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LIBRARY

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM

Sy the Same Author.
THE GREY WORLD.
THE LOST WORD.
THE COLUMN OF DUST.
THE MIRACLES OF OUR LADY
SAINT MARY.
MYSTICISM: A Study in the Nature
& Development of Man's Spiritual
Consciousness.
THE MYSTIC WAY: A Psychologi
cal Study in Christian Origins.
IMMANENCE: A Book of Verses.

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
A LITTLE BOOK FOR NORMAL
PEOPLE BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL

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

LONDON
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1914

All rights reserved

D
Uy)2.zq

TO THE UNSEEN FUTURE

PREFACE
This little hook, written during the last months of
peace, goes to press in the first weeks of the great war.
Many will feel that in such a time of conflict and
horror, when only the most ignorant, disloyal, or
apathetic can hope for quietness of mind, a book which
deals with that which is called the " contemplative "
attitude to existence is wholly out of place. So
obvious, indeed, is this point of view, that I had at
first thought of postponing its publication. On the
one hand, it seems as though the dreams of a spiritual
renaissance, which promised so fairly but a little time
ago, had perished in the sudden explosion of brute
force. On the other hand, the thoughts of the English
race are now turned, and rightly, towards the most
concrete forms of action — struggle and endurance,
practical sacrifices, difficult and long-continued effort
— rather than towards the passive attitude of self-
surrender which is all that the practice of mysticism
seems, at first sight, to demand. Moreover, that
deep conviction of the dependence of all human worth
vii

viii PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
upon eternal values, the immanence of the Divine
Spirit within the human soul, which lies at the root of
a mystical concept of life, is hard indeed to reconcile
with much of the human history now being poured
red-hot from the cauldron of war. For all these
reasons, we are likely during the present crisis to
witness a revolt from those superficially mystical
notions which threatened to become too popular during
the immediate past.
Yet, the title deliberately chosen for this book —
that of " Practical " Mysticism — means nothing if
the attitude and the discipline which it recommends
be adapted to fair weather alone : if the principles
for which it stands break down when subjected to the
pressure of events, and cannot be reconciled with the
sterner duties of the national life. To accept this
position is to reduce mysticism to the status of a
spiritual plaything. On the contrary, if the experi
ences 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

PREFACE ix
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 destruc
tion 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 con
ferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck.
Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and other
worldly calm, isolate them from the pain and effort
of the common life. Rather, it gives them renewed
vitality ; administering to the human spirit not —
as some suppose — a soothing draught, but the most
powerful of stimulants. Stayed upon eternal realities,
that spirit will be far better able to endure and profit
by the stern discipline which the race is now called
to undergo, than those who are wholly at the mercy
of events ; better able to discern the real from the
illusory issues, and to pronounce judgment on the new
problems, new difficulties, new fields of activity now
disclosed. Perhaps it is worth while to remind our
selves that the two women who have left the deepest

X PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
mark upon the military history of France and England
— Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale — both
acted under mystical compulsion. So, too, did one
of the noblest of modern soldiers, General Gordon.
Their national value was directly connected with
their deep spiritual consciousness : their intensely
practical energies were the flowers of a contemplative
life. We are often told, that in the critical periods of
history it is the national soul which counts : that
" where there is no vision, the people perish." No
nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual
self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which
does not emerge with soul unstained. If this be so, it
becomes a part of true patriotism to keep the spiritual
life, both of the individual citizen and of the social
group, active and vigorous ; its vision of realities
unsullied by the entangled interests and passions of
the time. This is a task in which all may do their
part. The spiritual life is not a special career,
involving abstraction from the world of things. It is
a part of every man's life ; and until he has realised
it he is not a complete human being, has not entered
into possession of all his powers. It is therefore the

PREFACE xi
function of a practical mysticism to increase, not
diminish, the total efficiency, the wisdom and stead
fastness, of those who try to practise it. It will help
them to enter, more completely than ever before, into
the life of the group to which they belong. It will
teach them to see the world in a truer proportion,
discerning eternal beauty beyond and beneath apparent
ruthlessness. It will educate them in a charity free
from all taint of sentimentalism ; it will confer on
them an unconquerable hope ; and assure them that
still, even in the hour of greatest desolation, " There
lives the dearest freshness deep down things."
As a contribution, then, to these purposes, this little
book is now published. It is addressed neither to
the learned nor to the devout, who are already in
possession of a wide literature dealing from many
points of view with the experiences and philosophy
of the mystics. Such readers are warned that they
will find here nothing but the re-statement of elemen
tary 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 appear-

xii PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ance of more elaborate works on the subject, would
yet like to know what is meant by mysticism, and
what it has to offer to the average man : how it helps
to solve his problems, how it harmonises with the
duties and ideals of his active life. For this reason,
I presuppose in my readers no knowledge whatever
of the subject, either upon the philosophic, religious, or
historical side. Nor, since I wish my appeal to be
general, do I urge the special claim of any one theo
logical 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 descrip
tion 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

PREFACE xiii
general self-discipline and attitude toward life which
it involves. The seventh, eighth, and ninth chapters
treat in an elementary way of the three great forms of
contemplation ; and in the tenth, the practical value
of the life in which they have been actualised is
examined. Those kind enough to attempt the perusal
of the book are begged to read the first sections with
some attention before passing to the latter part.
E. U.
September iz, 191 4.

CONTENTS

CHAP. Preface ....
I. What is Mysticism? .
II. The World of Reality
III. The Preparation of the Mystic
IV. Meditation and Recollection
V. Self-Adjustment .
VI. Love and Will .
VII. The First Form of Contemplation
VIII. The Second Form of Contemplation
K. The Third Form of Contemplation
X. The Mystical Life

page vii I
13
3844 54
7385
102123
143

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS MYSTICISM S"
Those who are interested in that special attitude
towards the universe which is now loosely called
" mystical," find themselves beset by a multitude of
persons who are constantly asking — some with real
fervour, some with curiosity, and some with disdain
— " What is mysticism S* " 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 in
comprehensible 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

2 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 Whit
man 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 exaspera
tion — " What is mysticism 5" "
I dare not pretend to solve a problem which has
provided so much good hunting in the past. It is
indeed the object of this little essay to persuade the
practical man to the one satisfactory course : that of
discovering the answer for himself. Yet perhaps
it will give confidence if I confess at the outset that
I have discovered a definition which to me appears

WHAT IS MYSTICISM < 3
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 s"" — a
question, perhaps, which never occurred to him
before — is already forming in his mind ; and he
knows that it will cause him infinite distress. Only
a mystic can answer it : and he, in terms which other
mystics alone will understand. Therefore, for the
time being, the practical man may put it on one side.
All that he is asked to consider now is this : that the
word " union " represents not so much a rare and "^
um'maginable operation, as something which he is
doing, in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every mo
ment of his conscious life ; and doing with intensity

4 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
and thoroughness in all the"more valid moments of
that life. We know a thing only by uniting with it ;
by assimilating it ; by an interpenetration of it and
ourselves. It gives itself to us, just in so far as we
give ourselves to it ; and it is because our outflow
towards things is usually so perfunctory and so
languid, that our comprehension of things is so per
functory 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 ; ignor
ance the inevitable portion of those who " keep
themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judging,
analysing the things which they have never truly
known. Because he has surrendered himself to it, " united "
with it, the patriot knows his country, the artist
knows the subject of his art, the lover his beloved,
the saint his God, in a manner which is inconceiv
able as well as unattainable by the looker-on. Real
knowledge, since it always implies an intuitive
'sympathy more or less intense, is far more accur
ately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste
than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic

WHAT IS MYSTICISMS' 5
thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the appre
hension, the union : and we, in our muddle-headed
way, have persuaded ourselves that this is the
essential part of knowledge — that it is, in fact, more
important to cook the hare than to catch it. But
when we get rid of this illusion and go back to the
more primitive activities through which our mental
kitchen gets its supplies, we see that the distinction
between mystic and non-mystic is not merely that
between the rationalist and the dreamer, between
intellect and intuition. The question which divides
them is really this : What, out of the mass of material
offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon — ^with
what aspects of the universe shall it " unite " i
It is notorious that the operations of the average
human consciousness unite the self, not with things
as they really are, but with images, notions, aspects
of things. The verb " to be," which he uses so
lightly, does not truly apply to any of the objects
amongst which the practical man supposes himself
to dwell. For him the hare of Reality is always
ready-jugged : he conceives not the living, lovely,
wild, swift-moving creature which has been sacri
ficed in order that he may be fed on the deplorable

6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
dish which he calls " things as they really are." So
complete, indeed, is the separation of his conscious
ness 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 demon
strating the fact that he habitually mistakes his own
private sensations for qualities inherent in the
mysterious objects of the external world. From
those few qualities of colour, size, texture, and the
rest, which his mind has been able to register and
classify, he makes a label which registers the sum
of his own experiences. This he knows, with this
he " unites " ; for it is his own creature. It is neat,
flat, unchanging, with edges well defined : a thing
one can trust. He forgets the existence of other
conscious creatures, provided with their own
standards of reality. Yet the sea as the fish feels it.

WHAT IS MYSTICISMS 7
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 land
scape as known in its vastness to the wood-louse and
ant — all these experiences, denied to him for ever,
have just as much claim to the attribute of Being
as his own partial and subjective interpretations of
things. Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed
for the most part to live in a world of labels ; to
make of them the current coin of experience, and
ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite
gradation of values which they misrepresent. We
simply do not attempt to unite with Reality. But
now and then that symbolic character is suddenly
brought home to us. Some great emotion, some
devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, lifts
us to another level of consciousness ; and we are
aware for a moment of the difference between the
neat collection of discrete objects and experiences
which we call the world, and the height, the depth,
the breadth of that living, growing, changing Fact,
of which thought, life, and energy are parts, and in
which we " live and move and have our being."

8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Then we realise that our whole life is enmeshed in
great and living forces ; terrible because unknown.
Even the power which lurks in every coal-scuttle,
shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-
omnibus, declares itself in the ineffable wonders of
reproduction and growth, is supersensual. We do
but perceive its results. The more sacred plane of
life and energy which seems to be manifested in the
forces we call " spiritual " and " emotional " — ^in
love, anguish, ecstasy, adoration — is hidden from
us too. Symptoms, appearances, are all that our
intellects can discern : sudden irresistible inroads
from it, all that our hearts can apprehend. The
material for an intenser life, a wider, sharper con
sciousness, 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 there.
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

WHAT IS MYSTICISM i g
usually deal — has thrust past the current notion to
the Fact : that the claim of such a saint as Teresa
is bound up with her declaration that she has
achieved union with the Divine Essence itself.
The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates
to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses.
The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond
thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The
active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to
be a part of a greater activity. Blake, Plotinus,
Joan of Arc, and John of the Cross — there is a link
which binds all these together : but if he is to make
use of it, the inquirer must find that link for him
self. All four exhibit different forms of the work
ing of the contemplative consciousness; a faculty
which is proper to all men, though few take the
trouble to develop it. Their attention to life has
changed its character, sharpened its focus : and as
a result they see, some a wider landscape, some a
more brilliant, more significant, more detailed world
than that which is apparent to the less educated,
less observant vision of common sense.
The old story of Eyes and No-Eyes is really the
story of the mystical and unmystical types. " No-

10 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 effi
ciently and comfortably as he can. He asks not to
know what may be on either side of the hedges.
He ignores the caress of the wind until it threatens
to remove his hat. He trudges along, steadily,
diligently ; avoiding the muddy pools, but oblivious
of the light which they reflect. " Eyes " takes the
walk too : and for him it is a perpetual revelation of
beauty and wonder. The sunlight inebriates him,
the winds delight him, the very effort of the journey
is a joy. Magic presences throng the roadside, or
cry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The
rich world through which he moves lies in the fore
ground of his consciousness ; and it gives up new
secrets to him at every step. " No-Eyes," when
told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe
that both have gone by the same road. He fancies
that his companion has been floating about in the air,
or beset by agreeable hallucinations. We shall
never persuade him to the contrary unless we
persuade him to look for himself.

WHAT IS MYSTICISMS' ii
Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the
practical man is here invited : to a training of his
latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his
languid consciousness, an emancipation from the
fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to
new levels of the world. Thus he may become
aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is
always trying to disclose to the race. This amount ,
of mystical perception — this " ordinary contempla
tion," as the specialists call it — ^is possible to all
men : without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor
wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no
more involving the great powers and sublime experi
ences 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 partici
pate 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 Un
knowing, " is as nigh down as up, and up as down ;

13 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
behind as before, before as behind, on one side as
other. Inasmuch, that whoso had a true desire for
to be at heaven, then that same time he were in
heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way
thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet."
None therefore is condemned, save by his own
pride, sloth, or perversity, to the horrors of that
which Blake called " single vision " — perpetual and
undivided attention to the continuous cinematograph
performance, which the mind has conspired with
the senses to interpose between ourselves and the
living world.

THE WORLD OF REALITY 13
CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF REALITY
The practical man may justly observe at this point
that the world of single vision is the only world he
knows : that it appears to him to be real, solid, and
self-consistent : and that until the existence — at
least, the probability — of other planes of reality is
made clear to him, all talk of uniting with them is
mere moonshine, which confirms his opinion of
mysticism as a game fit only for idle women and
inferior poets. ^Plainly, then, it is the first business
of the missionary to create, if he can, some feeling
of dissatisfaction with the world within which the
practical man has always lived and acted ; to suggest
something of its fragmentary and subjective char
acter. We tum back therefore to a further examina
tion 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 fact ;
that the universe in which he lives and at which he

14 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Uooks is but a construction which the mind has
Imade 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, deUcate
gradation, that machinery cannot represent. It
leaves them out. From the countless suggestions,
the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real
world presents to you, you snatch one here and there.
Of these you weave together those which are the
most useful, the most obvious, the most often re
peated : 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

THE WORLD OF REALITY 15
behaving to it as though it were not a representation
but a thing. On it you fix your attention ; with it
you " unite." Yet, did you look at the wrong side,
at the many short ends, the clumsy joins and patches,
this simple philosophy might be disturbed. You
would be forced to acknowledge the conventional
character of the picture you have made so cleverly,
the wholesale waste of material involved in the
weaving of it : for only a few amongst the wealth o^
impressions we receive are seized and incorporateq
into our picture of the world. Further, it might
occur to you that a slight alteration in the rhythm of
the senses would place at your disposal a complete
new range of material ; opening your eyes and ears to
sounds, colours, and movements now inaudible and
invisible, removing from your universe those which
you now regard as part of the established order of
things. Even the strands which you have made use of
might have been combined in some other way ; with
disastrous results to the " world of common sense,"
yet without any diminution of their own reality.
Nor can you regard these strands themselves as
ultimate. As the most prudent of logicians might
venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable

i6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
existence of a sheep ; so you, from the raw stuff of
perception, may venture to deduce a universe which
transcends the reproductive powers of your loom.
Even the camera:.of the photographer, more apt at
contemplation thah.the mind of man, has shown us
how limited' arel these powers in some directions,
and enlightened us as to a few of the cruder errors of
the person who accepts its products at face-value ;
or, as he would say,^ believes his own eyes. It has
shown us, for instance, that -the galloping race-horse,
with legs stretched out as we are used to see it, is a
mythical animal, probably founded on the mental
image of a running dog. : No horse has ever galloped
thus : but its real action is too quick for us, and we
explain it to ourselves as something resembling the
more deliberate dog-action which we have caught
and registered as it passed. The plain man's
universe is full of race-horses which are really run
ning 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 genera
lised from insufficient data, and then " discovered "
in actuality : of theological diagrams and scientific

THE WORLD OF REALITY 17
" laws," flung upon the background of eternity as
the magic lantern's image is reflected on the screen.
The coloured scene at which you look so trustfully
owes, in fact, much of its character to the activities
of the seer : to that process of thought — concept —
cogitation, from which Keats prayed with so great
an ardour to escape, when he exclaimed in words
which will seem to you, according to the temper
of your mind, either an invitation to the higher
laziness or one of the most profound aspirations of
the soul, " O for a life of sensations rather than
thoughts ! " He felt — as all the poets have felt with
him — that another, lovelier world, tinted with un
imaginable wonders, alive with ultimate music,
awaited those who could free themselves from the
fetters of the mind, lay down the shuttle and the
weaver's comb, and reach out beyond the conceptual
image to intuitive contact with the Thing.
There are certain happy accidents which have the
power of inducting man for a moment into this
richer and more vital world. These stop, as one old
mystic said, the " wheel of his imagination," the
dreadful energy of his image-making power weaving
up and transmuting the incoming messages of sense.

i8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
They snatch him from the loom and place him, in
the naked simplicity of his spirit, face to face with
that Other than himself whence the materials of his
industry have come. In these hours human con
sciousness ascends from thought to contemplation ;
becomes at least aware of the world in which the
mystics dwell; and perceives for an instant, as St.
Augustine did, " the light that never changes, above
the eye of the soul, above the intelligence." This
experience might be called in essence " absolute
.sensation." It is a pure feeling-state ; in which the
fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through
the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion
which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which
the reason can never understand, that Totality of
which fragments are known by the lover, the
musician, and the artist.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, said
Blake, everything would appear to man as it is —
Infinite. But the doors of perception are hung
with the cobwebs of thought ; prejudice, cowardice,
sloth. Eternity is with us, inviting our contempla
tion perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy,
and suspicious to respond : too arrogant to still our

THE WORLD OF REALITY 19
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 re
arrangement of our mental furniture, a wide open
ing of closed windows, that the notes of the wild
birds beyond our garden may come to us fully
charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with
their music the noise of the gramaphone within.
Those who do this, discover that they have lived in
a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world
of morning-glory ; where every tit-mouse is a
celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is
charged with the full significance of life.
There will be many who feel a certain scepticism
as to the possibility of the undertaking here sug
gested 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

20 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
them — ^perpetually demonstrates the many-graded
character of human consciousness ; the new worlds
which await it, once it frees itself from the tyranny
of those labour-saving contrivances with which it
usually works. Leaving on one side the more
subtle apprehensions which we call " spiritual,"
even the pictures of the old Chinese draughtsmen
and the modern impressionists, of Watteau and of
Turner, of Manet, Degas, and Cezanne ; the poems
of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman — these,
and countless others, assure you that their creators
have enjoyed direct communion, not with some
vague world of fancy, but with a visible natural
order which you have never known. These have
seized and woven into their pictures strands which
never presented themselves to you ; significant
forms which elude you, tones and relations to which
you are bhnd, living facts for which your conven
tional world provides no place. They prove by
their works that Blake was right when he said that
" a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees " ;
and that psychologists, insisting on the selective
action of the mind, the fact that our preconceptions
govern the character of our universe, do but teach

THE WORLD OF REALITY 21
the most demonstrable of truths. Did you take
them seriously, as you should, their ardent reports
might well disgust you with the dull and narrow
character of your own consciousness.
What is it, then, which distinguishes the out
look of great poets and artists from the arro
gant subjectivism of common sense i Innocence
andjiumility^distingiiish. it. These persons pre
judge nothing, criticis,& nothing. To some extent,
tESTattitude to the universe is that of_childlgJJ '.
and because this is so, they participate to that ex
tent in the Heaven of Reality. According to their
measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they
do live a hfe in which the emphasis lies on sensation
rather than on thought : for the state which he then
struggled to describe was that idealstatejcdLpurg^
receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the
essence of things, of which all artists have a share,
and which a few great mystics appear to have
possessed — ^not indeed in its entirety, but to an
extent which made them, as they say, "one with
the Reality of things." The greater the artist is, the
wider and deeper is the range of this pure sensation :
the more sharply he is aware of the torrent of life

22 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
and loveliness, the rich profusion of possible
beauties and shapes. He always wants to press
deeper and deeper, to let the span of his perception
spread wider and wider ; till he unites with the
whole of that Reality which he feels all about him,
and of which his own life is a part. He is always
tending, in fact, to pass over from the artistic to the
mystical state. In artistic experience, then, in the
artist's perennial effort to actualise the ideal which
Keats expressed, we may find a point of departure
for our exploration of the contemplative hfe.
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 5*
Plainly, it would mean the achievement of a new
universe, a new order of reality : escape from the
terrible museum--like_ wojld of daily hfe, where
everything is classified and labelled, and all the
graded fluid facts which have no label are ignored.
It would mean an innocence of eye and innocence
of ear impossible for us to conceive ; the impas
sioned contemplation of pure form, freed from all

THE WORLD OF REALITY 23
the meanings with which the mind has draped and
disguised it ; the recapturing of the lost mysteries
of touch and fragi^ance, 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 hfe : that the scents of
ceasing rain, the voice of trees, the deep softness of
the kitten's fur, the acrid touch of sorrel on the
tongue, should be in themselves profound, complete,
and simple experiences, calling forth simpHcity of
response in our souls.
Thus understood, the life of pure sensation is the
meat and drink of poetry, and one of the most
accessible avenues to that union with Reality which
the mystic declares to us as the very object of hfe.
But the poet must take that living stuff direct from
the field and river, without sophistication, without

24 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
criticism, as the hfe of the soul is taken direct from
the altar ; witkja.aaiB=ii^^nuts^not,^Laaa^^
He must not subject it to the cooking, filtering pro
cess of the brain. It is because he knows how
to elude this dreadful sophistication of Reahty,
because his attitude to the universe is governed by
the supreme artistic virtues of humiUty and love, that
poetry is what it is : and I include in the sweep of
poetic art the coloured poetry of the painter, and the
wordless poetry of the musician and the dancer too.
At this point the critical reader will certainly
offer an objection. " You have been inviting me,"
he will say, " to do nothing more or less than trust
my senses : and this too on the authority of those
impracticable dreamers the poets. Now it is notori
ous that our senses deceive us. Every one knows
that ; and even your own remarks have already
suggested it. How, then, can a wholesale and un
critical acceptance of my sensations help me to
unite with Reahty S" Many of these sensations we
share with the animals : in some, the animals
obviously surpass us. Will you suggest that my
terrier, smeUing his way through an unco-ordinated
universe, is a better mystic than IS"

THE WORLD OF REALITY 25
To this I reply, that the terrier's contacts with
the world are doubtless crude and imperfect ; yet
he has indeed preserved a directness of apprehen
sion which you have lost. He gets, and responds
to, the real smell ; not a notion or a name. Cer
tainly the senses, when taken at face-value, do
deceive us : yet the deception resides not so much
in them, as in that conceptual world which we insist
on building up from their reports, and for which we
make them responsible. They deceive us less when
we receive these reports uncooked and unclassified,
as simple and direct experiences. Then, behind the
special and imperfect stammerings which we call
colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we some
times 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 ghmpsed is of an immense signifi
cance ; 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 signifi
cance, that character will seem : the more complete.

26 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
too, will be our conviction that our uneasiness, the
vagueness of our reactions to things, would be
cured could we reach and unite with the fact, instead
of our notion of it. And it is just such an act of
union, reached through the clarified channels of
sense and unadulterated by the content of thought,
which the great artist or poet achieves.
We seem in these words to have come far from
the mystic, and that mtitg;mp1at-ivp consciousness
wherewith he ascends to the contact of Truth. As
a matter of fact, we are merely considering that con
sciousness in its most natural and accessible form :
for contemplation is, on the one hand, the essential
activity of all artists ; on the other, the art through
which those who choose to learn and practise it
may share in some fragmentary degree, according to
their measure, the special experience of the mystic
and the poet. By it they may achieve that virginal
outlook upon things, that celestial power of com
munion with veritable hfe, which comes when that
which we call " sensation " is freed from the
tyranny of that which we calLJ'jthouglit" The
artist is no more and no less than a contemplative
who has learned to express himself, and who tells

THE WORLD OF REALITY 27
his love in colour, speech, or sound : the mystic,
upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special
and exalted kind, who tries to express something of
the revelation he has received, mediates between
Reality and the race. In the game of give and take
which goes on between the human consciousness and
the external world, both have learned to put the
emphasis upon the message from without, rather
than on their own reaction to and rearrangement
of it. Both have exchanged the false imagina
tion which draws the sensations and intuitions of the
self into its own narrow circle, and there distorts
and transforms them, for the true imagination
which pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-
giving, towards the greater universe.

28 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER III
THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC
Here the practical man will naturally say : And
pray how am I going to do this S* How shall I
detach myself from the artificial world to which I
am accustomed S Where is the brake that shall
stop the wheel of my image-making mind S
I answer : You are going to do it by an educative
process ; a drill, of which the first stages wiU,
indeed, be hard enough. You have already acknow
ledged the need of such mental driU, such dehberate
selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of
hfe. You willingly spend time and money over
that narrowing and sharpening of attention which
you call a " business training," a " legal education,"
the " acquirement of a scientific method." But
this new undertaking will involve the develop
ment and the training of a layer of your con
sciousness which has lain fallow in the past; the
acquirement of a method you have never used
before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 29
work and disciphne should be needed for this : that
it should demand of you, if not the renunciation
of the cloister, at least the virtues of the golf course.
The education of the mystical sense begins in
self:siayiIification. The feeling, wilhng, seeing self
is to move from the various and the analytic to the
simple and the sytitbf t'> ^ a si>tit(»np<» wbifhnigyjcaijy.
hard breathing^d mopping of the brows on the
p^td[^e^ractical man. Yet it is to you, practical
man, reading these pages as you rush through the
tube to the practical work of rearranging unim
portant fragments of your universe, that this message
so needed by your time — or rather, by your want of
time — ^is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst,
so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage
wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your
unceasing flight : so anxiously acquisitive of the
crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf.
The essence of mystical contemplation is summed
in these two experiences — union with the flug of
life, and union with the Whole_jjn,^jyJaidi.~alL
lesser reahties'"'are"resumed — ^and these experiences
are well widun your reach. Though it is hkely
that the accusation will annoy you, you are already

30 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 S
When the world took on a strangeness, and you
rushed out to meet it, in a mood at once exultant
and ashamed S 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 i a universe so great, charged with
so terrible an intensity, that you have hardly dared
to think of it since. Do you remember that horrid
moment at the concert, when you became wholly
unaware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpenny
seat i Those were onsets of involuntary contempla
tion ; sudden partings of the conceptual veil. Dare
you call them the least significant moments of your
life i Did you not then, hke the African saint,
" thrill with love and dread," though you were not
provided with a label for that which you adored i
It will not help you to speak of these experiences

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 31
as " mere emotion." Mere emotion then inducted
you into a world which you recognised as more
vahd — in the highest sense, more rational — than
that in which you usually dwell : a^world whifli ^^(^
g,vabQtg^MSjJLiB)M"ing»J5diich exceededJts^umof
its parts. Mere emotion then brought you to your
knees, made you at once proud and humble, showed
you your place. It simplified and unified existence :
it stripped off the httle 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 in
telligence could not comprehend. Such an emotion
is the driving power of spirit, an august and ulti
mate thing : and this your innermost inhabitant felt
it to be, whilst your eyesjsete open to thejightt___---^
Now that (Simplifying act, which is the prelimin-
aqc,ofairmystical experience,, that gathering of the
scattere3r"6its of personality into the one which is
reallyyou — ^into the " unity of your spirit," as the
mystics say — the great forces of love, beauty,
wonder, grief, may do for you now and again.
These lift you perforce from the consideration of
the details to the contemplation of the All : tum

32 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
you from the tidy world of image to the ineffable
world of fact. But they are fleeting and ungovern
able experiences, descending with dreadful violence
on the soul. Are you willing that your participa
tion in Reahty shall depend wholly on these incalcul
able visitations : on the sudden wind and rain that
wash your windows, and let in the vision of the
landscape at your gates S" You can, if you hke,
keep those windows clear. You can, if you choose
to tum 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 thepurificaj
tion of the senses zntiib&jaimlacaiisn of the will.

Those who are so fortunate as to experience in one
of its many forms the crisis which is called " con
version " 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, hterally,
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 con-

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 33
centrated into one violent shattering and rearrang
ing of the self, which can now begin its true career
of correspondence with the Reality it has per
ceived. To persons of this type I do not address
myself : but rather to the ordinary plodding scholar
of hfe, who must reach the same goal by a more
gradual road.
What is it that smears the windows of the senses i
Thought, convention, self-interest. We throw a
mist of thought between ourselves and the external
world : and through this we discem, as in a glass
darkly, that which(^e hav^ Jafrah^eH^to^s^ We
see it in the way in which our neighbours see it ;
sometimes through a pink veil, sometimes through
a grey. Rehgion, indigestion, priggishness, or
discontent may drape the panes. The prismatic
colours of a fashionable school of art may stain
them. Inevitably, too, we see the narrow world our
windows show us, not " in itself," but in relation
to our own needs, moods, and preferences ; which
exercise a selective control upon those few aspects
of the whole which penetrate to the field of con
sciousness and dictate the order in which we arrange
them, for the universe of the natural man is strictly

34 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 under
standing of it are govemed 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
pa|abn_jEo£_^las^ficaiaQjj,^^ ;
ignore the instinctive, selfish question, " What
does it mean to meS " ; learn to dip ourselves in the
universe at our gates, and know it, not from with
out by comprehension, but from within by self-
mergence. Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence
of all purification is self-simphfication ; the doing
away of the unnecessary and unreal, the tangles
and comphcations of consciousness : and we must

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 35
remember that when these masters of the spiritual
life speak of purity, they have in their minds no thin,
abstract notion of a rule of conduct stripped of all
colour and compounded chiefly of refusals, such
as a more modem, more arid asceticism set up.
Their purity is an affirmative state ; something
strong, clean, and crystalhne, capable of a wholeness
of adjustment to the wholeness of a God-inhabited
world. The pure soul is hke 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 Tran
scendent Fact within which all other facts are held.
" All which I took from thee I did but take.
Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might'st seek it iu My arms."
All the details of existence, all satisfactions of the
heart and mind, are resumed within that Transcen
dent Fact, as all the colours of the spectrum are
included in white hght : and we possess them best
by passing beyond them, by following back the
many to the One.
The " Simple Eye " of Contemplation, about
which the mystic writers say so much, is then a

36 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
synthetic sense ; which sees that white light in
which all colour is, without discrete analysis of its
properties. The Simple Ear which discerns the
celestial melody, hears that Tone in which all music
is resumed ; thus achieving that ecstatic hfe of
"sensation without thought " which Keats perceived
to be the substance of true happiness.
But you, practical man, have hved all your days
amongst the illusions of multiglidty. Though you
are using at every instant your innate tendency to
synthesis and simphfication, 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 hfe has
been dehberately adjusted to a world of frittered
values and prismatic refracted lights : full of in
compatible 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 comphcated thing. At this
very moment your thoughts are buzzing hke a swarm
of bees. The reduction of this fevered complex
to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 37
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 cgntre_there is
a stillness which even you are not able, to break.
There, the rhythm of your duration is one with
the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your
essential self exists : the permanent being which
persists through and behind the flow and change of
your conscious states. You have been snatched to
that centre once or twice. Turn your conscious
ness inward to it dehberately. Retreat to that point
whence all the various hnes of your activities flow,
and to which at last they must return. Since this
alone of all that you call your " selfhood " is pos
sessed of eternal reahty, it is surely a counsel of
prudence to acquaint yourself with its peculiarities
and its powers, " Take your seat within the heart
of the thousand-petalled lotus," cries the Eastern
visionary, " Hold thou to thy Centre," says his
Christian brother, " and all things shall be thine,"
This is a practical recipe, not a pious exhortation.
The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can
do it if you will : standing back, as it were, from

38 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 possibihties of life within it :
can discern too, if you be at all inchned to mystical
adventure, the stages of the road along which you
must pass on your way towards harmony with the
Real. This universe, these possibihties, are far richer,
yet far simpler than you have supposed. Seen
from the true centre of personahty, 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
gyrifigd _ai3d Jnten^fiei_ consd^ 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 wilhng to beheve.
Now it is a paradox of human hfe, often observed
even by the most concrete and unimaginative of
philosophers, that man seems to be poised between
two contradictory orders of Reahty. Two planes
of existence — or, perhaps, two ways of apprehend
ing existence — he within the possible span of his

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 39
consciousness. That great pair of opposites which
metaphysicians call Being and Becoming, Eternity
and Time, Unity and Multiphcity, and others mean,
when they speak of the Spiritual and the Natural
Worlds, represents the two extreme forms under
which the universe can be reahsed by him. The
greatest men, those whose consciousness is extended
to full span, can grasp, be aware of, both. They
know themselves to hve, both in the discrete,
manifested, ever-changeful parts and appearances,
and also in the Whole Fact. They react fully to
both : for them there is no conflict between the
parochial and the patriotic sense. More than this,
a deep instinct sometimes assures them that the
inner spring or secret of that Whole Fact is also the
inner spring and secret of their individual lives :
and that here, in this third factor, the disharmonies
between the part and the whole are resolved. As
they know themselves to dwell in the world of time
and yet to be capable of transcending it, so the
Ultimate Reahty, they think, inhabits yet incon
ceivably 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

40 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
of that symphony in which these cadences must
play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid
hfe, that " inward light " which these men find at
their own centres when they seek for it, is for them
an earnest of the Uncreated Light, the ineffable
splendour of God, dwelling at, and energising within
the heart of things : for this spark is at once one
with, yet separate from, the Universal Soul.
So then, man, in the person of his greatest and
most living representatives, feels himself to have
implicit correspondences with three levels of exis
tence ; which we may call the Natural, the Spiritual,
and the Divine. The road on whichhe is to travel
therefore, the mystical education whichhe is to under
take, shall successively unite him with these three
worlds; stretching his consciousness to the point
at which he finds them first as three, and at last as
One. Under normal circumstances even the first
of them, the natural world of Becoming, is only
present to him — unless he be an artist — in a vague
and fragmentary way. He is, of course, aware of a
temporal order, a ceaseless change and movement,
birth, growth, and death, pf which he is a part.
But the rapture and splendour of that everlasting

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 41
flux which India calls the Sport of God hardly
reaches his understanding ; he is too busy with his
own httle movements to feel the full current of the
stream. But under those abnormal circumstances on
which we have touched, a deeper level of his con
sciousness 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 becausM
of his existence within this Eternal Reality, his j
patriotic relationship to it, that the efforts and
experiences of the time-world have significance for
him. It is from the vantage point gained when he
reahses his contacts with this higher order, that he
can see with the clear eye of the artist or the mystic
the World of Becoming itself— recognise its pro
portions — even reach out to some faint intuition of
its ultimate worth. So, if he would be a whole
man, if he would reahse all that is implicit in his
humanity, he must actuahse his relationship with

42 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
this supernal plane of Being : and he shall do it, as
we have seen, by simphfication, by a dehberate
withdrawal of attention from the bewildering
multiphcity of things, a dehberate 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 Reahty. But
this spiritual principle, this gathering point of
his selfhood, is just that aspect of him which is
furthest removed from the active surface conscious
ness. He treats it as the busy citizen treats his
national monuments. It is there, it is important,
a possession which adds dignity to his existence;
but he never has time to go in. Yet as the purified
sense, cleansed of prejudice and self-interest, can
give us fleeting communications from the actual
broken-up world of duration at our gates : so
the purified and educated will can wholly with
draw the self's attention from its usual concen
tration 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

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 43
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 Reahty 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 fuU of pain — may be
grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining
and simplifying of the^ttention, which is the essence
of Recollection. Next, the disciphning and simph-
fying of the affections and will, the orientation
of the heart ; which is sometimes called by the
formidable name of Purgation. So the practical
mysticism of the plain man will best be grasped by
him as a five-fold scheme of training and growth :
in which the first two stages prepare the self for
union with Reahty, and the last three unite it succes
sively with the World of Becoming, the World of
Being, and finally with that Ultimate Fact which
the philosopher calls the Absolute and the rehgious
mystic calls God.

44 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM

CHAPTER IV
MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION
Recollection, the art which the practical man is
now invited to leam, is in essence no more and no
less than the subjection of the attention to the
control of the will. It is not, therefore, a purely
mystical activity. In one form or another it is
demanded of all who would get control of their own
mental processes ; and does or should represent the
first great step in the education of the human con
sciousness. So slothful, however, is man in all
that concerns his higher faculties, that few de
liberately undertake this education at all. They
are content to make their contacts with things by a
vague, unregulated power, ever apt to play truant,
ever apt to fail them. Unless they be spurred to it
by that passion for ultimate things which expresses
itself in religion, philosophy, or art, they seldom
leam the secret of a voluntary concentration of the
mind.

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 45
Since the philosopher's interests are mainly
objective, and the artist seldom cogitates on his own
processes, it is, in the end, to the initiate of religion
that we are forced to go, if we would learn how to
undertake this training for ourselves. The religious
contemplative has this further attraction for us :
that he is by nature a missionary as well. The
vision which he has achieved is the vision of an
intensely loving heart ; and love, which cannot keep
itself to itself, urges him to tell the news as widely
and as clearly as he may. In his works, he is ever
trying to reveal the secret of his own deeper hfe and
wider vision, and to help his fellow men to share it :
hence he provides the clearest, most orderly, most
practical teachings on the art of contemplation that
we are likely to find. True, our purpose in
attempting this art may seem to us very different
from his : though if we carry out the principles
involved to their last term, we shall probably find
that they have brought us to the place at which he
aimed from the first. But the method, in its earlier
stages, must be the same; whether we call the
Reality which is the object of our quest aesthetic,
cosmic, or divine. The athlete must develop much

46 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
the same muscles, endure much the same discipline,
whatever be the game he means to play.
So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire
of her what was the method by which she taught her
daughters to gather themselves together, to capture
and hold the attitude most favourable to communion
with the spiritual world. She tells us — and here
she accords with the great tradition of the Christian
contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under
the pressure of long experience — that the process is
a gradual one. The method to be employed is a
slow, patient training of material which the hcence
of years has made intractable ; not the sudden easy
turning of the mind in a new direction, that it may
minister to a new fancy for " the mystical view of
things." Recollection begins, she says, in the
deliberate and regular practice of meditation ; a
perfectly natural form of mental exercise, though
at first a hard one.
Now meditation is a half-way house between
thinking and contemplating : and as a disciphne,
it derives its chief value from this transitional char
acter. The real mystical life, which is the truly
practical life, begins at the beginning; not with

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 47
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 considera
tions 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 clever
ness — such an opening of the Eye of Eternity — was
the essence of contemplation itself : and indeed one
of the best definitions has described that art as a
" loving sight," a " peering into heaven with the
ghostly eye." But the self who is yet at this early
stage of the pathway to Reality is not asked to look
at anything new, to peer into the deeps of things :
only to gaze with a new and cleansed vision on
the ordinary intellectual images, the labels and
the formula, the " objects " and ideas — even the
external symbols — amongst which it has always
dwelt. It is not yet advanced to the seeing of
fresh landscapes : it is only able to re-examine the
furniture of its home, and obtain from this exercise
a skill, and a control of the attention, which shaU
afterwards be apphed to greater purposes. Its task

48 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
is here to consider that furniture, as the Victorines
called this preliminary training : to take, that is, a
more starry view of it : standing back from the
whirl of the earth, and observing the process of
things. Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst the
common stock, and hold it before your mind. The
selection is large enough : all sentient beings may
find subjects of meditation to their taste, for there
hes a universal behind every particular of thought,
however concrete it may appear, and within the
most rational propositions the meditative eye may
ghmpse a dream.
" Reason has moons, but moons not hers
Lie mirror'd on her sea.
Confounding her astronomers
But, O delighting me."
Even those objects which minister to our sense-life
may well be used to nourish our spirits too. Who
has not watched the intent meditations of a com
fortable cat brooding upon the Absolute Mouse?'
You, if you have a philosophic twist, may transcend
such relative views of Reahty, and try to meditate on
Time, Succession, even Being itself ; or again on
human intercourse, birth, growth, and death, on a

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 49
flower, a river, the various tapestries of the sky.
Even your own emotional hfe will provide you with
the ideas of love, joy, peace, mercy, conflict, desire.
You may range, with Kant, from the stars to the
moral law. If your turn be to rehgion, 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 encroach
ments, 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 dis
tinction between real time, the true stream of

50 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 unsus
pected meaning, beauty, power. A perpetual growth
of significance keeps pace with the increase of
attention which you bring to bear on it; that
attention which is the one agent of all your appre
hensions, 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

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 51
will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the
outer world. You wiU hear the busy hum of that
world as a distant exterior melody, and know your
self to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You
have set a ring of silence between you and it ; and
behold ! within that silence you are free. You
will look at the coloured scene, and it will seem to
you thin and papery : only one amongst countless
possible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your
reach. And gradually, you will come to be aware
of an entity, a You, who can thus hold at arm's
length, be aware of, look at, an idea — a universe —
other than itself. By this voluntary painful act of
concentration, this first step upon the ladder which
goes — as the mystics would say — from " multi
phcity to unity," you have to some extent with
drawn yourself from that union with unreahties,
with notions and concepts, which has hitherto
contented you ; and at once all the values of exist
ence are changed, " The road to a Yea hes
through a Nay," You, in this prehminary move
ment of recoUection, are saying your first de
hberate No to the claim which the world of
appearance makes to a total possession of your

52 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
consciousness : and are thus making possible some
contact between that consciousness and the World
of Reality,
Now tum this new purified and universalised gaze
back upon yourself. Observe your own being in a
fresh relation with things, and surrender yourself
willingly to the moods of astonishment, humility,
joy — perhaps of deep shame or sudden love —
which invade your heart as you look. So doing
patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the
vagrant attention, ever renewing the struggle for
simphcity of sight, you will at last discover that
there is something within you — something behind
the fractious, conflicting hfe 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 hfe when he is not on the stage. When
you do not merely beheve this but know it ; when
you have achieved this power of withdrawing
yourself, of making this first crude distinction
between appearance and reahty, the initial stage

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 53
of the contemplative hfe 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.

54 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER V
self-adjustment
So, in a measure, you have found yourself : have
retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that
busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and
obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and
apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which
even the psychologists mistake for You. Thanks
to this recollective act, you have discovered in your
inmost sanctuary a being not wholly practical, who
refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of corre
spondences with the world of normal men, and hun
gers for communion with a spiritual universe. And
this thing so foreign to your surface consciousness,
yet familiarto it and continuous with it, you recognise
as the true Self whose existence you always took for
granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in
its scattered manifestations. " That art thou."
This chmb up the mountain of self-knowledge,
said the Victorine mystics, is the necessary prelude
to all illumination. Only at its summit do we dis-

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 55
cover, as Dante did, the beginning of the pathway
to Reahty. 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-know
ledge, indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone.
Few can bear to contemplate themselves face to
face ; for the vision is strange and terrible, and
brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life of
the seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted,
in the deepest and most drastic sense ; is forced to
take up a new attitude towards himself and all other
things. Likely enough, if you really knew yourself
— saw your own dim character, perpetually at the
mercy of its environment ; your true motives,
stripped for inspection and measured against eternal
values; your unacknowledged self-indulgences;
your irrational loves and hates — ^you would be com
peUed 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

56 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
eternal spark, the agent of all your contacts with
Reahty, You have often read about it. Now you
have met it ; know for a fact that it is there. What
next i What changes, what readjustments will this
self-revelation involve for you S"
You will have noticed, as with practice your
famiharity with the state of Recollection has in
creased, that the kind of consciousness which it
brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands
of you, conflict sharply with the consciousness and
the attitude which you have found so appropriate to
your ordinary life in the past. They make this old
attitude appear childish, unworthy, at last absurd.
By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reahty 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 silhness of your earnest pursuit
of impermanent things : your solemn concentration
upon the game of getting on. None the less, this
attitude persists. Again and again you swing back
to it. Something more than reahsation is needed if
you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 57
world. This game which you have played so long
has formed and conditioned you, developing certain
quahties and perceptions, leaving the rest in abey
ance : so that now, suddenly asked to play another,
which demands fresh movements, alertness of a
different sort, your mental muscles are intractable,
your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less
wiU serve you here than that drastic remodelhng of
character which the mystics call " Purgation," the
second stage in the training of the human conscious
ness for participation in Reahty,
It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated,
united with a superficial and unreal view of the
world. Far worse ; your wiU, your desire, the sum
total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way,
harnessed to the wrong machine. You have be
come accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought
to want, certain valueless things, certain specific
positions. For years your treasure has been in the
Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the
Salon, or the reviews that " really count " (if they
still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair ; and
thither your heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit
has you in its chains. You are not free. The

58 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows
not habit and desires nothing but free correspon
dence with the Real, awakens you at once to the
fact of a disharmony between the simple but inex
orable longings and instincts of the buried spirit,
now beginning to assert themselves in your hours
of meditation — pushing out, as it were, towards the
hght — and the various changeful, but insistent
longings and instincts of the surface-self. Between
these two no peace is possible : they conflict at
every turn. It becomes apparent to you that the
declaration of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by aU
the mystics, concerning a " higher " and a " lower "
hfe, 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 personahty was thus two-fold : thus capable
of correspondence with two orders of existence.
The " higher life " was always tending towards
union with Reahty ; towards the gathering of itself
up into One. The " lower life," framed for corre
spondence with the outward world of multiphcity,
was always tending to fall downwards, and fritter the

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 59
powers of the self among external things. This is
but a restatement, in terms of practical existence,
of the fact which RecoUection brought home to us :
that the human self is transitional, neither angel nor
animal, capable of living towards either Eternity
or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautiful
theories on these subjects : another when the un
resolved dualism of your own personality (though
you may not give it this high-sounding name) be
comes 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 in
compatible 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 inner
most 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

6o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
met, and the apparent opposition between them
resolved. You are sure now that there is another,
more durable and more " reasonable," hfe possible
to the human consciousness than that on which it
usually spends itself. But it is also clear to you that
you must yourself be something more, or other,
than you are now, if you are to achieve this life,
dwell in it, and breathe its air. You have had in
your brief spells of recollection a first quick vision
of that plane of being which Augustine caUed " the
land of peace," the " beauty old and new," You
know for evermore that it exists : that the real thing
within yourself belongs to it, might hve in it, is
being all the time invited and enticed to it. You
begin, in fact, to feel and know in every fibre of
your being the mystical need of " union with
Reality " ; and to realise that the natural scene
which you have accepted so trustfully cannot
provide the correspondences towards 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

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 6i
of the conscious field, has grown strong, and ce
mented itself hke a hmpet to the rock of the obvious ;
gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security,
and building up, from a selection amongst the more
concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of
hfe, a defensive sheU of " fixed ideas." It is useless
to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it
by main force. That old comfortable chnging life,
protected by its hard shell from the hving waters of
the sea, must now come to an end. A conflict of
some kind — a severance of old habits, old notions,
old prejudices — is here inevitable for you ; and a
decision as to the form which the new adjustments
must take.
Now although in a general way we may regard the
practical man's attitude to existence as a hmpet-like
adherence to the unreal ; yet, from another point
of view, fixity of purpose and desire is the last thing
we can attribute to him. His mind is fuU of little
whirlpools, twists and currents, confhcting systems,
incompatible desires. One after another, he centres
himself on ambition, love, duty, friendship, social
convention, politics, religion, self-interest in one
of its myriad forms ; making of each a core round

62 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
which whole sections of his life are arranged. One
after another, these things either fail him or enslave
him. Sometimes they become obsessions, distort
ing his judgment, narrowing his outlook, colouring
his whole existence. Sometimes they develop incon
sistent characters which involve him in pubhc diffi
culties, private compromises and self-deceptions of
every kind. They spht his attention, fritter his
powers. This stateof affairs, which usuallypasses for
an " active life," begins to take on a different com
plexion when looked at with the simple eye of
meditation. Then we observe that the plain man's
world is in a muddle, just because he has tried to
arrange its major interests round himself as round
a centre ; and he is neither strong enough nor
clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched
little whirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming,
interrupting — as he imagines, in his own interest —
its even flow : and within that whirlpool are numer
ous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst
which his will and attention fly to and fro in a con
tinual state of unrest. The man who makes a
success of his life, in any department, is he who has
chosen one from amongst these claims and interests.

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 63
and devoted to it his energetic powers of heart and
wiU ; " unifying " himself about it, and from within
it resisting all counter-claims. He has one objec
tive, one centre ; has killed out the lesser ones,
and simplified himself.
Now the artist, the discoverer, the philosopher,
the lover, the patriot — the true enthusiast for any
form of life — can only achieve the full reahty to
which his special art or passion gives access by
innumerable renunciations. He must kill out the
smaUer centres of interest, in order that his whole
will, love, and attention may pour itself out
towards, seize upon, unite with, that special mani
festation of the beauty and significance of the
universe to which he is drawn. So, too, a dehberate
self-simphfication, a " purgation " of the heart and
will, is demanded of those who would develop the
form of consciousness caUed " 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.

64 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
singleness of heart, and self-control. It is towards
the perfecting of these mihtary virtues, not to the
production of a pious softness, that the disciphne of
asceticism is largely directed ; and the ascetic
foundation, in one form or another, is the only
enduring foundation of a sane contemplative life.
You cannot, until you have steadied yourself,
found a poise, and begun to resist some amongst the
innumerable claims which the world of appearance
perpetually makes upon your attention and your
desire, make much use of the new power which
Recollection has disclosed to you ; and this Recol
lection 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-disciphne, 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 hmpet from its
crevice ; the refusal to anchor yourself to materia!

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 65
things, to regard existence from the personal
standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity.
By Mortification, they mean the resolving of the
turbulent whirlpools and currents of your own con
flicting 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 5" 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 hfe " 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

66 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
tells us again and again, that " he is rid of aU his
asking " ; that " henceforth the heat of having
shaU never scorch him more." Compare this with
your normal attitude to the world, practical man :
your quiet certitude that you are weU within your
rights in pushing the claims of " the I, the Me, the
Mine " ; your habit, if you be rehgious, of asking
for the weather and the government that you want,
of persuading the Supemal Powers to take a special
interest in your national or personal health and
prosperity. How often in each day do you dehber
ately revert to an attitude of disinterested adoration i
Yet this is the only attitude in which true com
munion with the universe is possible.
The very mainspring of your activity is a demand,
either for a continued possession of that which you
have, or for something which as yet you have not :
wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friend
ship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have
a right to some of these things : to a certain recog
nition of your powers, a certain immunity from
failure or humihation. You resent anything which
opposes you in these matters. You become rest
less when you see other selves more skilful in the

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 67
game of acquisition than yourself. You hold tight
against aU comers your own share of the spoils.
You are rather inchned to shirk boring responsi
bilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil ; are
greedy of pleasure and excitement, devoted to the
art of having a good time. If you possess a social
sense, you demand these things not only for your
self but for your tribe — the domestic or racial group
to which you belong. These dispositions, so
ordinary that they almost pass unnoticed, were
named by our blunt forefathers the Seven Deadly
Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony,
and Lust, Perhaps you would rather call them — as
indeed they are — the seven common forms of
egotism. They represent the natural reactions to
hfe of the self-centred human consciousness,
enslaved by the " world of multiphcity " ; and con
stitute 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 aU

68 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 pro
portion ; and reckon with calm mind the sum of
evil and good. Therefore the mystics tell us per
petually that " selfhood must be killed " before
Reality can be attained,
" Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but
none other thing than thyself," says The Cloud of
Unknowing. " When the I, the Me, and the
Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done,"
says Kabir, The substance of that wrongness of
act and relation which constitutes " sin " is the
separation of the individual spirit from the whole ;
the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man
the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turn
ing inwards and condensation of his energies and
desires, tiU 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, enthu
siasm, sacrifice. " So long," says the Theologia

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 69
Germanica, " as a man seeketh his own will and his
own highest good, because it is his, and for his own
sake, he wiU never find it ; for so long as he doeth
this, he is not seeking his own highest good, and
how then should he find it 5" For so long as he
doeth this, he seeketh himself, and dreameth that
he is himself the highest good. . . . But who
soever seeketh, loveth, and pursueth goodness, as
goodness and for the sake of goodness, and maketh
that his end — for nothing but the love of goodness,
not for love of the I, Me, Mine, Self, and the hke —
he will find the highest good, for he seeketh it
aright, and they who seek it otherwise do err."
So it is disinterestedness, the saint's and poet's
love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the
charitable heart, which is the secret of union with
Reality and the condition of all real knowledge.
This brings with it the precious quality of supple
ness, the power of responding with ease and
simplicity to the great rhythms of life ; and this
will only come when the ungainly " lump " of sin is
broken, and the verb " to have," which expresses
its reaction to existence, is ejected from the centre of
your consciousness. Then your attitude to hfe will

70 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
cease to be commercial, and become artistic. Then
the guardian at the gate, scrutinising and sorting
the incoming impressions, will no longer ask,
" What use is this to me i " before admitting the
angel of beauty or significance who demands your
hospitality. Then things will cease to have power
over you. You will become free, " Son," says a
Kempis, " thou oughtest dihgently to attend to this ;
that in every place, every action or outward occupa
tion, thou be inwardly free and mighty in thyself,
and aU 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 wiU
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 personahty.
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 — ^wiU become possible to you. Ascending
the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside
your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 71
arrive at the point which they caU the summit
of the spirit ; where the various forces of your
character — brute energy, keen intellect, desirous
heart — long dissipated amongst a thousand httle
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,

73 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER VI
love and will
This steady effort towards the simplifying of your
tangled character, its gradual emancipation from
the fetters of the unreal, is not to dispense you from
that other special training of the attention which
the dihgent practice of meditation and recollection
effects. Your pursuit of the one must never involve
neglect of the other ; for these are the two sides —
one moral, the other mental — of that unique process
of self - conquest which Ruysbroeck calls " the
gathering of the forces of the soul into the unity of
the spirit " : the welding together of all your powers,
the focussing of them upon one point. Hence
they should never, either in theory or practice, be
separated. Only the act of recollection, the con
stantly renewed retreat to the quiet centre of the
spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and
more valid hfe 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.

LOVE AND WILL 73
indifference, degeneracy ; whilst diligent character-
building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts
at self-adjustment, its bracing, purging disciphne,
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 uni
verse ; next, the dehberate 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 mysticahty. Only the real, say the mystics,
can know Reahty, 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-

74 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
simphfication — ^perception of, and adaptation to,
the Spiritual World in which we dweU — are the
essential preparations for the mystical life, and
neither can exist in a wholesome and well-balanced
form without the other. By them the mind, the
will, the heart, which so long had dissipated their
energies over a thousand scattered notions, wants,
and loves, are gradually detached from their old
exclusive preoccupation with the ephemeral interests
of the self, or of the group to which the self belongs.
You, if you practise them, wiU 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

LOVE AND WILL 75
you possess great inward hberty, a sense of spacious
ness and peace. Released from the obsessions
which so long had govemed 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 i It shall
take a practical form, shall express itself in terms
of movement : the pressing outwards of the whole
personahty, 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
wilhng, all hesitations between the indrawing and
outflowing instincts of the soul, shall be checked and
resolved. You are to push with all your power :
not to absorb ideas, but to pour forth wiU and love.
With this " conative act," as the psychologists would
call it, the true contemplative life begins. Con
templation, you see, has no very close connection
with dreaminess and idle musing ; it is more hke
the intense effort of vision, the passionate and self-

76 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
forgetful act of communion, presupposed in all
creative art. It is, says one old Enghsh mystic,
" a bhnd intent stretching ... a privy love
pressed " in the direction of Ultimate Beauty,
athwart aU the checks, hindrances, and contradic
tions of the restless world : a " loving stretching
out " towards Reahty, says the great Ruysbroeck,
than whom none has gone further on this path.
Tension, ardour, are of its essence : it demands the
perpetual exercise of industry and courage.
We observe in such definitions as these a strange
neglect of that glory of man, the Pure InteUect, with
which the spiritual prig enjoys to beheve that he can
chmb up to the Empyrean itself. It almost seems
as though the mystics shared Keats' view of the
supremacy of feehng 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
subhme 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 faU into the clumsy error

LOVE AND WILL 77
of supposing that the things which are beyond the
grasp of reason are necessarily unreasonable things.
Immediate feehng, 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 prehminary act of gathering yourself
together, and in those unremitting explorations
through which you came to " a knowing and a feehng
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 feehng, 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 con
ducted upon strictly intellectual lines ; and contem
plation is an act of love, the wooing, not the critical
study, of Divine Reahty, It is an eager outpouring
of ourselves towards a Somewhat Other for which

78 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
we feel a passion of desire ; a seeking, touching,
and tasting, not a considering and analysing, of the
beautiful and true wherever found. It is, as it
were, a responsive act of the organism to those
Supernal Powers without, which touch and stir
it. Deep humility as towards those Powers, a
wiUing surrender to their control, is the first condi
tion 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 feehng "
in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contem
plation does not mean abject surrender to every
" mystical " impression that comes in. It is no
sentimental sestheticism or emotional piety to which
you are being invited : nor shall the transcending of
reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silhness.

LOVE AND WILL 79
All the powers of the self, raised to their intensest
form, shaU be used in it ; though used perhaps in a
new way. These, the three great faculties of love,
thought, and will — with which you have been
accustomed to make great show on the periphery of
consciousness — ^you have, as it were, drawn inwards
during the course of your inward retreat ; and by
your education in detachment have cured them of
their tendency to fritter their powers amongst a
multiphcity of objects. Now, at the very heart of
personahty, you are alone with them ; you hold with
you in that " Interior Castle," and undistracted
for the moment by the demands of practical exis
tence, the three great tools wherewith the soul deals
with hfe.
As regards the hfe 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. WiU 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

8o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
with which they had to deal. But now your puri
fied love discerns and desires, your will is set towards,
something which thought cannot reaUy assimilate —
still less explain. " Contemplation," says Ruys
broeck, " is a knowing that is in no wise . . .
therein all the workings of the reason fail." That
reason has been trained to deal with the stuff of
temporal existence. It will only make mincemeat
of your experience of Eternity if you give it a chance ;
trimming, transforming, rationahsing that ineffable
vision, trying to force it into a symbohc 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 hve in thy working
mind but a naked intent stretching " — the voluntary
tension of your ever-growing, ever-moving person
ality pushing out towards the Real. " Love, and
do what you hke," said the wise Augustine : so httle
does mere surface activity count, against the deep
motive that begets it.
The dynamic power of love and will, the fact that

LOVE AND WILL 8i
the heart's desire — if it be intense and industrious —
is a better earnest of possible fulfilment than the
most elegant theories of the spiritual world ; this is
the perpetual theme of aU the Christian mystics.
By such love, they think, the worlds themselves
were made. By an eager outstretching towards
Reahty, they teU 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 aU 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
hps of the contemplatives when describing the
earher stages of their art. Clearly, the abohtion
of discursive thought is not to absolve you from

82 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
the obhgations of industry. You are to " energise
enthusiastically " upon new planes, where you shall
see more intensely, hear more intensely, touch and
taste more intensely than ever before ; for the modes
of communion which these senses make possible to
you are now to operate as parts of the one single
state of perfect intuition, of loving knowledge by
union, to which you are growing up. And graduaUy
you come to see that, if this be so, it is the ardent
wiU that shall be the prime agent of your under
taking : a will which has now become the active
expression of your deepest and purest desires.
About this the recollected and simphfied self is to
gather itself as a centre; and thence to look out —
steadily, deliberately — with eyes of love towards
the world.
To " look with the eyes of love " seems a vague
and sentimental recommendation: yet the whole art
of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact
and important results flow from this exercise. The
attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete
humihty and of receptiveness ; without criticism,
without clever analysis of the thing seen. When
you look thus, you surrender your I-hood ; see

LOVE AND WILL 83
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 dis
figuring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, vanish
away. Into that silent place to which recollection
has brought you, new music, new colour, new light
are poured from the outward world.
The conscious love which achieves this vision
may, indeed must, fluctuate — " As long as 'thou
livest thou art subject to mutabihty ; yea, though
thou wUt 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 corre
spondences ; and continue, even in darkness, and in
the suffering which such darkness brings to the
awakened spirit, its appointed task, cutting a way
into new levels of Reahty.
Therefore this transitional stage in the develop
ment of the contemplative powers — ^in one sense the

84 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
completion of their elementary schoohng, 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 con
troller of your destiny, is nothing else but a S3nnthesis
of such energetic will and such uncorrupt desire,
turned and held in the direction of the Best.

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 85
CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
Concentration, recollection, a profound self-
criticism, the stilhng 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 com
munion 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 in
tensified perception of things, which they declare
to be the heritage of the hberated consciousness.
This iUumination shall be gradual. The attain-

86 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ment of it depends not so much upon a philosophy
accepted, or a new gift of vision suddenly received,
as upon an uninterrupted changing and widening of
character ; a progressive growth towards the Real,
an ever more profound harmonisation of the self's
life with the greater and inclusive rhythms of
existence. It shall therefore develop in width and
depth as the sphere of that self's intuitive love
extends. As your own practical sympathy with and
understanding of other lives, your reahsation 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 rehgion — even perhaps the whole race — tiU you
feel yourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffer
ing with it, and partake of its whole conscious life ;
so here. Self-mergence is a gradual process, depen
dent on a progressive unhmiting of personahty.
The apprehension of Reahty which rewards it is
gradual too. In essence, it is one continuous out
flowing movement towards that boundless heavenly
consciousness where the " flaming ramparts "
which shut you from true communion with all
other selves and things is done away ; an unbroken

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 87
process of expansion and simphfication, 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 individuahty, these wilhng submissions
to the compelling rhythm of a larger existence than
that of the sohtary 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 hmits of
this enlargement have not yet been discovered.
The greatest contemplatives, returning from their
highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is
" unwalled." But this growth into higher reahties, this
blossoming of your contemplative consciousness —
though it be, hke all else we know in hfe, an un
broken process of movement and change — must be
broken up and reduced to the series of concrete
forms which we cMi. " order " if our inelastic minds
are to grasp it. So, we will consider it as the succes
sive achievement of those three levels or manifesta-

88 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
tions of Reahty, which we have agreed to caU the
Natural World of Becoming, the Metaphysical
World of Being, and — last and highest — ^that Divine
Reahty within which these opposites are found
as one. Though these three worlds of ex
perience are so plaited together, that intimations
from the deeper layers of being constantly reach you
through the natural scene, it is in this order of reah
sation that you may best think of them, and of your
own gradual upgrowth to the full stature of human
ity. 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 mysticahty. It is as fatal in result as the
opposite error of dehberately arrested development,
which, being attuned to the wonderful rhythms of
natural hfe, is content with this increase of sensi-
bihty ; and, becoming a " nature-mystic," asks no
more. So you are to begin with that first form of con
templation which the old mystics sometimes called
the " discovery of God in His creatures," Not with
some ecstatic adventure in supersensuous regions,
but with the loving and patient exploration of the

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 89
world that hes at your gates ; the " ebb and flow
and ever-during power " of which your own exist
ence forms a part. You are to push back the self's
barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included
in the widening circles of its intuitive love : till you
find in every manifestation of hfe — even those
which you have petulantly classified as cruel or
obscene — the ardent self-expression of that Imman
ent Being whose spark burns deep in your own soul.
The Indian mystics speak perpetually of the
visible universe as the Lild or Sport of God ; the
Infinite dehberately expressing Himself in finite
form, the musical manifestation of His creative joy.
All gracious and aU 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, nobihty from conflict and death, its
mingled splendour of sacrifice and triumph — ^than
their personal conquests, disappointments, and
fatigues. In the first form of contemplation you
are to reahse 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.

90 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 — aU these are
playing with you. They move one to another in
dehcate responsive measures, now violent, now
gentle, now in conffict, now in peace ; yet ever
weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient
to the music of that invisible Choragus whom
Boehme and Plotinus knew. What is that great
wind which blows without, in continuous and
ineffable harmonies 5" Part of you, practical man.
There is but one music in the world : and to it you
contribute perpetuaUy, whether you wiU or no,
your one httle 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

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 91
keep as it were a plate-glass window between your
self and your fellow - dancers — aU 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 shaU
demand of it — stretch out by a distinct act of loving
will towards one of the myriad manifestations of hfe
that surround you : and which, in an ordinary way,
you hardly notice unless you happen to need them.
Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its
image towards you, Dehberate — more, impas
sioned — attentiveness, an attentiveness which soon
transcends all consciousness of yourself, as separate
from and attending to the thing seen ; this is the
condition of success. As to the object of contem
plation, it matters httle. From Alp to insect,
anything wiU do, provided that your attitude be
right : for aU things in this world towards which

92 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
you are stretching out are linked together, and one
truly apprehended wiU be the gateway to the rest.
Look with the eye of contemplation on the most
dissipated tabby of the streets, and you shall dis
cern the celestial quahty of hfe set hke an aureole
about his tattered ears, and hear in his strident mew
an echo of " The deep enthusiastic joy.
The rapture of the hallelujah sent
From all that breathes and is."
The sooty tree up which he scrambles to escape
your earnest gaze is holy too. It contains for you
the whole divine cycle of the seasons ; upon the
plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to be heard.
But you must look at these things as you would look
into the eyes of a friend : ardently, selflessly, with
out considering his reputation, his practical uses,
his anatomical pecuharities, or the vices which
might emerge were he subjected to psycho-analysis.
Such a simple exercise, if entered upon with
singleness of heart, wiU soon repay you. By this
quiet yet tense act of communion, this loving gaze,
you wiU presently discover a relationship — ^far more
intimate than anything you imagined — between

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 93
yourself and the surrounding " objects of sense " ;
and in those objects of sense a profound signifi
cance, a personal quality, an actual power of re
sponse, which you might in cooler moments think
absurd. Making good your correspondences with
these fellow-travellers, you will learn to say with
Whitman :
" You air that serves me with breath to speak !
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them
shape !
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable
showers !
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadside 1
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, wiU take place. Old
barriers wiU 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.

94 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
They wiU 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 loveh-
ness will bud for you on every weed. Best and
greatest, your fellow-men will shine for you with
new significance and hght. Humility and awe wiU
be evoked in you by the beautiful and patient figures
of the poor, their long dumb heroisms, their wUhng
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 adven
turous endeavours, aU splendour of pain and aU
beauty of play — more, that grey unceasing effort
of existence which makes up the groundwork of the
social web, and the ineffective hopes, enthusiasms,
and loves which transfuse it — all these wiU be seen
and f ek by you at last as f uU of glory, full of meaning ;
for you wiU see them with innocent, attentive, dis-

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 95
interested 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
hving things, this down-sinking of your arrogant
personality into the great generous stream of hfe,
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 ;
StiU less, with a self-conscious and dehberate
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 hve in a world which is
ht with an intenser hght ; has, as George Fox in
sisted, " another smell than before." They hear
aU about them the dehcate music of growth, and see
the " new colour " of which the mystics speak.
Further, you will observe that this act, and the
attitude which is proper to it, differs in a very im
portant way even from that special attentiveness
which characterised the stage of meditation, and
which seems at first sight to resemble it in many

96 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 en
couraged to hold before your mind. Now, turning
away from the label, you shall surrender yourself
to the direct message poured out towards you by
the thing. Then, you considered: now, you are
to absorb. This experience will be, in the very
highest sense, the experience of sensation without
thought : the essential sensation, the " savouring "
to which some of the mystics invite us, of which
our fragmentary bodily senses offer us a transient
sacrament. So here at last, in this intimate com
munion, 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 con
templative outlook, carried the pecuhar methods of
artistic apprehension to their highest stage : with the
result that the sense-world has become for you, as
Erigena said that all creatures were, " a theophany,
or appearance of God." Not, you observe, a

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 97
symbol, but a showing: a very different thing. You
have begun now the Plotinian ascent from multiph
city 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
aU the myriad nascent, crescent, cadent hves. Poets,
gazing thus at the " flower in the crannied wall " or
the " green thing that stands in the way," have been
led deep into the heart of its life ; there to discern
the secret of the universe.
All the greater poems of Wordsworth and Walt
Whitman represent an attempt to translate direct
contemplative experience of this kind into words
and rhythms which might convey its secret to other
men : all Blake's philosophy is but a desperate
effort to persuade us to exchange the false world of
" Nature " on which we usually look — ^and which is
not really Nature at all — for this, the true world, to
which he gave the confusing name of " Imagina
tion." For these, the contemplation of the World of
Becoming assumes the intense form which we call
genius : even to read their poems is to feel the
beating of a heart, the upleap of a joy, greater than
anything that we have known. Yet your own httle

98 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
efforts towards the attainment of this level of con
sciousness will at least give to you, together with
a more vivid universe, a wholly new comprehen
sion of their works ; and that of other poets and
artists who have drunk from the chahce of the
Spirit of Life. These works are now observed by
you to be the only artistic creations to which the
name of Reahsm is appropriate ; and it is by the
standard of reality that you shall now criticise them,
recognising in utterances which you once dismissed
as rhetoric the desperate efforts of the clear-sighted
towards the exact description of things veritably seen
in that simphfied state of consciousness which Blake
called " imagination uncorrupt."
It was from those purified and heightened levels
of perception to which the first form of contempla
tion inducts the soul, that Juhan of Norwich, gazing
upon " a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut,"
found in it the epitome of all that was made ; for
therein she perceived the royal character of life. So
small and helpless in its mightiest forms, so august
even in its meanest, that hfe in its wholeness was
then realised by her as the direct outbirth of, and
the meek dependant upon, the Energy of Divine

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 99
Love. She felt at once the fugitive character of
its apparent existence, the perdurable Reahty within
which it was held. " I marvelled," she said, " how
it might last, for methought it might suddenly have
faUen to naught for httleness. And I was answered
in my understanding : It lasteth, and ever shall, for
that God loveth it. And so AU-thing hath the being
by the love of God." To this same apprehension of
Reality, this hnking up of each finite expression with
its Origin, this search for the inner significance of
every fragment of hfe, one of the greatest and most
balanced contemplatives of the nineteenth century,
Florence Nightingale, reached out when she ex
claimed 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 intro
spective and self-conscious aspiration, but rather
an unrelaxed, diligent intention, a steady acquies
cence, a simple and loyal surrender to the great
currents of hfe, a holding on to results achieved in
your best moments, that shaU do it for you : a
surrender not hmp but deliberate, a trustful self-
donation, a " hving faith." " A pleasing stirring

too PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
of love," says The Cloud of Unknowing; not a
desperate anxious struggle for more light. Tme
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 Reahty ultimate success is assured. The
strong tide of Transcendent Life will inevitably
invade, clarify, uphft 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, there
fore, you put aside your preconceived ideas, your
self-centred scale of values, and let intuition have
its way with you, you open up by this act new
levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the
most practical of all activities ; for then and then
only wiU 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 inequahties wiU be disclosed as true constituents

FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION loi
of its beauty, an inconceivable splendour will be
shaken out from its dingiest folds. Then, and only
then, escaping the single vision of the selfish, you
wiU 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 hifli or her who
remains jagged and broken."

102 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER VIII
THE second FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
" And here," says Ruysbroeck of the self which has
reached this point, " there begins a hunger and a
thirst which shall never more be stilled."
In the First Form of Contemplation that self has
been striving to know better its own natural plane
of existence. It has stretched out the feelers of its
intuitive love into the general stream of duration of
which it is a part. Breaking down the fences of
personahty, 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 wiU
rumours and intimations of a higher plane of experi
ence, a closer unity and more complete synthesis,
begin to besiege you. You feel that hitherto you
have received the messages of life in a series of dis-

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 103
connected words and notes, from which your mind
constmcted 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 inde
pendently of your own constructive efforts ; and
reahse that the words and notes which so often
puzzled you by displaying an intensity that exceeded
the demands of your little world, only have beauty
and meaning just because and in so far as you dis
cern them to be the partial expressions of a greater
whole which is still beyond your reach.
You have long been hke a child tearing up the
petals of flowers in order to make a mosaic on the
garden path ; and the results of this murderous
dihgence 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 lovehness of the hving 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 hving
growing plant does and must entail for you a con
sciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you

104 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
have not touched : of the intangible things and
forces which feed and support it ; of the whole
universe that touches you through its hfe. A mere
cataloguing of aU the plants — ^though this were far
better than your old game of indexing your own poor
photographs of them — wiU 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 psycho
logist who looks for the soul in " psychic states."
The deeper your reahsation 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 wiU become your craving for Some
thing More. You will now find and feel the Infinite
and Etemal, making as it were veiled and sacramental
contacts with you under these accidents — ^through
these its ceaseless creative activities — and you wiU
want to press through and beyond them, to a fuUer
reahsation of, a more perfect and unmediated union
with, the Substance of aU That Is. With the great
widening and deepening of your hfe that has ensued

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 105
from the abohtion of a narrow selfhood, your
entrance into the larger consciousness of living
things, there has necessarily come to you an instinc
tive 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 pecuhar heritage, something within
you now seems to urge you on.
If you obey this inward push, pressing forward
with the " sharp dart of your longing love," forcing
the point of your wilful attention further and further
into the web of things, such an ever-deepening
reahsation, such an extension of your conscious life,
wiU indeed become possible to you. Nothing but
your own apathy, your feeble and limited desire,
hmits this realisation. Here there is a strict relation
between demand and supply — ^your achievement
shaU be in proportion to the greatness of your desire.
The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Reality
without does not vary. Only the extent to which
you are able to receive it depends upon your cour
age and generosity, the measure in which you give
yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set a

io6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
hmit to their self-donation must feel as they attain
it, not a sense of satisfaction but a sense of constric
tion. 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 Juhan of Norwich did, the first stage of
your new outward-going joumey along the road that
lies nearest at hand. When Julian looked with the
eye of contemplation upon that " little thing " which
revealed to her the oneness of the created universe,
her deep and loving sight perceived in it successively
three properties, which she expressed as well as she
might under the symbols of her own theology :
" The first is that God made it ; the second is that
God loveth it ; the third is that God keepeth it."
Here are three phases in the ever-widening con
templative apprehension of Reality. Not three
opinions, but three facts, for which she struggles
to find words. The first is that each separate

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 107
hving thing, budding " hke an hazel nut " upon the
tree of life, and there destined to mature, age, and
die, is the outbirth of another power, of a creative
push : that the World of Becoming in all its richness
and variety is not ultimate, but formed by Some
thing other than, and utterly transcendent to, itself.
This, of course, the religious mind invariably takes
for granted : but we are concerned with immediate
experience rather than faith. To feel and know
those two aspects of Reality which we call " created "
and "uncreated," nature and spirit — to be as
sharply aware of them, as sure of them, as we are of
land and sea — is to be made free of the supersensual
world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's
side, and see that Poem of which you have de
ciphered separate phrases in the earher form of
contemplation. Then you were leaming to read :
and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas an
astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much
greater the significance of every detail would appear
to you, how much more tmly you would possess
its hfe, were you acquainted with the Poem : not
as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but
as a non-successional whole.

io8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge
of the heart which comes from a humble and
disinterested acceptance of hfe ; that this Creation,
this whole changeful natural order, with aU its
apparent coUisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs
from an ardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual
donation, which generates it, upholds it, drives it ;
for " aZZ-thing hath the being by the love of God."
Blake's anguished question here receives its answer :
the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the
tyger too. Everything, says Juhan in effect, whether
gracious, terrible, or mahgnant, is enwrapped in love:
and is part of a world produced, not by mechanical
necessity, but by passionate desire. Therefore
nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable ;
nothing, however perverted, irredeemable. The
blasphemous other-worldliness of the false mystic
who conceives of matter as an evil thing and flies
from its " deceits," is corrected by this loving sight.
Hence, the more beautiful and noble a thing appears
to us, the more we love it — ^so much the more truly
do we see it : for then we perceive within it the
Divine ardour surging up towards expression, and
share that simplicity and purity of vision in which

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 109
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 Juhan. Paradoxically, the per
petual changeful energies of love and creation wliich
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 enfold
ing 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, " aU at once " ; in a manner which we
can never comprehend, but which in hours of with
drawal we may sometimes taste and feel. It is in
man's moments of contact with this, when he
penetrates beyond all images, however lovely, how
ever significant, to that ineffable awareness which
the mystics caU " Naked Contemplation " — since
it is stripped of all the clothing with which reason
and imagination drape and disguise both our devils

no PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 aU
the puzzles of life.
As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet
actual reahty 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 thmsting 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

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION in
consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense
point of personahty. It has too an innate knowledge
of— an instinct for — another, greater rhythm, another
order of Reahty, as yet outside its conscious field ; or
as we say, a capacity for the Infinite. This capacity,
this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning mind of
the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it
can, is the source of all your unrest. More, it is
the true origin of all your best loves and enthusiasms,
the inspiring cause of your heroisms and achieve
ments ; which are but oblique and tentative efforts
to StiU 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 httle activity can be
merged. St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only with
held 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 con
tinuous and living intuition into conceptual scraps ;
in other words, because he cannot live the life of

112 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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, ana
lyses, incorporates in finite images the boundless
perceptions of the spirit : passing through its prism
the White Light of Reahty, and shattering it to a
succession of coloured rays. Therefore the man
who would know the Divine Secret must unshackle
himself more thoroughly than ever before from the
tyranny of the image-making power. As it is not
by the methods of the laboratory that we leam to
know hfe, so it is not by the methods of the intellect
that we leam 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 weU be
loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten
and holden ; but by thought never."
" Gotten and holden " : homely words, that

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 113
suggest rather the outstretching of the hand to take
something lying at your very gates, than the long
outward joumey or terrific ascent of the contempla
tive soul. Reahty indee4, the mystics say, is " near
and far " ; far from our thoughts, but saturating
and supporting our lives. Nothing would be
nearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter, were the
doors of our perception truly cleansed. You have
then but to focus attention upon your own deep
reahty, " reahse your own soul," in order to find it.
" We dweU in Him and He in us " : you participate
in the Etemal 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
personahty, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit, melts
and merges in it : from and by this encounter its
life arises and is sustained. But you have been busy
from your childhood with other matters. All the
urgent affairs of " hfe," as you absurdly called it,
have monopolised your field of consciousness.
Thus all the important events of your real life,
physical and spiritual — the mysterious perpetual
growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits of the

114 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
universe into the unstable body which you confuse
with yourself, the hum and whirr of the machine
which preserves your contacts with the material
world, the more delicate movements which condi
tion your correspondences with, and growth within,
the spiritual order — all these have gone on unper-
ceived by you. AU the time you have been kept
and nourished, hke the " Little Thing," by an
enfolding and creative love ; yet of this you are less
conscious than you are of the air that you breathe.
Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you
learned and estabhshed, as a patent and experienced
fact, your fraternal relation with all the other children
of God, entering into the rhythm of their existence,
participating in their stress and their joy ; will you
not at least try to make patent this your filial relation
too i This actuahsation of your true status, your
place in the Eternal World, is waiting for you. It
represents the next phase in your gradual achieve
ment of Reahty. 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
shaU be direct intuitive contact, sensation rather

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 115
than thought, which shaU bring you certitude —
" tasting food, not talking about it," as St. Bona-
ventura says.
Yet there is a marked difference between these
two stages. In the first, the deliberate inward
retreat and gathering together of your faculties which
was effected by recollection, was the prelude to a
new coming forth, an outflow from the narrow
hmits of a merely personal life to the better and
tmer 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 con
cepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. It
must therefore sink inwards towards its own
centre, " away from all that can be thought or
felt," as the mystics say, " away from every image,
every notion, every thing," towards that strange
condition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross
caUs the " Night of Sense." Do this steadily, check
ing each vagrant instinct, each insistent thought,
however " spiritual " it may seem ; pressing ever

ii6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 con
dition of simplicity which those same specialists call
nakedness of spirit or " Wayless Love," and which
they declare to be above aU 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 lostin the Imageless Ground,"
says Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensa
tions of the self in this, its first initiation into the
" wayless world, beyond image," where " all is,
yet in no wise."
Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the
Cloud of Unknowing into which you have plunged,
you are sure that it is well to be here. A peculiar
certitude which you cannot analyse, a strange

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 117
satisfaction and peace, is distiUed into you. You
begin to understand what the Psalmist meant,
when he said, " Be still, and know." You are lost
in a wilderness, a sohtude, 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 utter
ance ; it is the AU, and you are within it and part
of it, and know that it is good. It calls forth the
utmost adoration of which you are capable ; and,
mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended
now, say the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will
of God ; are become part of a higher, slower
duration, which carries you as it were upon its
bosom and — though never perhaps before has your
soul been so truly active — ^seems to you a stillness,
a rest. The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher hfe
of unity, a lower life of multiphcity, possible to
every human spirit, wiU now appear to you not
a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact,
which you have verified in your own experience.

ii8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
You perceive that these are the two complementary
ways of apprehending and uniting with Reahty —
the one as a dynamic process, the other as an eternal
whole. Thus understood, they do not conffict.
You know that the flow, the broken-up world of
change and multiphcity, is stiU 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 hfted to a new poise ; a direct participation in
that simple, transcendent hfe " broken, yet not
divided," which gives to this time-world aU its
meaning and validity. And you know, without
derogation from the realness of that hfe 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 hving Eternal Life now, in
the midst of time.
The effect of this form of contemplation, in the
degree in which the ordinary man may leam to
practise it, is hke the sudden change of atmosphere,
the shifting of values, which we experience when we
pass from the busy streets into a quiet church;

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 119
where a lamp burns, and a silence reigns, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Thence is poured
forth a stillness which strikes through the tumult
without. Eluding the fficker of the arc-lamps,
thence through an upper window we may ghmpse
a perpetual star.
The walls of the church, hmiting the range of our
attention, shutting out the torrent of hfe, 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 dehber
ate, humble practice of contemplation wiU teach you
at last to find it ; outside the sheltering walls of
recollection as weU as within. You wiU reahse then
what Juhan meant, when she declared the ultimate
property of all that was made to be that " God
keepeth it " : will feel the violent consciousness of
an enfolding Presence, utterly transcending the fluid
changeful nature-life, and incomprehensible to the

I20 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
intelhgence which that nature-life has developed
and trained. And as you knew the secret of that
nature-hfe best by surrendering yourself to it, by
entering its currents, and refusing to analyse or
arrange : so here, by a deliberate giving of yourself
to the silence, the rich " nothingness," the " Cloud,"
you will draw nearest to the Reahty 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 hght of
perception." Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of
that intuitive awareness, that meek and simple self-
mergence, which the mystics call sometimes, accord
ing to its degree and special circumstances, the
Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark, repre
sents the utmost that human consciousness can do
of itself towards the achievement of union with
Reahty. To some it brings joy and peace, to
others fear : to all a paradoxical sense of the lowh-
ness and greatness of the soul, which now at last
can measure itself by the august standards of the
Infinite. Though the trained and dihgent will of

SECOND FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 121
the contemplative can, if control of the attention be
really estabhshed, recapture this state of awareness,
retreat into the Quiet again and again, yet it is of
necessity a fleeting experience ; for man is immersed
in duration, subject to it. Its demands upon his
attention can only cease with the cessation of physi
cal life — perhaps not then. Perpetual absorption
in the Transcendent is a human impossibihty, and
the effort to achieve it is both unsocial and silly.
But this experience, this " ascent to the Nought,"
changes for ever the proportions of the hfe 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.

122 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER IX
THE THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
The hard separation which some mystical writers
insist upon making between " natural " and " super
natural " 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, super
stitious behefs, ghosts, and other disagreeable inter
ferences with the order which he calls " natural " ;
and inchnes 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 develop
ment of the contemplative consciousness : the real
change which, if you would go further on these in
terior paths, must now take place in the manner of
your apprehension of Reahty. Hitherto, aU that
you have attained has been — or at least has seemed
to you — the direct result of your own hard work.

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 123
A difficult self-disciphne, the slowly achieved control
of your vagrant thoughts and desires, the steady
daily practice of recollection, a dihgent pushing out
of your consciousness from the superficial to the
fundamental, an unselfish loving attention ; aU this
has been rewarded by the gradual broadening and
deepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into
the movements of a larger life. You have been a
knocker, a seeker, an asker : have beat upon the
Cloud of Unknowing " with a sharp dart of longing
love." A perpetual effort of the wiU has charac
terised your inner development. Your contempla
tion, in fact, as the speciahsts would say, has been
" active," not " infused,"
But now, having achieved an awareness — obscure
and indescribable indeed, yet actual — of the enfold
ing presence of Reahty, 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

124 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
really it will be the direct result of that long stress
and disciphne which has gone before, and has
made it ppssible for you to feel the subtle con
tact of deeper reahties. It wiU 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 hke a traveller arrived in a new country.
The journey has been a long one ; and the hard
ships and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the
perpetual conscious pressing forward, have at last
come to seem the chief features of your inner hfe.
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 hes far beyond the
horizons of human thought. There are no famihar
landmarks, nothing on which you can lay hold.

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 125
You " wander to and fro," as the mystics say, " in
this fathomless ground " ; surrounded by silence
and darkness, strugghng to breathe this rarefied air.
Like those who go to hve in new latitudes, you must
become acchmatised. 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 hght, which now
seems to you a darkness, may clarify your eyes, and
that you may be transformed from a visitor into
an inhabitant of that supernal Country which St,
Augustine described as " no mere vision, but a
home," You are therefore to let yourself go ; to cease
'all conscious, anxious striving and pushing.
Finding yourself in this place of darkness and
quietude, this " Night of the Spirit," as St. John of
the Cross has called it, you are to dwell there meekly ;
asking nothing, seeking nothing, but with your
doors flung wide open towards God. And as you
do thus, there will come to you an ever clearer
certitude that this darkness enveils the goal for
which you have been seeking from the first ; the final
Reahty with which you are destined to unite, the

126 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
perfect satisfaction of your most ardent and most
sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your
efforts reach it. This realisation of your own com
plete impotence, of the resistance which the Tran
scendent — long sought and faithfully served — ^now
seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love,
your ardour, your deliberate self-donation, is at
once the most painful and most essential phase in
the training of the human soul. It brings you into
that state of passive suffering which is to complete
the decentrahsation 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

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 127
last fragments of selfhood, the very desire for
spiritual satisfaction — the fundamental human ten
dency to drag down the Simple Fact and make it
ours, instead of offering ourselves to it — must be
sought out and kiUed, In this deep contemplation,
this profound Quiet, your soul gradually becomes
conscious of a constriction, a dreadful narrowness
of personahty; something stiU existing in itself,
still tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and
keeping it from that absolute surrender which is the
only way to peace. An attitude of perfect generosity,
complete submission, wilhng acquiescence in any
thing that may happen — even in failure and death —
is here your only hope : for union with Reahty can
only be a union of love, a glad and humble self-
mergence in the universal hfe. You must, so far
as you are able, give yourself up to, " die into,"
melt into the Whole; abandon aU efforts to lay
hold of It, More, you must be willing that it
should lay hold of you, " A pure bare going forth,"
says Tauler, trying to describe the sensations of the
self at this moment, " None," says Ruysbroeck,
putting this same experience, this meek out-
streaming of the bewildered spirit, into other

128 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
language, " is sure of Eternal Life, unless he has
died with his own attributes wholly into God,"
It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accom
pany 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 transi
tional plane of darkness, you will be re-born into
another " world," another stage of reahsation : and
find yourself, literally, to be other than you were
before. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence of the
change now effected consists in the fact that " God's
action takes the place of man's activity " — that the
surrendered self " does not act, but receives," By
this they mean to describe, as well as our concrete
language will permit, the new and vivid conscious
ness 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

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 129
preparing him ; and it is out of this wiUing quietude
and ever-deepening obscurity that the new experi
ences come, " O night that didst lead thus,
O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover's sight —
Lover with loved in marriage of delight,"
says St. John of the Cross in the most wonderful of
all mystical poems, " He who has had experience
of this," says St, Teresa of the same stage of appre
hension, " 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
beheving so,"
This sense, this conviction, which may be trans
lated by the imagination into mgny different forms,
is the substance of the greatest experiences and
highest joys of the mjretical saints. The intensity
with which it is reahsed will depend upon the ardour,
purity, and humihty of the experiencing soul : but
even those who feel it faintly are convinced by it for

130 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
evermore. In some great and generous spirits, able
to endure the terrific onslaught of Reahty, it may
even reach a vividness by which all other things
are obhterated ; and the self, utterly helpless under
the inundations of this transcendent hfe-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 Reahty, a susceptibility
to supemal impressions, so far beyond your own
smaU talent that there seems no link between you :
yet you have, since you are human, a capacity for
the Infinite too. With less intensity, less splendour,
but with a certitude which no arguments will ever
shake, this sense of the Living Fact, and of its mys
terious contacts with and invasions of the human
spirit, may assuredly be reahsed by you. This
reahsation — sometimes felt under the symbols of
personahty, sometimes under those of an impersonal
but life-giving Force, Light, Energy, or Heat — is the
ruhng character of the third phase of contempla
tion ; and the reward of that meek passivity, that

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 131
" 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 in
calculable, and completely outside your own control.
So far, to use St, Teresa's well-known image, you
have been watering the garden of your spirit by
hand ; a poor and laborious method, yet one in
which there is a definite relation between effort and
result. But now the watering-can is taken from
you, and you must depend upon the rain : more
generous, more fmitful, 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 hfe now makes
upon you, if you let yourself go, eradicate the last

132 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
traces of self-interest even of the most spiritual
kind — then, you have estabhshed conditions under
which the forces of the spiritual world can work on
you, heightening your susceptibihties, deepening
and purifying your attention, so that you are able
to taste and feel more and more of the inexhaustible
riches of Reahty,
Thus dying to your own wiU, waiting for what
is given, infused, you wiU presently find that a
change in your apprehension has indeed taken
place : and that those who said self-loss was the
only way to reahsation taught no pious fiction but
the truth. The highest contemplative experience
to which you have yet attained has seemed above all
else a still awareness. The cessation of your own
striving, a resting upon and within the Absolute
World — these were its main characteristics for
your consciousness. But now, this Ocean of Being
is no longer felt by you as an emptiness, a sohtude
without bourne. Suddenly you know it to be
instinct with a movement and hfe too great for you to
apprehend. You are thriUed by a mighty energy,
uncontrolled by you, unsohcited by you : its higher
vitahty is poured into your soul. You enter upon

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 133
an experience for which all the terms of power,
thought, motion, even of love, are inadequate : yet
which contains within itself the only complete ex
pression of all these things. Your strength is now
hterally 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 im
personal sense of the Infinite, in which you have
dipped yourself, and which swallows up and com
pletes 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 personahty 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 WiU, Thought,
and Love ; instantly recognised by the contemplating
spirit as the highest reality it yet has known, and
evoking in it a passionate and a humble joy.
This unmistakable experience has been achieved
by the mystics of every rehgion ; and when we

134 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 vahdity. It has always
become for them the central fact, by which all other
reahties must be tested and graduated. It has
brought to them the deep consciousness of sources
of abundant hfe now made accessible to man ; of
the impact of a mighty energy, gentle, passion
ate, self -giving, creative, which they can only
caU Absolute Love. Sometimes they feel this
strange life moving and stirring within them.
Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege
them. In every case, they are the passive objects
upon which it works. It is now another Power
which seeks the separated spirit and demands it ;
which knocks at the closed door of the narrow
personality ; which penetrates the contemplative
consciousness through and through, speaking,
stirring, compelhng it ; wliich sometimes, by its
secret irresistible pressure, wins even the most
recalcitrant in spite of themselves. Sometimes
this Power is felt as an impersonal force, the unifying
cosmic energy, the indrawing love which gathers aU
things into One ; sometimes as a sudden access of

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 135
vitahty, a light and heat, enfolding and penetrating
the self and making its languid hfe 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 declara
tion, they are speaking from a plane of conscious
ness far above the ideas and images of popular
rehgion ; 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 hfe look shadowy and in
secure. They say that this Fact is " immanent " ;
dwelhng in, transfusing, and discoverable through
every aspect of the universe, every movement of the
game of hfe — 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 includ
ing the sum of those ghmpses and contacts which
we obtain by self-mergence in hfe, and in Its

136 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
simplest manifestations above and beyond any
thing to which reason can attain — " the Nameless
Being, of Whom nought can be said," This you
discovered to be true in the second stage. But in
addition to this, they say also, that this all-pervasive,
all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melody
is heard in all movement, and within Whose Being
" the worlds are being told hke beads," calls the
human spirit to an immediate intercourse, a unity,
a fruition, a divine give-and-take, for which the
contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, of
marriage, of immersion, are all too poor ; and
which evokes in the fully conscious soul a passionate
and a humble love, " He devours us and He feeds
us ! " exclaims Ruysbroeck, " Here," says St,
Thomas Aquinas, " the soul in a wonderful and un
speakable manner both seizes and is seized upon,
devours and is herself devoured, embraces and is
violently embraced : and by the knot of love she
unites herself with God, and is with Him as the
Alone with the Alone,"
The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the
rhapsodies which extol the spirit's Lover, Friend,
Companion, Bridegroom ; which describe the " de-

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 137
liberate 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 hving heart of Reality is possible, " How
dehcately 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 imperish
able Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that
we truly love, and beyond aU these things both
seeks us and compels us, " giving more than we
can take and asking more than we can pay,"
You do not, you never will know, what this
Objective is : for as Dionysius teaches, " if any one
saw God and understood what he saw, then it was
not God that he saw, but something that belongs to
Him," But you do know now that it exists, with
an intensity which makes all other existences un
real ; save in so far as they participate in this one
Fact, " Some contemplate the Formless, and others
meditate on Form : but the wise man knows that

138 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Brahma is beyond both," As you yield your
self more and more completely to the impulses of
this intimate yet unseizable Presence, so much the
sweeter and stronger — so much the more constant
and steady — ^will your intercourse with it become.
The imperfect music of your adoration will be
answered and reinforced by another music, gentle,
deep, and strange ; your out-going movement, the
stretching forth of your desire from yourself to
something other, will be answered by a movement,
a stirring, within you yet not conditioned by you.
The wonder and variety of this intercourse is
never-ending. It includes in its sweep every phase
of human love and self-devotion, aU 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

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 139
with life, you have been surrendering progressively
to larger and larger existences, more and more com
plete reahties : have been learning to know them, to
share their very being, through the magic of dis
interested love. First, the manifested, flowing, evolv
ing life of multiphcity : felt by you in its wonder and
wholeness, once you learned to jrield yourself to its
rhythms, received in simphcity the undistorted
messages of sense. Then, the actual unchanging
ground of life, the eternal and unconditioned Whole,
transcending all succession : a world inaccessible
ahke to senses and intelligence, but felt — ^vaguely,
darkly, yet intensely — by the quiet and surrendered
consciousness. But now you are sohcited, whether
you will or no, by a greater Reahty, the final inclu
sive Fact, the Unmeasured Love, which "is through
aU things everlastingly " : and yielding yourself to
it, receiving and responding to its obscure yet ardent
communications, you pass beyond the cosmic
experience to the personal encounter, the simple
yet utterly inexpressible union of the soul with its
God. And this threefold union with Reality, as your
attention is focussed now on one aspect, now on

140 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
another, of its rich simphcity, wiU be actuahsed by
you in many different ways : for you are not to
suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now
to characterise your inner life. Though the sense
of your own dwelling within the Eternal transfuses
and illuminates it, the sense of your own necessary
efforts, a perpetual renewal of contact with the
Spiritual World, a perpetual self- donation, shaU
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
smaU energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper
and deeper reahsation — " 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

THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION 141
and passive love are both needed by you, if your whole
hfe is to be brought into union with the inconceiv
ably rich yet simple One in Whom these apparent
opposites are harmonised. Therefore seeking and
finding, work and rest, conffict 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 hving, growing human spirit;
the diverse aspects under which it realises the
simple fact of its intercourse with the Divine,
Each new stage achieved in the mystical develop
ment 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 enrich
ment of personahty. So that the total result of this
change, this steady growth of your transcendental
self, is not an impoverishment of the sense-hfe in
the supposed interests of the supersensual, 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 con
sciousness narrows to an intense point of feehng, in
which it seems indeed " alone with the Alone " :

142 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
sometimes it spreads to a vast apprehension of the
Universal Life, or perceives the common things of
sense aflame with God, It moves easily and with
no sense of incongruity from hours of close personal
communion with its Friend and Lover to self-loss
in the " deep yet dazzhng darkness " of the Divine
Abyss : or, re-entering that hving world of change
which the first form of contemplation disclosed
to it, passes beyond those discrete manifestations
of Reality to realise the Whole which dwells in
and inspires every part. Thus ascending to the
mysterious fruition of that Reahty which is beyond
image, and descending again to the loving contem
plation 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 upchmb of the individual
soul, the passionate outpouring of the Divine Mind,
form the completing opposites.

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 143
CHAPTER X
THE MYSTICAL LIFE
And here the practical man, who has been strangely
silent during the last stages of our discourse, shakes
himself like a terrier which has achieved dry land
again after a bath ; and asks once more, with a
certain explosive violence, his dear old question,
" What is the use of aU this i "
" You have introduced me," he says further, " to
some curious states of consciousness, interesting
enough in their way; and to a lot of pecuhar
emotions, many of which are no doubt most valuable
to poets and so on. But it is aU so remote from
daily life. How is it going to fit in with ordinary
existence i How, above all, is it all going to help
mei "
Well, put upon its lowest plane, this new way of
attending to hfe — this deepening and widening of
outlook — may at least be as helpful to you as many
things to which you have unhesitatingly conse
crated much time and diligence in the past : your

144 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
long journeys to new countries, for instance, or long
hours spent in acquiring new " facts," re-labelling
old experiences, gaining skiU in new arts and games.
These, it is true, were quite worth the effort
expended on them : for they gave you, in exchange
for your labour and attention, a fresh view of
certain fragmentary things, a new point of contact
with the rich world of possibilities, a tiny enlarge
ment of your universe in one direction or another.
Your love and patient study of nature, art, science,
politics, business — even of sport — repaid you thus.
But I have offered you, in exchange for a meek
and industrious attention to another aspect of the
world, hitherto somewhat neglected by you, an
enlargement which shall include and transcend all
these ; and be conditioned only by the perfection
of your generosity, courage, and surrender.
Nor are you to suppose that this enlargement will
be hmited to certain new spiritual perceptions,
which the art of contemplation has made possible
for you : that it will merely draw the curtain from
a window out of which you have never looked.
This new wide world is not to be for you something
seen, but something lived in : and you — since man

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 145
is a creature of responses — will insensibly change
under its influence, growing up into a more perfect
conformity with it. Living in this atmosphere of
Reahty, you will, in fact, yourself become more real.
Hence, if you accept in a spirit of trust the sugges
tions which have been made to you — and I acknow
ledge that here at the beginning an attitude of faith
is essential — and if you practise with dihgence the
arts which I have described : then, sooner or later,
you will inevitably find yourself deeply and per
manently changed by them — will perceive that you
have become a " new man." Not merely have
you acquired new powers of perception and new
ideas of Reahty ; but a quiet and complete trans
formation, a strengthening and maturing of your
personahty has taken place.
You are stiU, it is true, living the ordinary hfe of
the body. You are immersed in the stream of
duration ; a part of the human, the social, the
national group. The emotions, instincts, needs, of
that group affect you. Your changing scrap of
vitahty contributes to its corporate life ; and con
tributes the more effectively since a new, intuitive
sympathy has now made its interests your own,
K

146 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Because of that corporate life, transfusing you,
giving to you and taking from you — conditioning
you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent
ways — ^you are still compelled to react to many
suggestions which you are no longer able to respect :
controlled, to the last moment of your bodily exist
ence and perhaps afterwards, by habit, custom, the
good old average way of misunderstanding the
world. To this extent, the crowd-spirit has you in
its grasp.
Yet in spite of all this, you are now released from
that crowd's tyrannically overwhelming conscious
ness as you never were before. You feel yourself
now a separate vivid entity, a real, whole man :
dependent on the Whole, and gladly so dependent,
yet within that Whole a free self-goveming thing.
Perhaps you always fancied that your will was free —
that you were actually, as you sometimes said, the
" captain of your soul," If so, this was merely one
amongst the many illusions which supported your
old, enslaved career. As a matter of fact, you were
driven along a road, unaware of anything that lay
beyond the hedges, pressed on every side by other
members of the flock ; getting perhaps a certain

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 147
satisfaction out of the deep warm stir of the col
lective life, but ignorant of your destination, and
with your personal initiative limited to the snatching
of grass as you went along, the pushing of your way
to the softer side of the track. These operations
made up together that which you called Success,
But now, because you have achieved a certain power
of gathering yourself together, perceiving yourself
as a person, a spirit, and observing your relation
with these other individual lives — because too,
hearing now and again the mysterious piping of the
Shepherd, you realise your own perpetual forward
movement and that of the flock, in its relation to
that living guide — you have a far deeper, truer
knowledge than ever before both of the general and
the individual existence ; and so are able to handle
life with a surer hand.
Do not suppose from this that your new career is
to be perpetually supported by agreeable spiritual
contacts, or occupy itself in the mild contemplation
of the great world through which you move. True,
it is said of the Shepherd that he carries the lambs in
his bosom : but the sheep are expected to walk, and
put up with the inequahties of the road, the bunts and

148 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
blunders of the flock. It is to vigour rather than to
comfort that you are called. Since the transcenden
tal aspect of your being has been brought into focus
you are now raised out of the mere push-forward,
the bhnd passage through time of the flock, into a
position of creative responsibihty. You are aware
of personal correspondences with the Shepherd,
You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broader
world. The sky and the hedges, the wide lands
through which you are moving, the corporate
character and meaning of the group to which you
belong — all these are now within the circle of your
consciousness ; and each httle event, each separate
demand or invitation which comes to you is now
seen in a truer proportion, because you bring to
it your awareness of the Whole, Your journey
ceases to be an automatic progress, and takes on
some of the characters of a free act : for " things "
are now under you, you are no longer under them.
You will hardly deny that this is a practical gain :
that this widening and deepening of the range over
which your powers of perception work makes you
more of a man than you were before, and thus adds
to rather than subtracts from your total practical

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 149
efficiency. It is indeed only when he reaches these
levels, and feels within himself this creative freedom
— this full actuahsation of himself — on the one hand :
on the other hand the sense of a world-order, a love
and energy on which he depends and with whose
interests he is now at one, that man becomes fully
human, capable of hving the real hfe of Etemity in
the midst of the world of time.
And what, when you have come to it, do you
suppose to be your own function in this vast two
fold scheme i Is it for nothing, do you think, that
you are thus a meeting-place of two orders i Surely
it is your business, so far as you may, to express in
action something of the real character of that universe
within which you now know yourself to hve i
Artists, aware of a more vivid and more beautiful
world than other men, are always driven by their
love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into
direct manifestation, those deeper significances of
form, sound, rhythm, which they have been able
to apprehend : and, doing this, they taste deeper
and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with the
Real, For them, the duty of creation is tightly
bound up with the gift of love. In their passionate

I50 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
outflowing to the universe which offers itself under
one of its many aspects to their adoration, that
other-worldly fruition of beauty is always foUowed,
balanced, completed, by a this-world impulse to
creation : a desire to fix within the time-order, and
share with other men, the vision by which they were
possessed. Each one, thus bringing new aspects of
beauty, new ways of seeing and hearing within the
reach of the race, does something to amend the
sorry universe of common sense, the more hideous
universe of greed, and redeem his fellows from their
old, slack servitude to a lower range of significances.
It is in action, then, that these find their truest and
safest point of insertion into the hving, active world
of Reahty : in sharing and furthering its work of
manifestation they know its secrets best. For
them contemplation and action are not opposites,
but two interdependent forms of a hfe that is one —
a hfe that rushes out to a passionate communion
with the true and beautiful, only that it may draw
from this direct experience of Reahty a new inten
sity wherewith to handle the world of things ; and
remake it, or at least some httle bit of it, " nearer
to the heart's desire,"

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 151
Again, the great mystics tell us that the " vision of
God in His own hght " — ^the direct contact of the
soul's substance with the Absolute — to which
awful experience you drew as near as the quahty
of your spirit would permit in the third degree of
contemplation, is the prelude, not to a further
revelation of the eternal order given to you, but to
an utter change, a vivid life springing up within
you, which they sometimes call the " transform
ing union " or the " birth of the Son in the soul,"
By this they mean that the spark of spiritual stuff,
that high special power or character of human nature,
by which you first desired, then tended to, then
achieved contact with Reahty, is as it were fertihsed
by this profound communion with its origin ;
becomes strong and vigorous, invades and trans
mutes the whole personahty, and makes of it, not a
" dreamy mystic " but an active and impassioned
servant of the Eternal Wisdom,
So that when these fuU-grown, fuUy vital mystics
try to teU us about the life they have achieved, it is
always an intensely active life that they describe.
They say, not that they " dwell in restful fmition,"
though the deep and joyous knowledge of this.

152 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
perhaps too the perpetual longing for an utter self-
loss in it, is always possessed by them — ^but that
they " go up and down the ladder of contemplation."
They stretch up towards the Point, the unique Reahty
to which all the intricate and many-coloured hnes of
life flow, and in which they are merged ; and rush
out towards those various hves in a passion of active
love and service. This double activity, this swing
ing between rest and work — ^this alone, they say, is
truly the life of man; because this alone represents on
human levels something of that inexhaustibly rich
yet simple hfe, " ever active yet ever at rest," which
they find in God, When he gets to this, then man
has indeed actuahsed his union with Reahty ; be
cause then he is a part of the perpetual creative act,
the eternal generation of the Divine thought and
love. Therefore contemplation, even at its highest,
dearest, and most intimate, is not to be for you an
end in itself. It shall only be truly yours when it
impels you to action : when the double movement
of Transcendent Love, drawing inwards to uniftt
and fruition, and rushing out again to creative acts,
is reahsed in you. You are to be a hving, ardent
tool with which the Supreme Artist works : one of

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 153
the instruments of His self-manifestation, the per
petual process by which His Reality is brought into
concrete expression.
Now the expression of vision, of reahty, of beauty,
at an artist's hands — the creation of new hfe in all
forms — has two factors: the living moulding creative
spirit, and the material in which it works. Between
these two there is inevitably a difference of tension.
The material is at best inert, and merely patient of
the informing idea ; at worst, directly recalcitrant
to it. Hence, according to the balance of these two
factors, the amount of resistance offered by stuff
to tool, a greater or less energy must be expended,
greater or less perfection of result will be achieved.
You, accepting the wide deep universe of the
mystic, and the responsibihties that go with it,
have by this act taken sides once for all with creative
spirit : with the higher tension, the unrelaxed effort,
the passion for a better, intenser, and more signifi
cant life. The adoration to which you are vowed
is not an affair of red hassocks and authorised hymn
books ; but a buming and consuming fire. You
wiU find, then, that the world, going its own gait,
busily occupied with its own system of correspon-

154 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
dences — ^yielding to every gust of passion, intent on
the satisfaction of greed, the struggle for comfort
or for power — will oppose your new eagerness;
perhaps with violence, but more probably with the
exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which
refuses to get up. If your new life is worth any
thing, it will flame to sharper power when it strikes
against this dogged inertness of things : for you
need resistances on which to act. " The road to a
Yea hes through a Nay," and righteous warfare is
the only way to a hving and a lasting peace.
Further, you wiU observe more and more clearly,
that the stuff of your extemal world, the method
and machinery of the common hfe, is not merely
passively but actively inconsistent with your sharp
interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is
diseased as weU as indolent, AU man's perverse
ways of seeing his universe, aU the perverse and
hideous acts which have spmng from them — these
have set up reactions, have produced deep disorders
in the world of things, Man is free, and holds the
keys of hell as weU as the keys of heaven. Within
the love-driven universe which you have learned
to see as a whole, you wiU therefore find egotism.

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 155
rebeUion, meanness, brutahty, squalor ; the work
of separated selves whose energies are set athwart
the stream. But every aspect of life, however
falsely imagined, can still be " saved," turned to the
purposes of Reality : for " all-thing hath the being
by the love of God." Its oppositions are no part
of its reahiess ; and therefore they can be overcome.
Is there not here, then, abundance of practical work
for you to do; work which is the direct outcome
of your mystical experience ^ Are there not here,
as the French proverb has it, plenty of cats for you
to comb 5' And isn't it just here, in the new foot
hold it gives you, the new clear vision and certitude —
in its noble, serious, and invulnerable faith — that
mysticism is " useful " ; even for the most scien
tific of social reformers, the most belligerent of
politicians, the least sentimental of philanthropists 5'
To " bring Etemity into Time," the " invisible
into concrete expression " ; to " be to the Etemal
Goodness what his own hand is to a man " — these
are the plainly expressed desires of aU the great
mystics. One and aU, they demand eamest and
dehberate action, the insertion of the purified and
ardent wiU into the world of things. The mystics

156 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
are artists ; and the stuff in which they work is most
often human hfe. They want to heal the dis
harmony between the actual and the real : and
since, in the white-hot radiance of that faith, hope,
and charity which bums in them, they discem such
a reconcihation to be possible, they are able to work
for it with a singleness of purpose and an invincible
optimism denied to other men. This was the
instinct which drove St. Francis of Assisi to the
practical experience of that poverty which he
recognised as the highest wisdom ; St. Catherine
of Siena from contemplation to pohtics ; Joan of
Arc to the salvation of France ; St, Teresa to the
formation of an ideal rehgious family ; Fox to the
proclaiming of a world-rehgion in which all men
should be guided by the Inner Light ; Florence
Nightingale to battle with officials, vermin, dirt,
and disease in the soldiers' hospitals; Octavia
HiU to make in London slums something a little
nearer " the shadows of the angels' houses " than
that which the practical landlord usually provides.
All these have felt sure that a great part in the
drama of creation has been given to the free spirit
of man : that bit by bit, through and by him, the

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 157
scattered worlds of love and thought and action
shaU be realised again as one. It is for those who
have found the thread on which those worlds are
strung, to bring this knowledge out of the hidden-
ness ; to use it, as the old alchemists declared that
they could use their tincture, to transmute aU baser
metals into gold.
So here is your vocation set out : a vocation so
various in its opportunities, that you can hardly
fail to find something to do. It is your business to
actuahse within the world of time and space —
perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic
action, perhaps only by smaU ones in field and
market, tram and tube, office and drawing-room, in
the perpetual give-and-take ofthe common life — that
more real hfe, that holy creative energy, which this
world manifests as a whole but indifferently. You
shaU work for mercy, order, beauty, significance :
shaU mend where you find things broken, make
where you find the need. "Adoro te devote,
latens Deitas," said St. Thomas in his great mystical
hymn : and the practical side of that adoration
consists in the bringing of the Real Presence from
its hiddenness, and exhibiting it before the eyes of

158 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
other men. Hitherto you have not been very
active in this matter : yet it is the purpose for which
you exist, and your contemplative consciousness,
if you educate it, will soon make this fact clear to
you. The teeming life of nature has yielded up to
your loving attention many sacramental images of
Reahty : seen in the hght of charity, it is far more
sacred and significant than you supposed. What
about your hfe 5" Is that a theophany too S* " Each
oak doth cry I am," says Vaughan. Do you pro
claim by your existence the grandeur, the beauty,
the intensity, the hving wonder of that Eternal
Reahty within which, at this moment, you stand 5"
Do your hours of contemplation and of action
harmonise 5"
If they did harmonise — if everybody's did —
then, by these individual adjustments the complete
group-consciousness of humanity would be changed,
brought back into conformity with the Transcen
dent ; and the spiritual world would be actuahsed
within the temporal order at last. Then, that
world of false imagination, senseless conflicts, and
sham values, into which our children are now bom,
would be annihilated. The whole race, not merely

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 159
a few of its noblest, most clear-sighted spirits,
would be " in union with God " ; and men, trans
fused by His hght and heat, direct and willing
agents of His Pure Activity, would achieve that
completeness of hfe which the mystics dare to call
" deification." This is the substance of that
redemption of the world, which all religions pro
claim or demand : the consummation which is
cmdely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the
prophets and seers. It is the true incarnation of the
Divine Wisdom : and you must leam to see with
Paul the pains and disorders of creation — your own
pains, efforts, and difficulties too — as incidents in
the travail of that royal birth. Patriots have some
times been asked to " think imperiaUy." Mystics
are asked to think celestiaUy ; and this, not when
considering the things usually called spiritual, but
when deahng with the concrete accidents, the evil
and sadness, the cruelty, failure, and degeneration
of hfe.
So, what is being offered to you is not merely a
choice amongst new states of consciousness, new
emotional experiences — ^though these are indeed
involved in it — ^but, above all else, a larger and

i6o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
intenser hfe, a career, a total consecration to the
interests of the Real. This life shall not be abstract
and dreamy, made up, as some imagine, of nega
tions. It shall be violently practical and affirmative ;
giving scope for a hmitless activity of will, heart,
and mind working within the rhythms of the Divine
Idea. It shaU cost much, making perpetual de
mands on your loyalty, trust, and self-sacrifice :
proving now the need and the worth of that training
in renunciation which was forced on you at the
beginning of your interior life. It shaU be both
deep and wide, embracing in its span all those aspects
of Reality which the gradual extension of your con
templative powers has disclosed to you : making
" the inner and outer worlds to be indivisibly One."
And because the emphasis is now for ever shifted
from the accidents to the substance of hfe, it will
matter little where and how this career is actualised
— ^whether in convent or factory, study or battle
field, multitude or sohtude, sickness or strength.
These fluctuations of circumstance will no longer
dominate you ; since " it is Love that payeth for all."
Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening up
of the universe, the vivid consciousness of a living

THE MYSTICAL LIFE i6i
Reahty and your relation with it, which came to
you in contemplation, will necessarily be a constant
or a governable feature of your experience. Even
under the most favourable circumstances, you shaU
and must move easily and frequently between that
spiritual fmition and active work in the world of
men. Often enough it wiU slip from you utterly ;
often your most dihgent effort wiU faU to recapture
it, and only its fragrance wiU remain. The more
intense those contacts have been, the more terrible
wiU be your hunger and desolation when they are
thus withdrawn : for increase of susceptibihty
means more pain as well as more pleasure, as every
artist knows. But you will find in all that happens
to you, all that opposes and grieves you — even in
those inevitable hours of darkness when the doors
of tme perception seem to close, and the cruel tangles
of the world are all that you can discem — an inward
sense of security which will never cease. All the
waves that buffet you about, shaking sometimes the
strongest faith and hope, are yet parts and aspects
of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that
Ocean would receive you ; and there you would
find, overwhelming and transfusing you, the un-
I.

i62 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
fathomable Substance of aU life and joy. Whether
you realise it in its personal or impersonal manifesta
tion, the universe is now friendly to you ; and as he
is a suspicious and unworthy lover who asks every
day for renewed demonstrations of love, so you do
not demand from it perpetual reassurances. It is
enough, that once it showed you its heart. A hnk
of love now binds you to it for evermore : in spite
of derehctions, in spite of darkness and suffering,
your wiU is harmonised with the Will that informs
the Whole.
We said, at the beginning of this discussion,
that mysticism was the art of union with Reality :
that it was, above all else, a Science of Love. Hence,
the condition to which it looks forward and towards
which the soul of the contemplative has been
stretching out, is a condition of being, not of seeing.
As the bodily senses have been produced under
pressure of man's physical environment, and their
true aim is not the enhancement of his pleasure
or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment
to those aspects of the natural world which concern
him — so the use and meaning of the spiritual senses
are strictly practical too. These, when developed

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 163
by a suitable training, reveal to man a certain measure
of Reahty : not in order that he may gaze upon it,
but in order that he may react to it, learn to live in,
with, and for it ; growing and stretching into more
perfect harmony with the Eternal Order, until at
last, hke the blessed ones of Dante's vision, the
clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable
radiance of the Enkindhng Light.

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