 Chapter 6 of Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill 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 Ricebrook calls the gathering of the forces of the soul into the unity of the spirit, the welding together of all your powers, the focusing 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 center of the spirit, gives that assurance of a reality, a calmer and a 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 adaption 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 practice 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 in-drawing and out-flowing 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 cognitive act, as the psychologists would call it, the true contemplative life begins. One 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, a thwart all the checks, hindrances and contradictions of the restless world. A loving stretching out towards reality, says the great Ricebrook, then whom none has gone further on this path. Tension, ardour are of its essence. It demands the perpetual exercise of industry and courage. He observes 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 mystic shared Keats's 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 analyzing of the beautiful and true were ever found. It is, as it were, a responsive act of the organism to those supernal powers without which touch and stir it. 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 and 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 Ricebrook, is a knowing that is in no wise, therein all the workings of the reason fail. This 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, rationalizing 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 fulfillment 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 energize 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 center, and then 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 eye-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 color, 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 away 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. End of Chapter 6, recorded by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter 7 of Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter 7. 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 and ever more profound harmonization 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 realization 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 unlimited of personality. The apprehension of reality, which rewards it, is gradual too. In essence, it is one continuous outflowing 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 essence, 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 plated together, that intimations from the deeper layers of being constantly reach you through the natural scene, it is in this order of realization 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 mystic sometimes called the discovery of God in his creatures, not with some ecstatic adventure in super sensuous regions, but with a 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 apart. 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 imminent 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 splendor of sacrifice and triumph, then their personal conquests, disappointments and fatigues. In the first form of contemplation, you are to realize 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 corregus whom Burma 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 know, 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 surrounds 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, and 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 out 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 oriole about his tattered ears, and here in his strident mew, an echo of, the deep enthusiastic joy, the rapture of the hallelujah scent 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 plain 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 where he subjected to psychoanalysis. 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 travelers, 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, equitable 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 fellow men will shine for you with new significance and light. Humility and awe will be invoked 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 endeavors, all splendor of pain and all beauty of play, more that gray and ceasing effort of existence which makes up the groundwork of the social web and the ineffective hopes, enthusiasm 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 intense light, has, as George Fox insisted, another smell than before. They hear all about them, the delicate music of growth and see the new color 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 characterized 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 savoring 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 originally said that all creatures were a theophany or appearance of God. Not you observe a symbol, but a showing, a very different thing. You may have begun now the Platinian 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 crandied 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 up leap 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 criticize them, recognizing 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 hazelnut, 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 aghast even in its meanest that life in its wholeness was then realized by her as the direct outbirth of and the meek depended upon the energy of divine love. She felt at once the fugitive character of its apparent existence, the purdurable reality within which it was held. I marveled, she said, how it might last, for me thought 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 19th 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 a knowing, 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-centered 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 and inconceivable splendor 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. End of chapter seven, recorded by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter eight of practical mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Carla Arnell, Lake Forest, Illinois. Chapter eight, the second form of contemplation. And here says Ricebrook of the south 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 apart. 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 rumors and intimations of a higher plane of experience, a closer unity and more complete synthesis begin to beseege you. You feel that here too, you have 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 realize 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 insofar 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 cataloging 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 realization 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 it ceaseless creative activities and you will want to press through and beyond them to a fuller realization 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 willful attention further and further into the web of things such an ever deepening realization 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 realization. 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 impressing 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 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 hazelnut 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 an utterly transcendent to itself. This of course the religious mind invariably takes for granted but we're 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 super sensual world. It is to stand for an instant at the poet 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 and 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 ardor and 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 he 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 otherworldliness 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 ardor 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 unfolding 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 in 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 to 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 enthusiasm 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, analyzes, 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 colored 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 of terrific assent of the contemplative soul reality indeed the mystic say is near and far far from our thoughts but saturating and supporting our lives nothing would be near nothing dear nothing sweeter where the doors of our perception truly cleansed you have been but to focus attention upon your own deep reality realize your own soul in order to find it we dwell in him and he and 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 it's 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 monopolized 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 Hammond were 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 unfolding 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 to this actualization 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 Saint 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 and 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 center away from all that can be thought or felt as the mystics say away from every image every notion everything towards that strange condition of obscurity which Saint 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 Ricebrook 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 an unknowing into which you have plunged you are sure that it is well to be here a peculiar certitude which you cannot analyze 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 arrest the doctrine of platinus 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 practice 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 at a silence reigns the same yesterday, today, and forever 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 realize 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 unfolding 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 analyze 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 the 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 not changes forever 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 end of chapter eight recorded by carla arnell lake forest illinois chapter nine of practical mysticism by evelin underhill this libre vox recording is in the public domain recording by carla arnell lake forest illinois chapter nine 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 and 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 a knowing with a sharp dart of longing love a perpetual effort of the will has characterized 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 unfolding 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 traveler 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 acclimatized 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 saint augustin 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 saint 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 and veils 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 realization 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 ardor your deliberate self donation is it 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 decentralization 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 center and keeping it from that absolute surrender which is the only way to peace and 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 hole abandon all efforts to lay hold of it more you must be willing that it should lay hold of you a pure bear going forth says tauler trying to describe the sensations of the self at this moment none says rice broke putting the same experience this meek out streaming of the bewildered spirit into other language is sure of eternal life unless he has died with his own attributes holy 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 realization and find yourself literally to be other than you were before aesthetic 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 broughtst us lover to lover's sight Lover with loved in marriage of delight says Saint John of the Cross in the most wonderful of all mystical poems he who has had experience of this says Saint 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 realized will depend upon the ardour, purity and humility of the experiencing soul but even those who feel it faintly are convinced by it forever more 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 splendor 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 realized by you this realization 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 Saint 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 realization 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 arresting 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 born 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 recognized 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 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 in drawing love which gathers all things into one sometimes as a sudden access of vitality a light and heat and folding 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 imminent 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 not 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 ricebrook 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 marvelous love poetry of mysticism the rhapsodies which extol the spirits lover friend companion bridegroom which described 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 anyone 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 insofar 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 unceasable 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 outgoing 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 and its wonder and wholeness once you learn 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 focused now on one aspect now on another of its rich simplicity will be actualized by you in many different ways for you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now to characterize 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 realization 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 harmonized 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 realizes 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 of flame 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 reentering that living world of change which the first form of contemplation disclosed to it passes beyond those discrete manifestations of reality to realize 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 end of chapter nine recorded by Karla Arnell Lake Forest Illinois