 Preface of Practical Mysticism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. 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 and 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 threaten 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 worthwhile 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 realized 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 practice 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 restatement 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 harmonizes 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 actualized 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. End of preface, recorded by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter 1 of Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter 1. 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 fervor, 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 of that of discovering the answer for himself. Yet perhaps it will give confidence if I confess pairs 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 has 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 insofar 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, analyzing 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 hair 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 massive 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 hair 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. What is 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 color, size, texture, and the rest, which he 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 woodlouse and ant. All these experiences, denied to him forever, 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 realize 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 super sensual. 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 the actions to be a part of a greater activity. Blake, Platinus, 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 and 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 wilder 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 the story of the mystical and unmistacle 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 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 magic presences throng the roadside or cries salutations to him from the hidden fields. The rich world through which he moves lies in the foreground 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 language consciousness 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 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, in as much 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, saved 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. End of Chapter 1 Recorded by Carla Arnell Lake Forest, Illinois Chapter 2 of Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Carla Arnell Lake Forest, Illinois Chapter 2 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 colored 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 and 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 of the patterns, 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. However 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 colors and movements now inaudible and invisible removing from your universe those which you now regard as part of the established order of things. 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 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 racehorse 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 a deliberate dog action which we have caught and registered as it passed. The plain man's universe is full of racehorses 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 generalized 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 colored 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, agitation from which Keats prayed with so great an ardor 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 oh for a life of sensations rather than thoughts. He felt as all the poets come 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 weavers come 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 once 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 Saint 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 politician, 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 gramophone 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 titmouse is a celestial messenger and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life. There will be many who feel a certain skepticism 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 labor-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 Vaatou and of Turner of Manet, Degas, and Cézanne, 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 in relations to which you are blind, living facts for which your conventional world provides no place. They proof by their works that Blake was right when he said that a fool sees not the same tree as the 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 discuss 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, criticize 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 here 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 actualize 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 an 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 labeled 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 sense of ceasing rain, the voice of trees, the deep softness of the kitten's fur, the acrid touch of the pearl 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 subject 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 colored 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. Everyone knows that and even your own remarks have already suggested it. How then can a wholesale and 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 terriers contacts with the world are doubtless, crude and 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 color, 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 active union reached through the clarified channels of sense and adulterated by the content of thought which the great artist 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 practice 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 color, 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 into its own narrow circle and their distorts and transforms them for the true imagination which pours itself out eager, adventurous and self-giving towards the greater universe. End of Chapter 2 recorded by Carla Arnell Lake Forest Illinois Chapter 3 of practical mysticism by Evelyn Underhill this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Carla Arnell Lake Forest Illinois Chapter 3 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 break that shall stop the wheel which 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 training a legal education the acquirement of the 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 the creation 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 the 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 the positive 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 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 and intensity that you have hardly dared to think of it since you remember that horrid moment at the concert when you became wholly unaware of your comfortable seven and six penny seat those were on sets 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 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 recognized 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 emotion then brought you to your knees made you at once proud and humble showed you your place it's simplified and unified existence it's 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 an 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 per force 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 per force 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 reality it has perceived to persons of this type I do not address myself but rather to the ordinary plotting 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 in 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 neighbors see it sometimes through a pink veil sometimes through a gray religion indigestion prigishness or discontent may drape the pains the prismatic colors 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 Saint 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 color 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 other facts are held all which I took from thee I did but take not for thy arms but just that thou mightest 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 colors of the spectrum are included in white light and we possess them best by passing beyond them 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 color 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 center 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 beyond the flow and change of your conscious states you have been snatched to that center once or twice turn your consciousness inward to it deliberately retreat to that point when 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 council of prudence to acquaint yourself with its peculiarities and its powers take your seat within the heart of the thousand petal lotus cries the eastern visionary hold thou to thy center 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 center 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 realized by him the greatest man when consciousness is extended to full span can grasp be aware of both they know themselves to live both in the discreet manifested ever-changable 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 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 centers when they seek for it them an earnest of the uncreated light the ineffable splendor of God dwelling at and energizing 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 and 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 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 splendor 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 from the vantage point gained when he realizes 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 recognize its proportions even reach out to some faint intuition of its ultimate worth so if he would be a whole man if he would realize all that is implicit in his humanity he must actualize 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 self hood 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 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 of reality and the last three united 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 end of chapter 3 recorded by Carla Arnell Lake Forest Illinois chapter 4 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 and mystical it is not therefore a purely mystical and mystical 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 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 philosophers 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 the 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 earliest stages must be the same whether we call the reality which is the object of our quest aesthetic, cosmic or divine it 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 Saint 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 favorable to communion with the spiritual world she tells us and here she accords with the great tradition 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 license 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 the action 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 halfway 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 appearing 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 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 world of the earth and observing the process of things take then an idea of the 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 may lie mirrored on her sea confounding her astronomers but oh 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 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 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 origin 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 colored 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 arms length be aware of, look at an idea, a universe other than itself by this voluntary painful act of concentration your 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 yay lies through an A 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 universalized gaze back upon yourself observe your own being in a fresh relation of 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 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 5 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 only practical who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of correspondences with the world of normal men and hungers for communion with the spiritual universe and this thing so foreign to your surface consciousness yet familiar to it and continuous with it is 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 forever 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 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 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 nonetheless this attitude persists again and again you swing back to it something more than realization 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 ask to play another which demands fresh movements of a different sort your mental muscles are intractable your attention refuses to respond nothing less will serve you here than that drastic remodeling 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 rooms 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 miserable 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 platinus existed 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 twofold thus capable of correspondence with two orders of existence the higher life was always tending towards union with reality towards the gathering of itself 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 was 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 were 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 forevermore 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 fiber of your being the mystical need of union with reality and to realize that the natural scene which you have accepted so trustfully 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 limpid to the rock of the obvious 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 limpid you must detach it by main force that old comfortable clinging life protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea when all 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 limpid like adherence to the unreal yet from another point of view the city 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 centers 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 coloring his whole existence sometimes they develop inconsistent characters which involve him in public difficulties private compromises and self-deceptions of every kind 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 center 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 the 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 center 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 centers of interest in order that his whole will love and attention may pour itself out towards 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 particularly 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 for 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 and 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 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, honor, 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 skillful 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 a 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 and your family 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-centered 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 wattest never what but none other than myself 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 the iteration of the individual spirit from the whole the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man the center 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 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 the love of I me, mine, self and the like he will find the love of goodness and he will find the love of goodness and the like he will find the highest good for he seeketh it a right and they who seek it otherwise do err so it is disinterestedness the saints and poets 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 center of your consciousness then your attitude to life will cease to be commercial and become artistic then the guardian at the gate scrutinizing 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 campus thou autest 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 desire's heart long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences are gathered into one and become a strong and disciplined instrument where with your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of reality end of chapter 5 recorded by Carla Arnau Lake Forest Illinois