of things. Man is free, and holds the keys of hell as well as
+the keys of heaven. Within the love-driven universe which you
+have learned to see as a whole, you will therefore find egotism,
+rebellion, meanness, brutality, squalor: the work of separated
+selves whose energies are set athwart the stream. But every
+aspect of life, however falsely imagined, can still be "saved,"
+turned to the purposes of Reality: for "all-thing hath the being by
+the 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 the
+direct outcome of your mystical experience? Are there not here,
+as the French proverb has it, plenty of cats for you to comb? And
+isn't it just here, in the new foothold it gives you, the new clear
+vision and certitude--in its noble, serious, and invulnerable faith--
+that mysticism is "useful"; even for the most scientific of social
+reformers, the most belligerent of politicians, the least
+sentimental of philanthropists?
+
+To "bring Eternity into Time," the "invisible into concrete
+expression"; to "be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is
+to a man"--these are the plainly expressed desires of all the great
+mystics. One and all, they demand earnest and deliberate action,
+the insertion of the purified and ardent will into the world of
+things. The mystics are artists; and the stuff in which they work
+is most often human life. They want to heal the disharmony
+between the actual and the real: and since, in the white-hot
+radiance of that faith, hope, and charity which burns in them, they
+discern such a reconciliation to be possible, they are able to work
+for it with a singleness of purpose and an invincible optimism
+denied to other men. This was the instinct which drove St.
+Francis of Assist to the practical experience of that poverty which
+he recognised as the highest wisdom; St. Catherine of Siena from
+contemplation to politics; Joan of Arc to the salvation of France;
+St. Teresa to the formation of an ideal religious family; Fox to the
+proclaiming of a world-religion in which all men should be
+guided by the Inner Light; Florence Nightingale to battle with
+officials, 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 practical
+landlord usually provides.
+
+All these have felt sure that a great part in the drama of creation
+has been given to the free spirit of man: that bit by bit, through
+and by him, the scattered worlds of love and thought and action
+shall be realised again as one. It is for those who have found the
+thread on which those worlds are strung, to bring this knowledge
+out of the hiddenness; to use it, as the old alchemists declared
+that they could use their tincture, to transmute all baser; metals
+into gold.
+
+So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so various in its
+opportunities, that you can hardly fail to find something to do. It
+is your business to actualise within the world of time and space--
+perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic action, perhaps
+only by small ones in field and market, tram and tube, office and
+drawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the common
+life--that more real life, that holy creative energy, which this
+world manifests as a whole but indifferently. You shall work for
+mercy, order, beauty, significance: shall mend where you find
+things broken, make where you find the need. "Adoro te devote,
+latens Deitas," said St. Thomas in his great mystical hymn: and
+the practical side of that adoration consists in the bringing of the
+Real Presence from its hiddenness, and exhibiting it before the
+eyes of other men. Hitherto you have not been very active in this
+matter: yet it is the purpose for which you exist, and your
+contemplative consciousness, if you educate it, will soon make
+this fact clear to you. The teeming life of nature has yielded up to
+your loving attention many sacramental images of Reality: seen
+in the light of charity, it is far more sacred and significant than
+you supposed. What about _your_ life? Is that a theophany too?
+"Each oak doth cry I AM," says Vaughan. Do you proclaim by
+your existence the grandeur, the beauty, the intensity, the living
+wonder of that Eternal Reality within which, at this moment, you
+stand? Do your hours of contemplation and of action harmonise?
+
+If they did harmonise--if everybody's did--then, by these
+individual adjustments the complete group-consciousness of
+humanity would be changed, brought back into conformity with
+the Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be actualised
+within the temporal order at last. Then, that world of false
+imagination, senseless conflicts, and sham values, into which our
+children are now born, would be annihilated. The whole race, not
+merely 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 that
+completeness of life which the mystics dare to call "deification."
+This is the substance of that redemption of the world, which
+all religions proclaim or demand: the consummation which is
+crudely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the prophets and
+seers. It is the true incarnation of the Divine Wisdom: and you
+must learn to see with Paul the pains and disorders of creation--
+your own pains, efforts, and difficulties too--as incidents in the
+travail of that royal birth. Patriots have sometimes been asked to
+"think imperially." Mystics are asked to think celestially; and
+this, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, but
+when 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 amongst
+new states of consciousness, new emotional experiences--though
+these are indeed involved in it--but, above all else, a larger and
+intenser life, a career, a total consecration to the interests of the
+Real. This life shall not be abstract and dreamy, made up, as
+some imagine, of negations. It shall be violently practical and
+affirmative; giving scope for a limitless activity of will, heart, and
+mind working within the rhythms of the Divine Idea. It shall cost
+much, making perpetual demands on your loyalty, trust, and
+self-sacrifice: proving now the need and the worth of that training in
+renunciation which was forced on you at the beginning of your
+interior life. It shall be both deep and wide, embracing in its span
+all those aspects of Reality which the gradual extension of your
+contemplative powers has disclosed to you: making "the inner
+and outer worlds to be indivisibly One." And because the
+emphasis is now for ever shifted from the accidents to the
+substance of life, it will matter little where and how this career is
+actualised--whether in convent or factory, study or battlefield,
+multitude or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctuations of
+circumstance will no longer dominate you; since "it is Love that
+payeth 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 with
+it, which came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be a
+constant or a governable feature of your experience. Even under
+the most favourable circumstances, you shall and must move
+easily and frequently between that spiritual fruition and active
+work in the world of men. Often enough it will slip from you
+utterly; often your most diligent effort will fail to recapture it, and
+only its fragrance will remain. The more intense those contacts
+have been, the more terrible will be your hunger and desolation
+when they are thus withdrawn: for increase of susceptibility
+means more pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist knows.
+But you will find in all that happens to you, all that opposes and
+grieves you--even in those inevitable hours of darkness when the
+doors of true perception seem to close, and the cruel tangles of
+the world are all that you can discern--an inward sense of security
+which will never cease. All the waves that buffet you about,
+shaking sometimes the strongest faith and hope, are yet parts and
+aspects of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that Ocean
+would receive you; and there you would find, overwhelming and
+transfusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all life and
+joy. Whether you realise it in its personal or impersonal
+manifestation, the universe is now friendly to you; and as he is a
+suspicious and unworthy lover who asks every day for renewed
+demonstrations of love, so you do not demand from it perpetual
+reassurances. It is enough, that once it showed you its heart. A
+link of love now binds you to it for evermore: in spite of
+derelictions, in spite of darkness and suffering, your will is
+harmonised with the Will that informs the Whole.
+
+We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was
+the art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science
+of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and
+towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching
+out, is a condition of _being_, not of _seeing_. As the bodily
+senses have been produced under pressure of man's physical
+environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of his
+pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to
+those aspects of the natural world which concern him--so the use
+and meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too.
+These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man a
+certain 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 for
+it; growing and stretching into more perfect harmony with the
+Eternal Order, until at last, like the blessed ones of Dante's vision,
+the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance of
+the Enkindling Light.
+
+
+
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