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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY V
From the Estate of
Mary Augusta Jordon

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM

iL

^yJAlUA .A..1 A'^-i-Uj

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
A LITTLE BOOK FOR NORMAL
PEOPLE

BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL
Author of "Mysticism," "The Mystic Way,"
"Immanence: A Book of 'Verses."

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

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1915, by
E. P. Dutton & Company
First printing, January, igis
Second " August, igiS

o

TO THE UNSEEN FUTURE

PREFACE
This little book, written during the last months
of peace, goes to press in the first weeks of the
great war. Many will feel that in such a time of
conflict and horror, when only the most ignorant,
disloyal, or apathetic can hope for quietness of
mind, a book which deals with that which is called
the "contemplative" attitude to existence is wholly
out of place. So obvious, indeed, is this point of
view, that I had at first thought of postponing its
publication. On the one hand, it seems as though
the dreams of a spiritual renaissance, which prom
ised 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 con
crete 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
yii

vHi PRACTICAL MYSTiaSM
mysticism seems, at first sight, to demand. More
over, that deep conviction of the dependence of all
human worth upon eternal values, the immanence
of the Divine Spirit within the human soul, which
lies at the root of a mystical concept of life, is
hard indeed to reconcile with much of the human
history now being poured red-hot from the caul
dron of war. For all these reasons, we are likely
during the present crisis to witness a revolt from
those superficially mystical notions which threat
ened to beccHne 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 recom
mends 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 na
tional life. To accept this position is to reduce
mysticism to the status of a spiritual plaything.
On the contrary, if the experiences on which it is
based have indeed the transcendent value for
humanity which the mystics claim for them — if

PREFACE ix
they reveal to us a world of higher truth and
greater reality than the world of concrete happen
ings in which we seem to be immersed — then that
value is increased rather than lessened when con
fronted by the overwhelming disharmonies and
sufferings of the present time. It is significant
that many of these experiences are reported to us
from periods of war and distress : that the stronger
the forces of destruction appeared, the more in
tense grew the spiritual vision which opposed
them. We leam from these records that the mys
tical consciousness has the power of lifting those
who possess it to a plane of reality which no
struggle, no cruelty, can disturb: of conferring a
certitude which no catastrophe can wreck. Yet
it does not 'wrap its initiates in a selfish and 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 stem discipline
which the race is now called to undergo, than

x PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 difBculties, new fields of activity
now disclosed. Perhaps it is worth while to re
mind ourselves that the two women who have left
the deepest mark upon the military history of
France and England — Joan of Arc and Florence
Nightingale — both acted under mystical compul
sion. So, too, did one of the noblest of modem
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 spirit
ual 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 vigor
ous; its vision of realities unsullied by the en-

PREFACE xi
tangled 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 en
tered into possession of all his powers. It is
therefore the function of a practical mysticism to
increase, not diminish, the total efficiency, the
wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to
practise it. It will help them to enter, more com
pletely 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*h(jur of greatest desolation, "There
livesdie dearest freshness deep down things."
^MHfe^jHribudon, then, to these purposes, this
nfflc 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

xii PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
from many points of view with the experiences
and philosophy of the mystics. Such readers are
wamed that they will find here nothing but the
re-statement of elementary and familiar proposi
tions, and invitations to a discipline immemorially
old. Far from presuming to instruct those to
whom first-hand information is both accessible
and palatable, I write only for the larger class
which, repelled by the formidable appearance of
more elaborate works on the subject, would yet
like to know what is meant by mysticism, and
what it has to offer to the average man: how it
helps to solve his problems, how it harmonises
with the duties and ideals of his active life. For
this reason, I presuppose in my readers no knowl
edge whatever of the subject, either upon the phil
osophic, religious, or historical side. Nor, since
I wish my appeal to be general, do I urge the
special claim of any one theological system, any
one metaphysical school. I have merely at
tempted 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 imdcr which ordinary persons

PREFACE xiii
may participate in their experience. Therefore
the abnormal states of consciousness which some
times appear in cormection with mystical genius
are not discussed: my business being confined to
the description of a faculty which all men possess
in a greater or less degree.
The reality and importance of this faculty are
considered in the first three chapters. In the
fourth and fifth is described the preliminary train
ing of attention necessary for its use ; in the sixth,
the general self-discipline and attitude toward life
which it involves. The seventh, eighth, and ninth
chapters treat in an elementary way of the three
great forms of contemplation; and in the tenth,
the practical value of the life in which they have
been actualised is examined. Those kind enough
to attempt the perusal of the book are begged to
read the first sections with some attention before
passing to the latter part.
E. U.
September 12, 1914.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Preface  vii
I What is Mysticism?  i
II The World of Reality  13
III The Preparation of the Mystic ... 29
IV Meditation and Recollection ... 46
V Self-Adjustment  56
VI Love and Will  74
VII The First Form of Contemplation . . 87
VIII The Second Form of Contemplation . 105
IX The Third Form of Contemplation . 126
X The Mystical Life  148

PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS MYSTICISM?
Those who are interested in that special attitude
towards the universe which is now loosely called
"mystical," find themselves beset by a multitude of
persons who are constantly asking — some with
real fervour, some with curiosity, and some with
disdain — "What zs mysticism?" When referred
to the writings of the mystics themselves, and to
other works in which this question appears to be
answered, these people reply that such books are
wholly incomprehensible to them.
On the other hand, the genuine inquirer will
find before long a number of self-appointed
apostles who are eager to answer his question in
many strange and inconsistent ways, calculated to
increase rather than resolve the obscurity of his

2 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
mind. He will learn that mysticism is a philoso
phy, 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 mo
rality — and at the same time that it is very super
stitious. One expert tells him that it is simply
"Catholic piety," another that Walt Whitman
was a typical mystic; a third assures him that all
mysticism comes from the East, and supports his
statement by an appeal to the mango trick. At
the end of a prolonged course of lectures, sermons,
tea-parties, and talks with eamest persons, the in
quirer is still heard saying — too often in tones of
exasperation — "What ^s mysticism?"
I dare not pretend to solve a problem which has
provided so much good hunting in the past. It is
indeed the object of this little essay to persuade
the practical man to the one satisfactory course:
that of discovering the answer for himself. Yet
perhaps it will give confidence if I confess at the

WHAT IS MYSTICISM? 3
outset that I have discovered a definition which to
me appears to cover all the ground; or at least, all
that part of the ground which is worth covering.
It will hardly stretch to the mango trick; but it
finds room at once for the visionaries and the
philosophers, for Walt Whitman and the saints.
Here is the definition : —
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
The mystic is a person who has attained that
union in greater or less degree; or who aims at
and believes in such attainment.
It is not expected that the inquirer will find
great comfort in this sentence when first it meets
his eye. The ultimate question, "What is
Reality?" — a question, perhaps, which never oc
curred to him before — is already forming in his
mind; and he kno'vvs 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" rep
resents not so much a rare and unimaginable opera
tion, as something which he is doing, in a vague,

4 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
imperfect fashion, at every moment of his con
scious life; and doing with intensity and thor
oughness 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 out
flow towards things is usually so perfunctory and
so languid, that our comprehension of things is so
perfunctory and languid too. The great Sufi who
said that "Pilgrimage to the place of the wise, is
to escape the flame of separation" spoke the literal
truth. Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignor
ance the inevitable portion of those who "keep
themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judg
ing, analysing the things which they have never
truly known.
Because he has surrendered himself to it,
"united" with it, the patriot knows his country,
the artist knows the subject of his art, the lover
his beloved, the saint his God, in a manner which
is inconceivable as well as unattainable by the
looker-on. Real knowledge, since it always im
plies an intuitive sympathy more or less intense,

WHAT IS MYSTICISM? S
is far more accurately suggested by the symbols of
touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight.
Tme, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the
contact, the apprehension, the union: and we, in
our muddle-headed way, have persuaded ourselves
that this is the essential part of knowledge —
that it is, in fact, more important to cook the hare
than to catch it. But when we get rid of this
illusion and go back to the more primitive activi
ties through which our mental kitchen gets its
supplies, we see that the distinction between mys
tic and non-mystic is not merely that between the
rationalist and the dreamer, between intellect and
intuition. The question which divides them is
really this: What, out of the mass of material
offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon — with
what aspects of the universe shall it "unite" ?
It is notorious that the operations of the aver
age 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

6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
always ready- jugged: he conceives not the living,
lovely, wild, swift-moving creature which has been
sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the de
plorable dish which he calls "things as they really
are." So complete, indeed, is the separation of
his consciousness from the facts of being, that he
feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough "un
derstanding," 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 "mys
tical." But sometimes it is suggested to him that his
knowledge is not quite so thorough as he sup
posed. Philosophers in particular have a way of
pointing out its clumsy and superficial character;
of demonstrating the fact that he habitually mis
takes his own private sensations for qualities in
herent 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

WHAT IS MYSTICISM? 7
creature. It is neat, flat, unchanging, with edges
well defined: a thing one can trust. He forgets
the existence of other conscious creatures, provided
with their own standards of reality. Yet the sea
as the fish feels it, the borage as the bee sees it,
the intricate sounds of the hedgerow as heard by
the rabbit, the impact of light on the eager face of
the primrose, the landscape as known in its vast-
ness to the wood-louse and ant — all these experi
ences, 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 experi
ence, and ignore their merely symbolic character,
the infinite gradation of values which they misrep
resent. We simply do not attempt to unite with
Reality. But now and then that symbolic char
acter is suddenly brought home to us. Some great
emotion, some devastating visitation of beauty,
love, or pain, lifts us to another level of conscious
ness ; and we are aware for a moment of the differ
ence between the neat collection of discrete objects

8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
and experiences which we call the world, and the
height, the depth, the breadth of that living, grow
ing, changing Fact, of which thought, life, and
energy are parts, and in which we "live and move
and have our being." Then we realise that our
whole life is enmeshed in great and living forces;
terrible because unknown. Even the power which
lurks in every coal-scuttle, shines in the electric
lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declares itself
in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and
growth, is supersensual. We do but perceive its
results. The more sacred plane of life and energy
which seems to be manifested in the forces we
call "spiritual" and "emotional" — in love, an
guish, ecstasy, adoration — is hidden from us
too. Symptoms, appearances, are all that our
intellects can discem: 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.

WHAT IS MYSTICISM? 9
We now begin to attach at least a fragmentary
meaning to the statement that "mysticism is the
art of union with Reality." We see that the
claim of such a poet as Whitman to be a mystic
lies in the fact that he has achieved a passionate
communion with deeper levels of life than those
with which we usually deal — ^has thrust past the
current notion to the Fact : that the claim of such
a saint as Teresa is bound up with her declaration
that she has achieved union with the Divine Es
sence 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 appre
hension 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 in
quirer must find that link for himself. All four
exhibit different forms of the working of the con
templative consciousness; a faculty which is proper
to all men, though few take the trouble to develop
it. Their attention to life has changed its char-

lo PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
acter, 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 ob
servant vision of common sense.
The old story of Eyes and No-Eyes is really the
story of the mystical and unmystical types. "No-
Eyes" has fixed his attention on the fact that he
is obliged to take a walk. For him the chief fac
tor of existence is his own movement along the
road; a movement which he intends to accomplish
as efficiently and comfortably as he can. He asks
not to know what may be on either side of the
hedges. He ignores the caress of the wind until
it threatens to remove his hat. He tmdges 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 per
petual revelation of beauty and wonder. The
sunlight inebriates him, the winds delight him, the
very effort of the joumey is a joy. Magic pres
ences throng the roadside, or cry salutations to
him from the hidden fields. The rich world

WHAT IS MYSTICISM? ii
through which he moves lies in the fore-ground
of his consciousness; and it gives up new secrets
to him at every step. "No-Eyes," when told of
his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both
have gone by the same road. He fancies that his
companion has been floating about in the air, or
beset by agreeable hallucinations. We shall
never persuade him to the contrary unless we
persuade him to look for himself.
Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the
practical man is here invited : to a training of his
latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his
languid consciousness, an emancipation from the
fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to
new levels of the world. Thus he may become
aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is
always trying to disclose to the race. This
amount of mystical perception — this "ordinary
contemplation," as the specialists call it — is pos
sible to all men: without it, they are not wholly
conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural
human activity, no more involving the great
powers and sublime experiences of the mystical

12 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoy
ment of music involves the special creative
powers of the great musician.
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist
and poet alone — though these can find in it more
poignant depths of meaning than other men — ^so
the world of Reality exists for all; and all may
participate in it, unite with it, according to their
measure and to the strength and purity of their
desire. "For heaven ghostly," says The Cloud
of Unknowing, "is as nigh down as up, and up as
down; behind as before, before as behind, on one
side as other. Inasmuch, that whoso had a tme
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 con
tinuous cinematograph performance, which the
mind has conspired with the senses to interpose
between ourselves and the living world.

CHAPTER II
THE WORLD OF REALITY
The practical man may justly observe at this
point that the world of single vision is the only
world he knows : that it appears to him to be real,
solid, and self-consistent: and that until the ex
istence — at least, the probability — of other planes
of reality is made clear to him, all talk of unit
ing with them is mere moonshine, which confirms
his opinion of mysticism as a game fit only for
idle women and inferior poets. Plainly, then, it
is the first business of the missionary to create, if
he can, some feeling of dissatisfaction with the
world within which the practical man has always
lived and acted; to suggest something of its
fragmentary and subjective character. We turn
back therefore to a further examination of the
tmism — so obvious to those who are philosophers,
so exasperating to those who are not — that man
dwells, under normal conditions, in a world of
13

14 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
imagination rather than a world of facts ; that the
universe in which he lives and at which he looks
is but a construction which the mind has made
from some few amongst the wealth of materials
at its disposal.
The relation of this universe to the world of
fact is not unlike the relation between a tapestry
picture and the scene which it imitates. You,
practical man, are obliged to weave your image
of the. outer world upon the hard warp of your
own mentality; which perpetually imposes its own
convention, and checks the free representation of
life. As a tapestry picture, however various and
full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little
squares; so the world of common sense is ulti
mately reducible to a series of static elements
conditioned by the machinery of the brain.
Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate grada
tion, 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

THE WORLD OF REALITY 15
often repeated: which make a tidy and coherent
pattern when seen on the right side. Shut up
with this symbolic picture, you soon drop into
the habit of behaving to it as though it were not
a representation but a thing. On it you fix your
attention; with it you "unite." Yet, did you
look at the wrong side, at the many short ends,
the clumsy joins and patches, this simple philoso
phy might be disturbed. You would be forced
to acknowledge the conventional character of the
picture you have made so cleverly, the wholesale
waste of material involved in the weaving of it:
for only a few amongst the wealth of impressions
we receive are seized and incorporated into our
picture of the world. Further, it might occur to
you that a slight alteration in the rhythm of the
senses would place at your disposal a complete
new range of material ; opening your eyes and ears
to sounds, colours, and movements now inaudible
and invisible, removing from your universe those
which you now regard as part of the established
order of things. Even the strands which you
have made use of might have been combined in
some other way; with disastrous results to the

i6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
"world of common sense," yet without any
diminution of their own reality.
Nor can you regard these strands themselves
as ultimate. As the most pmdent of logicians
might venture to deduce from a skein of wool
the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from
the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce
a universe which transcends the reproductive
powers of your loom. Even the camera of the
photographer, more apt at contemplation than the
mind of man, has shown us how limited are these
powers in some directions, and enlightened us as
to a few of the cmder 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
ot 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 resem
bling 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

THE WORLD OF REALITY 17
are really mnning dogs: of conventional waves,
first seen in pictures and then imagined upon the
sea: of psychological situations taken from books
and applied to human life: of racial peculiarities
generalised from insufficient data, and then
"discovered" in actuality : of theological diagrams
and scientific "laws," flung upon the background
of eternity as the magic lantern's image is reflected
on the screen.
The coloured scene at which you look so trust
fully 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 ex
claimed in words which will seem to you, accord
ing to the temper of your mind, either an invita
tion to the higher laziness or one of the most
profound aspirations of the soul, "O for a life
of sensations rather than thoughts I" He felt —
as all the poets have felt with him — that another,
lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders,
alive with ultimate music, awaited those who
could free themselves from the fetters of the mind,
lay down the shuttle and the weaver's comb, and

i8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
reach out beyond the conceptual image to intui
tive 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 imagina
tion," the dreadful energy of his image-making
power weaving up and transmuting the incoming
messages of sense. They snatch him from the
loom and place him, in the naked simplicity of
his spirit, face to face with that Other than him
self whence the materials of his industry have
come. In these hours human consciousness as
cends 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 "abso
lute sensation." It is a pure feeling-state; in
which the fragmentary contacts with Reality
achieved through the senses are merged in a whole
ness of communion which feels and knows all at
once, yet in a way which the reason can never

THE WORLD OF REALITY 19
unders-tand, 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, coward
ice, sloth. Eternity is with us, inviting our
contemplation perpetually, but we are too fright
ened, lazy, and suspicious to respond : too arrogant
to still our thought, and let divine sensation have
its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we
would make that transition: for the process in
volves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a
mming-out and rearrangement of our mental
furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that
the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden
may come to us fully charged with wonder and
freshness, and drown with their music the noise
of the gramaphone within. Those who do this,
discover that they have lived in a stuffy world,
whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-
glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial mes
senger, and every thrusting bud is charged with
the full significance of life.

20 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
There will be many who feel a certain scep
ticism as to the possibility of the undertaking here
suggested to them; a pmdent unwillingness to
sacrifice their old comfortably upholstered uni
verse, on the mere promise that they will receive
a new heaven and a new earth in exchange.
These careful ones may like to remind themselves
that the vision of the world presented to us by
all the great artists and poets — those creatures
whose very existence would seem so strange to
us, were we not accustomed to them — ^perpetually
demonstrates the many-graded character of human
consciousness ; the new worlds which await it, once
it frees itself from the tyranny of those labour-
saving contrivances with which it usually works.
Leaving on one side the more subtle apprehensions
which we call "spiritual," even the pictures of
the old Chinese draughtsmen and the modem
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

THE WORLD OF REALITY 21
order which you have never known. These have
seized and woven into their pictures strands which
never presented themselves to you; significant
forms which elude you, tones and relations to
which you are blind, living facts for which your
conventional world provides no place. They
prove by their works that Blake was right when
he said that "a fool sees not the same tree that a
wise man sees"; and that psychologists, insisting
on the selective action of the mind, the fact that
our preconceptions govern the character of our
universe, do but teach the most demonstrable of
tmths. 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 arrogant
subjectivism of common sense? Innocence and
humility distinguish it. These persons prejudge
nothing, criticise nothing. To some extent, their
attitude to the universe is that of children: and
because this is so, they participate to that extent
in the Heaven of Reality. According to their

22 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration,
they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on
sensation rather than on thought: for the state
which he then struggled to describe was that ideal
state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence
with the essence of things, of which all artists
have a share, and which a few great mystics appear
to have possessed — ^not indeed in its entirety, but
to an extent which made them, as they say, "one
with the Reality of things." The greater the
artist is, the wider and deeper is the range of this
pure sensation: the more sharply he is aware of
the torrent of life and loveliness, the rich profu
sion 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 explora
tion of the contemplative life.

THE WORLD OF REALITY 23
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 sophis
ticated universe into which our clever brains
transmute them? Plainly, it would mean the
achievement of a new universe, a new order of
reality: escape from the terrible museum-like
world of daily life, where everything is classified
and labelled, and all the graded fluid facts which
have no label are ignored. It would mean an
innocence of eye and innocence of ear impossible
for us to conceive; the impassioned contempla
tion of pure form, freed from all the meanings
with which the mind has draped and disguised it;
the recapturing of the lost mysteries of touch and
fragrance, most wonderful amongst the avenues
of sense. It would mean the exchanging of the
neat conceptual world our thoughts build up,
fenced in by the solid ramparts of the possible,
for the inconceivable richness of that unwalled
world from which we have subtracted it. It
would mean that we should receive from every
flower, not merely a beautiful image to which the

24 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
label "flower" has been affixed, but the full impact
of its unimaginable beauty and wonder, the direct
sensation of life having communion with life:
that the scents of ceasing rain, the voice of trees,
the deep softaess of the kitten's fur, the acrid
touch of sorrel on the tongue, should be in
themselves profound, complete, and simple experi
ences, calling forth simplicity of response in our
souls. Thus understood, the life of pure sensation is
the meat and drink of poetry, and one of the
most accessible avenues to that union with Reality
which the mystic declares to us as the very object
of life. But the poet must take that living stuff
direct from the field and river, without sophistica
tion, without criticism, as the life of the soul is
taken direct from the altar; with an awe that
admits not of analysis. He must not subject it
to the cooking, filtering process of the brain. It
is because he knows how to elude this dreadful
sophistication of Reality, because his attitude to
the universe is governed by the supreme artistic
virtues of humility and love, that poetry is what
it is : and I include in the sweep of poetic art the

THE WORLD OF REALITY 25
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
tmst my senses : and this too on the authority of
those impracticable dreamers the poets. Now it
is notorious that our senses deceive us. Every
one knows that; and even your own remarks have
already suggested it. How, then, can a wjiole-
sale and uncritical acceptance of my sensations
help me to unite with Reality? Many of these
sensations we share with the animals : in some, the
animals obviously surpass us. Will you suggest
that my terrier, smelling his way through an unco
ordinated universe, is a better mystic than I?"
To this I reply, that the terrier's contacts with
the world are doubtless crude and imperfect; yet
he has indeed preserved a directness of 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

26 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 stammer
ings which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and
the rest, we sometimes discem a whole fact — at
once divinely simple and infinitely various — from
which these partial messages proceed; and which
seeks as it were to utter itself in them. And we
feel, when this is so, that the fact thus glimpsed
is of an immense significance; imparting to that
aspect of the world which we are able to perceive
all the significance, all the character which it
possesses. The more of the artist there is in us,
the more intense that significance, that character
will seem: the more complete, too, will be our
conviction that our uneasiness, the vagueness of
our reactions to things, would be cured could we
reach and unite with the fact, instead of our no
tion 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.

THE WORLD OF REALITY 27
We seem in these words to have come far from
the mystic, and that contemplative consciousness
wherewith he ascends to the contact of Truth. As
a matter of fact, we are merely considering that
consciousness in its most natural and accessible
form: for contemplation is, on the one hand, the
essential activity of all artists; on the other, the
art through which those who choose to learn and
practise it may share in some fragmentary degree,
according to their measure, the special experience
of the mystic and the poet. By it they may
achieve that virginal outlook upon things, that
celestial power of communion with veritable life,
which comes when that which we call "sensation"
is freed from the tyranny of that which we call
"thought." The artist is no more and no less
than a contemplative who has learned to express
himself, and who tells his love in colour, speech,
or sound : the mystic, upon one side of his nature,
is an artist of a special and exalted kind, who
tries to express something of the revelation he
has received, mediates between Reality and the
^.ace. In the game of give and take which goes
on between the human consciousness and the ex-

28 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ternal world, both have learned to put the empha
sis upon the message from without, rather than
on their own reaction to and rearrangement of it.
Both have exchanged the false imagination which
draws the sensations and intuitions of the self
into its own narrow circle, and there distorts and
transforms them, for the tme imagination which
pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-
giving, towards the greater universe.

CHAPTER III
THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC
Here the practical man will naturally say : And
pray how am I going to do this? How shall I
detach myself from the artificial world to which
I am accustomed? Where is the brake that shall
stop the wheel of my image-making mind?
I answer : You are going to do it by an educa
tive process; a drill, of which the first stages will,
indeed, be hard enough. You have already
acknowledged the need of such mental drill, such
deliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller
matters of life. You willingly spend time and
money over that narrowing and sharpening of
attention which you call a "business training,"
a "legal education," the "acquirement of a sci
entific method." But this new undertaking will
involve the development and the training of a
layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow
in the past; the acquirement of a method you have
29

30 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
never used before. It is reasonable, even reassur
ing, that hard work and discipline should be
needed for this : that it should demand of you, if
not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the
virtues of the golf course.
The education of the mystical sense begins in
self-simplification. The feeling, willing, seeing
self is to move from the various and the analytic
to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence which
may cause hard breathing and mopping of the
brows on the part of the practical man. Yet it
is to you, practical man, reading these pages as
you rush through the tube to the practical work
of rearranging unimportant fragments of your
universe, that this message so needed by your
time — or rather, by your want of time — is ad
dressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy
reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall,
that you hardly observe the stages of your unceas
ing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs
that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The
essence of mystical contemplation is summed in
these two experiences — union with the flux of
life, and union with the Whole in which all lesser

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 31
realities are resumed — and these experiences are
well within your reach. Though it is likely that
the accusation will annoy you, you are already
in fact a potential contemplative : for this act, as
St. Thomas Aquinas taught, is proper to all men —
is, indeed, the characteristic human activity.
More, it is probable that you are, or have been,
an actual contemplative too. Has it never hap
pened to you to lose yourself for a moment in a
swift and satisfying experience for which you
found no name? When the world took on a
strangeness, and you rushed out to meet it, in a
mood at once exultant and ashamed? Was there
not an instant when you took the lady who now
orders your dinner into your arms, and she sud
denly interpreted to you the whole of the uni
verse? 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 mo
ment at the cojicert, when you became wholly una
ware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpenny
seat? Those were onsets of involuntary contem
plation; sudden partings of the conceptual veil.
Dare you call them the least significant moments

32 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
of your life? Did you not then, like the African
saint, "thrill with love and dread," though you
were not provided with a label for that which
you adored?
It will not help you to speak of these experiences
as "mere emotion." Mere emotion then inducted
you into a world which you recognised as more
valid — in the highest sense, more rational — than
that in which you usually dwell: a world which
had a wholeness, a meaning, which exceeded the
sum of its parts. Mere emotion then brought
you to your knees, made you at once proud and
humble, showed you your place. It simplified
and unified existence: it stripped off the little
accidents and omaments which perpetually deflect
our vagrant attention, and gathered up the whole
being of you into one state, which felt and knew
a Reality that your intelligence could not com
prehend. Such an emotion is the driving power
of spirit, and august and ultimate thing : and this
your innermost inhabitant felt it to be, whilst
your eyes were open to the light.
Now that simplifying act, which is the pre
liminary of all mystical experience, that gather-

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 33
ing of the scattered bits of personality into the one
which is really you — into the "unity of your
spirit," as the mystics say — the great forces of
love, beauty, wonder, grief, may do for you now
and again. These lift you perforce from the
consideration of the details to the contemplation
of the All : turn you from the tidy world of image
to the ineffable world of fact. But they are fleet
ing and ungovernable experiences, descending
with dreadful violence on the soul. Are you
willing that your participation in Reality shall
depend wholly on these incalculable visitations:
on the sudden wind and rain that wash your
windows, and let in the vision of the landscape
at your gates? You can, if you like, keep those
windows clear. You can, if you choose to turn
your attention that way, learn to look out of them.
These are the two great phases in the education of
every contemplative: and they are called in the
language of the mystics the purification of the
senses and the purification of the will.
Those who are so fortunate as to experience in
one of its many forms the crisis which is called
"conversion" are seized, as it seems to them, by

34 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
some power stronger than themselves and turned
perforce in the right direction. They find that
this irresistible power has cleansed the windows of
their homely coat of grime; and they look out,
literally, upon a new heaven and new earth. The
long quiet work of adjustment which others must
undertake before any certitude rewards them is
for these concentrated into one violent shattering
and rearranging of the self, which can now begin
its true career of correspondence with the Reality
it has perceived. To persons of this type I do
not address myself: but rather to the ordinary
plodding scholar of life, who must reach the same
goal by a more gradual road.
What is it that smears the windows of the
senses? Thought, convention, self-interest. We
throw a mist of thought between ourselves and
the external world: and through this we discern,
as in a glass darkly, that which we have arranged
to see. We see it in the way in which our neigh
bours see it ; sometimes through a pink veil, some
times through a grey. Religion, indigestion,
priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes.
The prismatic colours of a fashionable school of

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 35
art may stain them. Inevitably, too, we see the
narrow world our windows show us, not "in it
self," but in relation to our own needs, moods,
and preferences; which exercise a selective control
upon those few aspects of the whole which pene
trate to the field of consciousness and dictate the
order in which we arrange them, for the universe
of the natural man is strictly egocentric. We
continue to name the living creatures with all the
placid assurance of Adam : and whatsoever we call
them, that is the name thereof. Unless we hap
pen to be artists — and then but rarely — we never
know the "thing seen" in its purity; never, from
birth to death, look at it with disinterested eyes.
Our vision and understanding of it are governed
by all that we bring with us, and mix with it, to
form an amalgam with which the mind can deal.
To "purify" the senses is to release them, so far
as human beings may, from the tyranny of
egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs
of direct perception. This means that we must
cmsh our deep-seated passion for classification and
correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish
question, "What does it mean to me?"; learn to

36 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and
know it, not from without by comprehension, but
from within by self-mergence.
Richard of St. Victor has said, that the essence
of all purification is self-simplification; the doing
away of the unnecessary and unreal, the tangles
and complications of consciousness: and we must
remember that when these masters of the spiritual
life speak of purity, they have in their minds no
thin, abstract notion of a rule of conduct stripped
of all colour and compounded chiefly of refusals,
such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set
up. Their purity is an affirmative state; some
thing strong, clean, and crystalline, capable of a
wholeness of adjustment to the wholeness of a
God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a
lens from which all irrelevancies and excrescences,
all the beams and motes of egotism and prejudice,
have been removed; so that it may reflect a clear
image of the one Transcendent Fact within which
all others facts are held.
"All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms."

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 37
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 light : and we possess them best
by passing beyond them, by following back the
many to the One.
The "Simple Eye" of Contemplation, about
which the mystic writers say so much, is then a
synthetic sense; which sees that white light in
which all colour is, without discrete analysis of its
properties. The Simple Ear which discerns the
celestial melody, hears that Tone in which all
music is resumed; thus achieving that ecstatic life
of "sensation without thought" which Keats per
ceived to be the substance of true happiness.
But you, practical man, have lived all your days
amongst the illusions of multiplicity. Though
you are using at every instant your innate tend
ency to synthesis and simplification, since this
alone creates the semblance of order in your
universe — though what you call seeing and hear
ing are themselves great unifying acts — yet your
attention to life has been deliberately adjusted
to a world of frittered values and prismatic re-

38 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
fracted lights: full of incompatible interests, of
people, principles, things. Ambitions and affec
tions, tastes and prejudices, are fighting for your
attention. .Your poor, worried consciousness
flies to and fro amongst them; it has become a
restless and a complicated thing. At this very
moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm
of bees. The reduction of this fevered complex
to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human
power. Yet the situation is not as hopeless for
you as it seems. All this is only happening upon
the periphery of the mind, where it touches and
reacts to the world of appearance. At the centre
there is a stillness which even you are not able
to break. There, the rhythm of your duration
is one with the rhythm of the Universal Life.
There, your essential self exists: the permanent
being which persists through and behiftd the flow
and change of your conscious states. You have
been snatched to that centre once or twice. Turn
your consciousness inward to it deliberately.
Retreat to that point whence all the various lines
of your activities flow, and to which at last they
must return. Since this alone of all that you call

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 39
your "selfhood" is possessed of eternal reality,
it is surely a counsel of prudence to acquaint your
self with its peculiarities and its powers. "Take
your seat within the heart of the thousand-pet-
aled lotus," cries the Eastern visionary. "Hold
thou to thy Centre," says his Christian brother,
"and all things shall be thine." This is a prac
tical recipe, not a pious exhortation. The thing
may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if
you will: standing back, as it were, from the
vague and purposeless reactions in which most
men fritter their vital energies. Then you can
survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment,
your universe and the possibilities of life within
it: can discern too, if you be at all inclined to
mystical adventure, the stages of the road along
which you must pass on your way towards har
mony with the Real.
This universe, these possibilities, are far richer,
yet far simpler than you have supposed. Seen
from the true centre of personality, instead of the
usual angle of self-interest, their scattered parts
arrange themselves in order : you begin to perceive
those graduated levels of Reality with which a

40 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
purified and intensified consciousness can unite.
So, too, the road is more logically planned, falls
into more comprehensible stages, than those who
dwell in a world of single vision are willing to
believe. Now it is a paradox of human life, often ob
served even by the most concrete and unimagina
tive of philosophers, that man seems to be poised
between two contradictory orders of Reality.
Two planes of existence — or, perhaps, two ways
of apprehending existence — lie within the pos
sible span of his consciousness. That great pair
of opposites which metaphysicians call Being and
Becoming, Eternity and Time, Unity and Multi
plicity, and others mean, when they speak of the
Spiritual and the Natural Worlds, represents the
two extreme forms under which the universe can
be realised by him. The greatest men, those
whose consciousness is extended to full span, can
grasp, be aware of, both. They know themselves
to live, both in the discrete, manifested, ever-
changeful parts and appearances, and also in the
Whole Fact. They react fully to both : for them
there is no conflict between the parochial and the

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 41
patriotic sense. More than this, a deep instinct
sometimes assures them that the inner spring or
secret of that Whole Fact is also the inner spring
and secret of their individual lives : and that here,
in this third factor, the disharmonies between the
part and the whole are resolved. As they know
themselves to dwell in the world of time and yet
to be capable of transcending it, so the Ultimate
Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably
exceeds all that they know to be — as the soul of
the musician controls and exceeds not merely each
note of the flowing melody, but also the whole
of that symphony in which these cadences must
play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid
life, that "inward light" which these men find at
their own centres when they seek for it, is for
them an eamest of the Uncreated Light, the in
effable splendour of God, dwelling at, and ener
gising within the heart of things: for this spark
is at once one with, yet separate from, the Uni
versal Soul.
So then, man, in the person of his greatest and
most living representatives, feels himself to have
implicit correspondences with three levels of exist-

42 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ence; which we may call the Natural, the Spirit
ual, and the Divine. The road on which he is
to travel therefore, the mystical education which
he is to undertake, shall successively unite him
with these three worlds; stretching his conscious
ness to the point at which he finds them first as
three, and at last as One. Under normal circum
stances even the first of them, the natural world
of Becoming, is only present to him — unless he
be an artist — in a vague and fragmentary way.
He is, of course, aware of the temporal order, a
ceaseless change and movement, birth, growth,
and death, of which he is a part. But the rapture
and splendour of that everlasting flux which India
calls the Sport of God hardly reaches his under
standing; he is too busy with his own little move
ments 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 dura-

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 43
tional spirit is immersed. Here all the highest
values of existence are stored for him: and it is
because of his existence within this Etemal
Reality, his patriotic relationship to it, that the
efforts and experiences of the time-world have
significance for him. It is from the vantage point
gained when he realises his contacts with this
higher order, that he can see with the clear eye
of the artist or the mystic the World of Becoming
itself — recognise its proportions — even reach out
to some faint intuition of its ultimate worth. So,
if he would be a whole man, if he would realise
all that is implicit in his humanity, he must actu
alise his relationship with this supernal plane of
Being: and he shall do it, as we have seen, by
simplification, by a deliberate withdrawal of atten-
tion from the bewildering multiplicity of things,
a deliberate humble surrender of his image-making
consciousness. He already possesses, at that
gathering point of personality which the old
writers sometimes called the "apex" and some
times the "ground" of the soul, a medium of
communication with Reality. But this spiritual
principle, this gathering point of his selfhood, is

44 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
just that aspect of him which is furthest removed
from the active surface consciousness. He treats
it as the busy citizen treats his national monu
ments. It is there, it is important, a possession
which adds dignity to his existence; but he never
has time to go in. Yet as the purified sense,
cleansed of prejudice and self-interest, can give
us fleeting communications from the actual broken-
up world of duration at our gates : so the purified
and educated will can wholly withdraw the self's
attention frc«n its usual concentration on small
useful aspects of the time-world, refuse to react
to its perpetually incoming messages, retreat to
the unity of its spirit, and there make itself ready
for messages from another plane. This is the
process which the mystics call Recollection: the
first stage in the training of the contemplative
consciousness. We begin, therefore, to see that the task of
union with Reality will involve certain stages of
preparation as well as stages of attainment; and
these stages of preparation — for some disinterested
souls easy and rapid, for others long and full of
pain — ^may be grouped under two heads. First,

PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC 45
the disciplining and simplifying of the attention,
which is the essence of Recollection. Next, the
disciplining and simplifying of the affections and
will, the orientation of the heart; which is some
times called by the formidable name of Purga
tion. So the practical mysticism of the plain
man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold
scheme of training and growth : in which the first
two stages prepare the self for union with Reality,
and the last three unite it successively with the
World of Becoming, the World of Being, and
finally with that Ultimate Fact which the phi
losopher calls the Absolute and the religious
mystic calls God.

CHAPTER IV
MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION
Recollection, the art which the practical man
is now invited to 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 consciousness. So slothful, however,
is man in all that concerns his higher faculties,
that few deliberately undertake this education at
all. They are content to make tlieir 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, phi
losophy, or art, they seldom learn the secret of
a voluntary concentration of the mind.
46

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 47
Since the philosopher's interest 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 our
selves. The religious contemplative has this
further attraction for us: that he is by nature a
missionary as well. The vision which he has
achieved is the vision of an intensely loving heart ;
and love, which cannot keep itself to itself, urges
him to tell the news as widely and as clearly as
he may. In his works, he is ever trying to reveal
the secret of his own deeper life and wider vision,
and to help his fellow men to share it: hence he
provides the clearest, most orderly, most practical
teachings on the art of contemplation that we are
likely to find. True, our purpose in attempting
this art may seem to us very different from his:
though if we carry out the principles involved to
their last term, we shall probably find that they
have brought us to the place at which he aimed
from the first. But the method, in its earlier
stages, must be the same; whether we call the
Reality which is the object of our quest aesthetic,

48 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
cosmic, or divine. The athlete must develop
much the same muscles, endure much the same
discipline, whatever be the game he means to play.
So we will go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire
of her what was the method by which she taught
her daughters to gather themselves together, to
capture and hold the attitude most favourable to
communion with the spiritual world. She tells
us — and here she accords with the great tradition
of the Christian contemplatives, a tradition which
was evolved under the pressure of long experience
— that the process is a gradual one. The method
to be employed is a slow, patient training of
material which the licence of years has made in
tractable; 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." Recol
lection begins, she says, in the deliberate and
regular practice of meditation; a perfectly natural
form of mental exercise, though at first a hard
one. Now meditation is a half-way house between
thinking and contemplating: and as a discipline,
it derives its chief value from this transitional

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 49
character. The real mystical life, which is the
truly practical life, begins at the beginning; not
with supernatural acts and ecstatic apprehensions,
but with the normal faculties of the normal man.
"I do not require of you," says Teresa to her
pupils in meditation, "to form great and curious
considerations in your imderstanding: 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 in
deed 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 im
ages, the labels and the formulae, 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 ob-

so PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
tain from this exercise a skill, and a control of the
attention, which shall afterwards be applied to
greater purposes. Its task is here to consider that
furniture, as the Victorines called this preliminary
training : to take, that is, a more starry view of it :
standing back from the whirl of the earth, and
observing the process of things.
Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst
the common stock, and hold it before your mind.
The selection is large enough: all sentient beings
may find subjects of meditation to their taste, for
there lies a universal behind every particular of
thought, however concrete it may appear, and
within the most rational propositions the medita
tive eye may glimpse a dream.
"Reason has moons, but moons not hers
Lie mirror'd on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers
But, O delighting me."
Even those objects which minister to our sense-
life may well be used to nourish our spirits too.
Who has not watched the intent meditations of a
comfortable cat brooding upon the Absolute
Mouse? You, if you have a philosophic twist,

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 51
may transcend such relative views of Reality, and
try to meditate on Time, Succession, even Being
itself: or again on human intercourse, birth,
growth, and death, on a flower, a river, the vari
ous tapestries of the sky. Even your own emo
tional life will provide you with the ideas of love,
joy, peace, mercy, conflict, desire. You may
range, with Kant, from the stars to the moral law.
If your turn be to religion, the richest and most
evocative of fields is open to your choice : from the
plaster image to the mysteries of Faith.
But, the choice made, it must be held and de
fended during the time of meditation against all
invasions from without, however insidious their
encroachments, however "spiritual" their disguise.
It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again
and again, as distractions seem to snatch it from
your grasp. A restless boredom, a dreary convic
tion of your own incapacity, will presently at
tack 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-eiacated is your attention, how

52 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
miserably ineffective your will, how far away you
are from the captaincy of your own soul. It
should convince, too, the most common-sense of
philosophers of the distinction between real time,
the true stream of duration which is life, and the
sequence of seconds so carefully measured by the
clock. Never before has the stream flowed so
slowly, or fifteen minutes taken so long to pass.
Consciousness has been lifted to a longer, slower
rhythm, and is not yet adjusted to its solemn
march. But, striving for this new poise, intent on the
achievement of it, presently it will happen to you
to find that you have indeed — though how you
know not — entered upon a fresh plane of percep
tion, 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 in
crease of attention which you bring to bear on it;
that attention which is the one agent of all your
apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It
ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 53
were into the deeps of it, rest in it, "unite" with
it ; and learn, in this still, intent communion, some
thing of its depth and breadth and height, as we
learn by direct intercourse to know our friends.
Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper
it will defend you from the perpetual assaults of
the outer world. You will hear the busy hum of
that world as a distant exterior melody, and know
yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it.
You have set a ring of silence between you and it;
and behold! within that silence you are free.
You will look at the coloured scene, and it will
seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst
countless possible images of a deeper life as yet
beyond your reach. And gradually, you will
come to be aware of an entity, a You, who can
thus hold at arm's length, be aware of, look at,
an idea — a universe — other than itself. By this
voluntary painful act of concentration, this first
step upon the ladder which goes — as the mystics
would say — from "multiplicity to unity," you
have to some extent withdrawn yourself from
that union with unrealities, with notions and con
cepts, which has hitherto contented you; and at

54 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
once all the values of existence are changed.
"The road to a Yea lies through a Nay." You,
in this preliminary movement of recollection, are
saying your first deliberate No to the claim which
the world of appearance makes to a total posses
sion of your consciousness: and are thus making
possible some contact between that consciousness
and the World of Reality.
Now turn this new purified and universalised
gaze back upon yourself. Observe your own be
ing 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 recap
turing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the
struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last
discover that there is something within you — some
thing behind the fractious, conflicting life of de
sire — 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

MEDITATION AND RECOLLECTION 55
find yourself, as an actor has another life when he
is not on the stage. When you do not merely be
lieve this but know it; when you have achieved
this power of withdrawing yourself, of making
this first crude distinction between appearance and
reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life
has been won. It is not much more of an achieve
ment than that first proud effort in which the
baby stands upright for a moment and then re
lapses to the more natural and convenient crawl :
but it holds within it the same earnest of future
development.

CHAPTER V
SELF-ADJUSTMENT
So, in a measure, you have found yourself: have
retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that
busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and
obsessions, its feverish altemations 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 prac
tical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy
life of correspondences with the world of normal
men, and hungers for communion with a spiritual
universe. And this thing so foreign to your sur
face consciousness, yet familiar to it and continu
ous with it, you recognise as the true Self whose
existence you always took for granted, but whom
you have only known hitherto in its scattered
manifestations. "That art thou."
This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge,
said the Victorine mystics, is the necessary prelude
56

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 57
to all illumination. Only at its summit do we
discover, as Dante did, the beginning of the path
way to Reality. It is a lonely and an arduous
excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity :
for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ig
norance upon the lower slopes, and there to make
of their more obvious characteristics a drapery
which shall veil the naked truth. True and com
plete self-knowledge, indeed, is the privilege of
the strongest alone. Few can bear to contemplate
themselves face to face; for the vision is strange
and terrible, and brings awe and contrition in its
wake. The life of the seer is changed by it for
ever. He is converted, in the deepest and most
drastic sense; is forced to take up a new attitude
towards himself and all other things. Likely
enough, if you really knew yourself — saw your
own dim character, perpetually at the mercy of its
environment; your true motives, stripped for in
spection and measured against eternal values ; your
unacknowledged self-indulgences; your irrational
loves and hates — you would be compelled to re
model your whole existence, and become for the
first time a practical man.

58 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
But you have done what you can in this direc
tion; have at last discovered your own deeper be
ing, your eternal spark, the agent of all your con
tacts with Reality. You have often read about it.
Now you have met it; know for a fact that it is
there. What next? What changes, what re
adjustments will this self-revelation involve for
you? You will have noticed, as with practice your
familiarity with the state of Recollection has in
creased, that the kind of consciousness which it
brings with it, the sort of attitude which it de
mands of you, conflict sharply with the conscious
ness and the attitude which you have found so
appropriate to your ordinary life in the past.
They make this old attitude appear childish, un
worthy, at last absurd. By this first deliberate
effort to attend to Reality you are at once brought
face to face with that dreadful revelation of dis
harmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which
the blunt moralists call "conviction of sin."
Never again need those moralists point out to you
the inherent silliness of your eamest pursuit of
impermanent things: your solemn concentration

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 59
upon tne game of getting on. None the less, this
attitude persists. Again and again you swing
back to it. Something more than realisation is
needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new
vision of the world. This game which you have
played so long has formed and conditioned you,
developing certain qualities and perceptions, leav
ing the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly
asked to play another, which demands fresh move
ments, alermess of a different sort, your mental
muscles are intractable, your attention refuses to
respond. Nothing less will serve you here than
that drastic remodelling of character which the
mystics call "Purgation," the second stage in the
training of the human consciousness for participa
tion in Reality.
It is not merely that your intellect has assimi
lated, united with a superficial and unreal view
of the world. Far worse : your will, your desire,
the sum total of your energy, has been turned the
wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine.
You have become accustomed to the idea that you
want, or ought to want, certain valueless things,
certain specific positions. For years your treasure

6o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of
Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really
count" (if they still exist), or the drawing-rooms
of Mayfair; and thither your heart perpetually
tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You
are not free. The awakening, then, of your
deeper self, which knows not habit and desires
nothing but free correspondence with the Real,
awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony
between the simple but inexorable longings and
instincts of the buried spirit, now beginning to
assert themselves in your hours of meditation —
pushing out, as it were, towards the light — and
the various changeful, but insistent longings and
instincts of the surface-self. Between these two
no peace is possible: they conflict at every turn.
It becomes apparent to you that the declaration
of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by all the mys
tics, conceming a "higher" and a "lower" life,
and the cleavage that exists between them, has a
certain justification even in the experience of the
ordinary man.
That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all
human personality was thus two-fold: thus capa-

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 6i
ble of correspondence with two orders of existence.
The "higher life" was always tending towards
union with Reality; towards the gathering of it
self up into One, The "lower life," framed for
correspondence with the outward world of multi
plicity, was always tending to fall downwards,
and fritter the powers of the self among external
things. This is but a restatement, in terms of
practical existence, of the fact which Recollec
tion brought home to us: that the human self is
transitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of
living towards either Eternity or Time. But it is
one thing to frame beautiful theories on these
subjects: another when the unresolved dualism of
your own personality (though you may not give
it this high-sounding name) becomes the main
fact of consciousness, perpetually reasserts itself
as a vital problem, and refuses to take academic
rank. This state of things means the acute discomfort
which ensues on being pulled two ways at once.
The uneasy swaying of attention between two in
compatible ideals, the alternating conviction that
there is something wrong, perverse, poisonouSj,

62 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
about life as you have always lived it, and some
thing hopelessly ethereal about the life which your
innermost inhabitant wants to live — these dis
agreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger.
First one and then the other asserts itself. You
fluctuate miserably between their attractions and
their claims; and will have no peace until these
claims have been met, and the apparent opposition
between them resolved. You are sure now that
there is another, more durable and more "rea
sonable," life possible to the human consciousness
than that on which it usually spends itself. But it
is also clear to you that you must yourself be some
thing 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 recol
lection a first quick vision of that plane of being
which Augustine called "the land of peace," the
"beauty old and new." You know for evermore
that it exists: that the real thing within yourself
belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time
invited and enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to
feel and know in every fibre of your being the
mystical need of "union with Reality"; and to

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 63
realise that the natural scene which you have ac
cepted so trustfully cannot provide the corres
pondences toward which you are stretching out.
Nevertheless, it is to correspondences with this
natural order that you have given for many years
your full attention, your desire, your will. The
surface-self, left for so long in undisputed posses
sion of the conscious field, has grown strong, and
cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the
obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent
security, and building up, from a selection
amongst the more concrete elements offered it by
the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of "fixed
ideas." It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet.
You must detach it by main force. That old
comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard
shell from the living waters of the sea, must now
come to an end. A conflict of some kind — a
severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices
— is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to
the form which the new adjustments must take.
Now although in a general way we may regard
the practical man's attitude to existence as a
limpet-like adherence to the unreal ; yet, from an-

64 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
other point of view, fixity of purpose and desire
is the last thing we can attribute to him. His
mind is full of little whirlpools, twists and cur
rents, conflicting systems, incompatible desires.
One after another, he centres himself on ambition,
love, duty, friendship, social convention, politics,
religion, self-interest in one of its myriad forms;
making of each a core round which whole sections
of his life are arranged. One after another, these
things either fail him or enslave him. Sometimes
they become obsessions, distorting his judgment,
narrowing his outlook, colouring his whole exist
ence. Sometimes they develop inconsistent char
acters which involve him in public difficulties,
private compromises and self-deceptions of every
kind. They split his attention, fritter his powers.
This state of affairs, which usually passes for an
"active life," begins to take on a different 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

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 65
wretched little whirlpool in the mighty River of
Becoming, interrupting — as he imagines, in his
own interest — its even flow : and within that whirl
pool are numerous petty complexes and counter-
currents, amongst which his will and attention fly
to and fro in a continual state of unrest. The
man who makes a success of his life, in any de
partment, is he who has chosen one from amongst
these claims and interests, and devoted to it his
energetic powers of heart and will; "unifying"
himself about it, and from within it resisting all
counter-claims. He has one objective, one
centre ; has killed out the lesser ones, and simpli
fied himself.
Now the artist, the discoverer, the philosopher,
the lover, the patriot — the true enthusiast for any
form of life — can only achieve the full reality to
which his special art or passion gives access by
innumerable renunciations. He must kill out the
smaller centres of interest, in order that his whole
will, love, and attention may pour itself out to
wards, seize upon, unite with, that special mani
festation of the beauty and significance of the uni
verse to which he is drawn. So, too, a deliberate

66 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
self-simplification, a "purgation" of the heart and
will, is demanded of those who would develop the
form of consciousness called "mystical." All
your power, all your resolution, is needed if you
are to succeed in this adventure : there must be no
frittering of energy, no mixture of motives. We
hear much of the mystical temperament, the mys
tical vision. The mystical character is far more
important: and its chief ingredients are courage,
singleness of heart, and self-control. It is to
wards the perfecting of these military virtues, not
to the production of a pious softness, that the dis
cipline 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 ap
pearance perpetually makes upon your attention
and your desire, make much use of the new power
which Recollection has disclosed to you; and this
Recollection itself, so long as it remains merely a
matter of attention and does not involve the

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 67
heart, is no better than a psychic trick. You are
committed therefore, as the fruit of your first at
tempts at self-knowledge, to a deliberate — prob
ably a difficult — rearrangement of your character;
to the stern course of self-discipline, the voluntary
acts of choice on the one hand and of rejection
on the other, which ascetic writers describe under
the formidable names of Detachment and Morti
fication. By Detachment they mean the eviction
of the limpet from its crevice; the refusal to an
chor yourself to material things, to regard exist
ence from the personal standpoint, or confuse cus
tom with necessity. By Mortification, they mean
the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and cur
rents of your own conflicting passions, interests,
desires; the killing out of all those tendencies
which the peaceful vision of Recollection would
condemn, and which create the fundamental op
position between your interior and exterior life.
What then, in the last resort, is the source of
this opposition; the true reason of your uneasiness,
your unrest? The reason lies, not in any real
incompatibility between the interests of the tem
poral and the eternal orders; which are but two

68 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
aspects of one Fact, two expressions of one Love.
It lies solely in yourself; in your attitude towards
the world of things. You are enslaved by the
verb "to have" : all your reactions to life consist in
corporate or individual demands, appetites, wants.
That "love of life" of which we sometimes speak
is mostly cupboard-love. We are quick to snap
at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a
proceeding which we dignify by the name of
pessimism. The mystic knows not this attitude
of demand. He tells us again and again, that
"he is rid of all his asking" ; that "henceforth the
heat of having shall never scorch him more."
Compare this with your normal attitude to the
world, practical man: your quiet certitude that
you are well within your rights in pushing the
claims of "the I, the Me, the Mine" ; your habit,
if you be religious, of asking for the weather and
the government that you want, of persuading the
Supernal Powers to take a special interest in your
national or personal health and prosperity. How
often in each day do you deliberately revert to an
attitude of disinterested adoration? Yet this is
the only attitude in which tme communion with

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 69
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 some
thing which as yet you have not: wealth, honour,
success, social position, love, friendship, comfort,
amusement. You feel that you have a right to
some of these things: to a certain recognition of
your powers, a certain immunity from failure or
humiliation. You resent anything which op
poses you in these matters. You become restless
when you see other selves more skilful in the
game of acquisition than yourself. You hold
tight against all comers your own share of the
spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boring
responsibilities and unattractive, unremunerative
toil; are greedy of pleasure and excitement, de
voted to the art of having a good time. If you
possess a social sense, you demand these things
not only for yourself but for your tribe — the
domestic or racial group to which you belong.
These dispositions, so ordinary that they almost
pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt fore
fathers the Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger,
En'vy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust. Per-

70 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
haps you would rather call them — as indeed they
are — the seven common forms of egotism. They
represent the natural reactions to life of the self-
centred human consciousness, enslaved by the
"world of multiplicity"; and constitute absolute
barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as
these dispositions govern character we can never
see or feel things as they are; but only as they
affect ourselves, our family, our party, our busi
ness, our church, our empire — the I, the Me, the
Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations.
Only the detached and purified heart can view all
things — the irrational cruelty of circumstance, the
tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life, the
acts and beliefs of enemy and friend — in true 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

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 71
act and relation which constitutes "sin" is the
separation of the individual spirit from the whole ;
the ridiculous megalomania which makes each
man the centre of his universe. Hence comes the
turning inwards and condensation of his energies
and desires, till they do indeed form a "lump" ; a
hard, tight core about which all the currents of
his existence swirl. This heavy weight within
the heart resists every outgoing impulse of the
spirit; and tends to draw all things inward and
downward to itself, never to pour itself forth in
love, enthusiasm, sacrifice. "So long," says the
Theologia Germanica, "as a man seeketh his own
will and his own highest good, because it is his,
and for his own sake, he will never find it: for so
long as he doeth this, he is not seeking his own
highest good, and how then should he find it?
For so long as he doeth this, he seeketh himself,
and dreameth that he is himself the highest
good. , . . But whosoever seeketh, loveth, and
pursueth goodness, as goodness and for the sake
of goodness, and maketh that his end — for noth
ing but the love of goodness, not for love of the
I, Me, Mine, Self, and the like — he will find the

72 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 sim
plicity to the great rhythms of life; and this will
only come when the ungainly "lump" of sin is
broken, and the verb "to have," which expresses
its reaction to existence, is ejected from the centre
of your consciousness. Then your attitude to
life will cease to be commercial, and become ar
tistic. Then the guardian at the gate, scmtinis-
ing and sorting the incoming impressions, will no
longer ask, "What use is this to me?" before ad
mitting the angel of beauty or significance who
demands your hospitality. Then things will
cease to have power over you. You will become
free. "Son," says a Kempis, "thou oughtest
diligently to attend to this; that in every place,
every action or outward occupation, thou be in-
v/ardly free and mighty in thyself, and all things

SELF-ADJUSTMENT 73
be under thee, and thou not under them ; that thou
be lord and govemor of thy deeds, not servant."
It is therefore by the withdrawal of your will
from its feverish attachment to things, till "they
are under thee and thou not under them," that
you will gradually resolve the opposition between
the recollective and the active sides of your per
sonality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental
attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty
and sometimes perfect freedom — for these are two
aspects of one thing — will become possible to you.
Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and
throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you
go, you shall at last arrive at the point which they
call the summit of the spirit; where the various
forces of your character — ^brute energy, keen in
tellect, desirous heart — long dissipated amongst a
thousand little wants and preferences, are gath
ered into one, and become a strong and disciplined
instrument wherewith your true self can force a
path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.

CHAPTER VI
LOVE AND WILL
This steady effort towards the simplifying of
your tangled character, its gradual emancipation
from the fetters of the unreal, is not to dispense
you from that other special training of the at
tention which the diligent practice of meditation
and recollection effects. Your pursuit of the one
must never involve neglect of the other ; for these
are the two sides — one moral, the other mental —
of that unique process of self-conquest which
Ruysbroeck calls "the gathering of the forces of
the soul into the unity of the spirit" : the welding
together of all your powers, the focussing of them
upon one point. Hence they should never, either
in theory or practice, be separated. Only the act
of recollection, the constantly renewed retreat to
the quiet centre of the spirit, gives that assurance
of a Reality, a calmer and more valid life attain
able by us, which supports the stress and pain of
self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even
74

LOVE AND WILL 75
in the teeth of the world's cmelty, indifference,
degeneracy; whilst diligent character-building
alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at self-
adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks
the human tendency to relapse into and react to
the obvious, and makes possible the further de
velopment of the contemplative power.
So it is through and by these two great changes
in your attitude towards things — first, the change
of attention, which enables you to perceive a truer
universe; next, the deliberate rearrangement of
your ideas, energies, and desires in harmony with
that which you have seen — that a progressive
uniformity of life and experience is secured to
you, and you are defended against the dangers of
an indolent and useless mysticality. Only the
real, say the mystics, can know Reality, for "we
behold that which we are," the universe which we
see is conditioned by the character of the mind
that sees it: and this realness — since that which
you seek is no mere glimpse of Eternal Life, but
complete possession of it — ^must apply to every
aspect of your being, the rich totality of character,
all the "forces of the soul," not to some thin and

76 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
isolated "spiritual sense" alone. This is why
recollection and self-simplification — perception
of, and adaptation to, the Spiritual World in
which we dwell — are the essential preparations
for the mystical life, and neither can exist in a
wholesome and well-balanced form without the
other. By them the mind, the will, the heart,
which so long had dissipated their energies over a
thousand scattered notions, wants, and loves, are
gradually detached from their old exclusive pre
occupation with the ephemeral interests of the
self, or of the group to which the self belongs.
You, if you practise them, will find after a time
— ^perhaps a long time — that the hard work which
they involve has indeed brought about a profound
and definite change in you, A new suppleness
has taken the place of that rigidity which you
have been accustomed to mistake for strength of
character: an easier attitude towards the acci
dents 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

LOVE AND WILL 77
from inordinate attachments," the "heat of hav
ing" does not scorch you any more; and because
of this you possess great inward liberty, a sense
of spaciousness and peace. Released from the
obsessions which so long had 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? It
shall take a practical form, shall express itself in
terms of movement : the pressing outwards of the
whole personality, the eager and trustful stretch
ing of it towards the fresh universe which awaits
you. As all scattered thinking was cut off in
recollection, as all vagrant and unworthy desires
have been killed by the exercises of detachment;
so now all scattered willing, all hesitations be
tween the indrawing and outflowing instincts of
the soul, shall be checked and resolved. You are
to push with all your power : not to absorb ideas,
but to pour forth will and love. With this
"conative act," as the psychologists would call it,
the tme contemplative life begins. Contempla-

78 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
tion, you see, has no very close connection with
dreaminess and idle musing : it is more like the in
tense effort of vision, the passionate and self-
forgetful act of communion, presupposed in all
creative art. It is, says one old English mystic,
"a blind intent stretching . , , a privy love
pressed" in the direction of Ultimate Beauty,
athwart all the checks, hindrances, and contradic
tions of the restless world: a "loving stretching
out" towards Reality, says the great Ruysbroeck,
than whom none has gone further on this path.
Tension, ardour, are of its essence : it demands the
perpetual exercise of industry and courage.
We observe in such definitions as these a strange
neglect of that glory of man, the Pure Intellect,
with which the spiritual prig enjoys to believe
that he can climb up to the Empyrean itself. It
almost seems as though the mystics shared Keats'
view of the supremacy of feeling over thought;
and reached out towards some new and higher
range of sensation, rather than towards new and
more accurate ideas. They are ever eager to as
sure us that man's most sublime thoughts of the
Transcendent are but a little better than his

LOVE AND WILL 79
worst: that loving intuition is the only certain
guide, "By love may He be gotten and holden,
but by thought never."
Yet here you are not to fall into the clumsy
error of supposing that the things which are be
yond the grasp of reason are necessarily unrea
sonable things. Immediate feeling, so far as it is
true, does not oppose but transcends and com
pletes the highest results of thought. It contains
within itself the sum of all the processes through
which thought would pass in the act of attaining
the same goal : supposing thought to have reached
— as it has not — the high pitch at which it was
capable of thinking its way all along this road.
In the preliminary act of gathering yourself
together, and in those unremitting explorations
through which you came to "a knowing and a
feeling of yourself as you are," thought assuredly
had its place. There the powers of analysis,
criticism, and deduction found work that they
could do. But now it is the love and will — the
feeling, the intent, the passionate desire — of the
self, which shall govern your activities and make
possible your success. Few would care to brave

8o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
the horrors of a courtship conducted upon strictly
intellectual lines: and contemplation is an act of
love, the wooing, not the critical study, of Divine
Reality. It is an eager outpouring of ourselves
towards a Somewhat Other for which we feel a
passion of desire ; a seeking, touching, and tasting,
not a considering and analysing, of the beautiful
and true wherever found. It is, as it were, a re
sponsive act of the organism to those Supemal
Powers without, which touch and stir it. Deep
humility as towards those Powers, a willing sur
render to their control, is the first condition of
success. The mystics speak much of these elusive
contacts ; felt more and more in the soul, as it be
comes increasingly sensitive to the subtle move
ments 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 feel-

LOVE AND WILL 81
ing" in its lowest and least orderly forms. Con
templation 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 tran
scending of reason ever be achieved by way of
spiritual silliness. All the powers of the self,
raised to their intensest form, shall be used in it ;
though used perhaps in a new way. These, the
three great faculties of love, thought, and will
— with which you have been accustomed to make
great show on the periphery of consciousness —
you have, as it were, drawn inwards during the
course of your inward retreat: and by your edu
cation in detachment have cured them of their
tendency to fritter their powers amongst a mul
tiplicity of objects. Now, at the very heart of
personality, you are alone with them; you hold
with you in that "Interior Castle," and undis-
tracted for the moment by the demands of prac
tical existence, the three great tools wherewith
the soul deals with life.
As regards the life you have hitherto looked
upon as "normal," love — understood in its widest

82 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
sense, as desire, emotional inclination — ^has
throughout directed your activities. You did
things, sought things, learned things, even suffered
things, because at bottom you wanted to. Will
has done the work to which love spurred it:
thought has assimilated the results of their activi
ties and made for them pictures, analyses, "ex
planations" of the world with which they had to
deal. But now your purified love discerns and
desires, your will is set towards, something which
thought cannot really assimilate — still less ex
plain. "Contemplation," says Ruysbroeck, "is a
knowing that is in no wise . . . therein all the
workings of the reason fail." That reason has
been trained to deal with the stuff of temporal
existence. It will only make mincemeat of your
experience of Eternity if you give it a chance;
trimming, transforming, rationalising that ineffa
ble vision, trying to force it into a symbolic sys
tem with which the intellect can cope. This is
why the great contemplatives utter again and
again their solemn warning against the deceptive-
ness of thought when it ventures to deal with the
spiritual intuitions of man ; crying with the author

LOVE AND WILL 83
of The Cloud of Unknowing, "Look that nothing
live in thy working mind but a naked intent
stretching" — the voluntary tension of your ever
growing, ever-moving personality pushing out to
wards the Real. "Love, and do what you like,"
said the wise Augustine : so little does mere surface
activity count, against the deep motive that be
gets it.
The dynamic power of love and will, the fact
that the heart's desire — if it be intense and in
dustrious — is a better earnest of possible fulfil
ment than the most elegant theories of the spirit
ual world; this is the perpetual theme of all the
Christian mystics. By such love, they think, the
worlds themselves were made. By an eager out
stretching towards Reality, they tell us, we tend
to move towards Reality, to enter into its rhythm :
by a humble and unquestioning surrender to it we
permit its entrance into our souls. This twofold
act, in which we find the double character of all
true love — which both gives and takes, yields and
demands — is assured, if we be patient and single-
hearted, of ultimate success. At last our igno
rance shall be done away; and we shall "apprc-

84 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
hend" the real and the etemal, as we apprehend
the sunshine when the sky is free from cloud.
Therefore "Smite upon that thick cloud of un
knowing with a sharp dart of longing love" — and
suddenly it shall part, and disclose the blue,
"Smite," "press," "push," "strive" — these are
strong words: yet they are constantly upon the
lips of the contemplatives when describing the
earlier stages of their art. Clearly, the abolition
of discursive thought is not to absolve you from
the obligations of industry. You are to "ener
gise 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 lov
ing knowledge by union, to which you are grow
ing up. And gradually you come to see that, if
this be so, it is the ardent will that shall be the
prime agent of your undertaking : a will which has
now become the active expression of your deepest
and purest desires. About this the recollected
and simplified self is to gather itself as a centre;

LOVE AND WILL 85
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 exer
cise. The attitude which it involves is an atti
tude of complete humility and of receptiveness ;
without criticism, without clever analysis of the
thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender
your I-hood; see things at last as the artist does,
for their sake, not for your own. The funda
mental unity that is in you reaches out to the
unity that is in them: and you achieve the
"Simple Vision" of the poet and the mystic —
that synthetic and undistorted apprehension of
things which is the antithesis of the single vision
of practical men. The doors of perception are
cleansed, and everything appears as it is. The
disfiguring results of hate, rivalry, prejudice, van
ish away. Into that silent place to which recol
lection has brought you, new music, new colour,
new light, are poured from the outward world.
The conscious love which achieves this vision

86 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
may, indeed must, fluctuate — "As long as thou
livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though
thou wilt not !" But the will which that love has
enkindled can hold attention in the right direc
tion. It can refuse to relapse to unreal and
egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in
darkness, and in the suffering which such dark
ness brings to the awakened spirit, its appointed
task, cutting a way into new levels of Reality,
Therefore this transitional stage in the develop
ment of the contemplative powers — in one sense
the completion of their elementary schooling, in
another the beginning of their true activities — is
concerned with the toughening and further train
ing of that will which self-simplification has de
tached from its old concentration upon the unreal
wants and interests of the self. Merged with
your intuitive love, this is to become the true
agent of your encounter with Reality; for that
Simple Eye of Intention, which is so supremely
your own, and in the last resort the maker of
your universe and controller of your destiny, is
nothing else but a synthesis of such energetic will
and such uncorrupt desire, turned and held in
the direction of the Best.

CHAPTER VII
THE FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
Concentration, recollection, a profound self-
criticism, the stilling of his busy surface-intellect,
his restless emotions of enmity and desire, the
voluntary achievement of an attitude of disin
terested love — ^by these strange paths the practical
man has now been led, in order that he may know
by communion something of the greater Life in
which he is immersed and which he has so long
and so successfully ignored. He has managed
in his own small way something equivalent to
those drastic purifications, those searching read
justments, 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, per
haps, he may share to some extent in that illum
ination, that extended and intensified perception
of things, which they declare to be the heritage
of the liberated consciousness, 87

88 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
This illumination shall be gradual. The at
tainment of it depends not so much upon a phi
losophy accepted, or a new gift of vision sud
denly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing
and widening of character; a progressive growth
towards the Real, an ever more profound har-
monisation of the self's life with the greater and
inclusive rhythms of existence. It shall there
fore develop in width and depth as the sphere of
that self's intuitive love extends. As your own
practical sympathy with and understanding of
other lives, your realisation of them, may be
narrowed and stiffened to include no more than the
family group, or spread over your fellow-workers,
your class, your city, party, country, or religion
— even perhaps the whole race — till you feel
yourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffer
ing with it, and partake of its whole conscious
life ; so here. Self-mergence is a gradual process,
dependent on a progressive unlimiting of person
ality. The apprehension of Reality which re
wards it is gradual too. In essence, it is one con
tinuous out-flowing movement towards that
boundless heavenly consciousness where the "flam-

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 89
ing ramparts" which shut you from true commun
ion with all other selves and things is done away;
an unbroken process of expansion and simplifica
tion, 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 individu
ality, these willing submissions to the compelling
rhythm of a larger existence than that of the
solitary individual or even of the human group —
by this perpetual widening, deepening, and un-
selfing of your attentiveness — ^you are to enlarge
your boundaries and become the citizen of a
greater, more joyous, more poignant world, the
partaker of a more abundant life. The limits of
this enlargement have not yet been discovered.
The greatest contemplatives, returning from their
highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is
"unwalled." But this growth into higher realities, this blos
soming of your contemplative consciousness —
though it be, like all else we know in life, an un
broken process .of movement and change — ^must
be broken up and reduced to the series of concrete

90 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
forms which we call "order" if our inelastic minds
are to grasp it. So, we will consider it as the
successive achievement of those three levels or
manifestations of Reality, which we have agreed
to call the Natural World of Becoming, the
Metaphysical World of Being, and — last and
highest — that Divine Reality within which these
opposites are found as one. Though these three
worlds of experience are so plaited together, that
intimations from the deeper layers of being con
stantly reach you through the natural scene, it
is in this order of realisation that you may best
think of them, and of your own gradual upgrowth
to the full stature of humanity. To elude nature,
to refuse her friendship, and attempt to leap the
river of life in the hope of finding God on the
other side, is the common error of a perverted
mysticality. It is as fatal in result as the opposite
error of deliberately arrested development, which,
being attuned to the wonderful rhythms of nat
ural life, is content with this increase of sensi
bility; and, becoming a "nature-mystic," asks no
more. So you are to begin with that first form of con-

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 91
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 explora
tion of the world that lies at your gates; the "ebb
and flow and ever-during power" of which your
own existence forms a part. You are to push
back the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all
duration is included in the widening circles of
its intuitive love : till you find in every manifesta
tion of life — even those which you have petulantly
classified as cruel or obscene — the ardent self-
expression of that Immanent Being whose spark
burns deep in your own soul.
The Indian mystics speak perpetually of the
visible universe as the Llld or Sport of God: the
Infinite deliberately expressing Himself in finite
form, the musical manifestation of His creative
joy. All gracious and all courteous souls, they
think, will gladly join His play; considering
rather the wonder and achievement of the whole
— its vivid movement, its strange and terrible
evocations of beauty from torment, nobility from
conflict and death, its mingled splendour of

92 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
sacrifice and triumph — than their personal con
quests, disappointments, and fatigues. In the
first form of contemplation you are to realise the
movement of this game, in which you have played
so long a languid and involuntary part, and find
your own place in it. It is flowing, growing,
changing, making perpetual unexpected patterns
within the evolving melody of the Divine
Thought, In all things it is incomplete, unstable;
and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring on
the battlefield, living and breeding in the slum,
adventurous and studious, sensuous and pure —
more, your great comrades, the hills, the trees,
the rivers, the darting birds, the scuttering insects,
the little soft populations of the grass — all these
are playing with you. They move one to another
in delicate responsive measures, now violent, now
gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet ever
weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedi
ent to the music of that invisible Choragus whom
Boehme and Plotinus knew. What is that great
wind which blows without, in continuous and
ineffable harmonies ? Part of you, practical man.
There is but one music in the world: and to it

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 93
you contribute perpetually, whether you will or
no, your one little ditty of no tone.
"Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this
music :
The hills and the sea and the earth dance:
The world of man dances in laughter and tears."
It seems a pity to remain in ignorance of this, to
keep as it were a plate-glass window between
yourself and your fellow-dancers — all those other
thoughts of God, perpetually becoming, changing
and growing beside you — and commit yourself to
the unsocial attitude of the "cat that walks by
itself." Begin therefore at once. Gather yourself up,
as the exercises of recollection have taught you to
do. Then — with attention no longer frittered
amongst the petty accidents and interests of your
personal life, but poised, tense, ready for the work
you shall demand of it — stretch out by a distinct
act of loving will towards one of the myriad
manifestations of life that surround you: and
which, in an ordinary way, you hardly notice
imless you happen to need them. Pour yourself
out towards it, do not draw its image towards

94 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
you. Deliberate — more, impassioned — attentive
ness, an attentiveness which soon transcends all
consciousness of yourself, as separate from and
attending to the thing seen; this is the condition
of success. As to the object of contemplation,
it matters little. From Alp to insect, anything
will do, provided that your attitude be right:
for all things in this world towards which you
are stretching out are linked together, and one
tmly apprehended will be the gateway to the
rest. Look with the eye of contemplation on the
most dissipated tabby of the streets, and you shall
discern the celestial quality of life set like an
aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his
strident mew an echo of
"The deep enthusiastic joy,
The rapture of the hallelujah sent
From all that breathes and is."
The sooty tree up which he scrambles to escape
your earnest gaze is holy too. It contains for you
the whole divine cycle of the seasons; upon the
plane of quiet, its inward pulse is clearly to be
heard. But you must look at these things as you

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 95
would look into the eyes of a friend: ardently,
selflessly, without considering his reputation, his
practical uses, his anatomical peculiarities, or the
vices which might emerge were he subjected to
psycho-analysis. Such a simple exercise, if entered upon with
singleness of heart, will soon repay you. By
this quiet yet tense act of communion, this loving
gaze, you will presently discover a relationship —
far more intimate than anything you imagined —
between yourself and the surrounding "objects of
sense"; and in those objects of sense a profound
significance, a personal quality, and actual power
of response, which you might in cooler moments
think absurd. Making good your correspond
ences with these fellow-travellers, you will leam
to say with Whitman :
"You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and
give them shape !
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate
equable showers !
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadside !
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are
so dear to me."

96 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
A subtle interpenetration of your spirit with the
spirit of those "unseen existences," now so deeply
and thrillingly felt by you, will take place. Old
barriers will vanish: and you will become aware
that St. Francis was accurate as well as charming
when he spoke of Brother Wind and Sister Water;
and that Stevenson was obviously right when he
said, that since
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we ought all to be happy as kings."
Those glad and vivid "things" will speak to
you. They will offer you news at least as definite
and credible as that which the paper-boy is hawk
ing in the street: direct messages from that
Beauty which the artist reports at best at second
hand. Because of your new sensitiveness, an
thems will be heard of you from every gutter;
poems of intolerable loveliness will bud for you
on every weed. Best and greatest, your fellow-
men will shine for you with new significance and
light. Humility and awe will be evoked in you
by the beautiful and patient figures of the poor,
their long dumb heroisms, their willing acceptance

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 97
of the burden of life. All the various members
of the human group, the little children and the
aged, those who stand for energy, those dedicated
to skill, to thought, to plainest service, or to
prayer, will have for you fresh vivid significance,
be felt as part of your own wider being. All
adventurous endeavours, all splendour of pain
and all beauty of play — more, that grey unceas
ing effort of existence which makes up the ground
work of the social web, and the ineffective hopes,
enthusiasms, and loves which transfuse it — all
these will be seen and felt by you at last as full
of glory, full of meaning; for you will see them
with innocent, attentive, disinterested eyes, feel
them as infinitely significant and adorable parts
of the Transcendent Whole in which you also
are immersed.
This discovery of your fraternal link with all
living things, this down-sinking of your arrogant
personality into the great generous stream of life,
marks an important stage in your apprehension of
that Science of Love which contemplation is to
teach. You are not to confuse it with pretty
fancies about nature, such as all imaginative

98 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
persons enjoy; still less, with a self-conscious and
deliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable
condition of awareness; a direct perception, not
an opinion or an idea. For those who attain it,
the span of the senses is extended. These live in
a world which is lit with an intenser light; has, as
George Fox insisted, "another smell than before."
They hear all about them the delicate music of
growth, and see the "new colour" of which the
mystics speak.
Further, you will observe that this act, and the
attitude which is proper to it, differs in a very 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
respects. Then, it was an idea or image from
amongst the common stock — one of those con
ceptual labels with which the human paste-brush
has decorated the surface of the universe — which
you were encouraged to hold before your mind.
Now, turning away from the label, you shall
surrender yourself to the direct message poured
out towards you by the thing. Then, you con
sidered : now, you are to absorb. This experience

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 99
will be, in the very highest sense, the experience
of sensation without thought: the essential sensa
tion, the "savouring" to which some of the mystics
invite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses
offer us a transient sacrament. So here at last,
in this intimate communion, this "simple seeing,"
this total surrender of you to the impress of things,
you are using to the full the sacred powers of
sense: and so using them, because you are con
centrating upon them, accepting their reports in
simplicity. You have, in this contemplative
outlook, carried the peculiar methods of artistic
apprehension to their highest stage : with the result
that the sense-world has become for you, as
Erigena said that all creatures were, "a theophany,
or appearance of God." Not, you observe, a
symbol, but a showing: a very different thing.
You have begun now the Plotinian ascent from
multiplicity to unity, and therefore begin to per
ceive in the Many the clear and actual presence
of the One: the changeless and absolute Life,
manifesting itself in all the myriad nascent, cres
cent, cadent lives. Poets, gazing thus at the
"flower in the crannied wall" or the "green thing

loo PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 des
perate effort to persuade us to exchange the false
world of "Nature" on which we usually look —
and which is not really Nature at all — for this,
the true world, to which he gave the confusing
name of "Imagination." For these, the con
templation of the World of Becoming assumes
the intense form which we call genius: even to
read their poems is to feel the beating of a heart,
the upleap of a joy, greater than anything that
we have known. Yet your own little efforts
towards the attainment of this level of conscious
ness will at least give to you, together with a
more vivid universe, a wholly new comprehension
of their works ; and that of other poets and artists
who have drunk from the chalice of the Spirit of
Life. These works are now observed by you to

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST lor
be the only artistic creations to which the name
of Realism is appropriate ; and it is by the stand
ard of reality that you shall now criticise them,
recognising in utterances which you once dismissed
as rhetoric the desperate efforts of the clear
sighted towards the exact description of things
veritably seen in that simplified state of conscious
ness 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 Julian of Norwich,
gazing upon "a little thing, the quantity of an
hazel nut," found in it the epitome of all that
was made; for therein she perceived the royal
character of life. So small and helpless in its
mightiest forms, so august even in its meanest,
that life in its wholeness was then realised by
her as the direct outbirth of, and the meek de
pendant upon, the Energy of Divine Love. She
felt at once the fugitive character of its apparent
existence, the perdurable Reality within which
it was held. "I marvelled," she said, "how it
might last, for methought it might suddenly have
fallen to naught for littleness. And I was an-

102 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
swered in my understanding: It lasteth, and
ever shall, for that God loveth it. And so All-
thing hath the being by the love of God." To
this same apprehension of Reality, this linking
up of each finite expression with its Origin, this
search for the inner significance of every fragment
of life, one of the greatest and most balanced
contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence
Nightingale, reached out when she exclaimed in
an hour of self-examination, "I must strive to
see only God in my friends, and God in my
cats." Yet it is not the self -tormenting strife of 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 life, a holding on to results achieved
in your best moments, that shall do it for you : a
surrender not limp but deliberate, a trustful self-
donation, a "living faith." "A pleasing stirring
of love," says The Cloud of Unknowing; not a
desperate anxious struggle for more light. True
contemplation can only thrive when defended
from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the

CONTEMPLATION— FIRST 103
one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other.
Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it
anything to gain. Though the way may be long,
the material of your mind intractable, to the
eager lover of Reality ultimate success is assured.
The strong tide of Transcendent Life will in
evitably invade, clarify, uplift the consciousness
which is open to receive it; a movement from
without — subtle yet actual — answering each
willed movement from within. "Your opening
and His -entering," says Eckhart, "are but one
moment." When, therefore, you put aside your
preconceived ideas, your self-centred scale of
values, and let intuition have its way with you,
you open up by this act new levels of the world.
Such an opening-up is the most practical of all
activities ; for then and then only will your diurnal
existence, and the natural scene in which that
existence is set, begin to give up to you its rich
ness and meaning. Its paradoxes and inequalities
will be disclosed as true constituents of its beauty,
an inconceivable splendour will be shaken out
from its dingiest folds. Then, and only then,
escaping the single vision of the selfish, you will

104 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
begin to guess all that your senses were meant to
be.
"I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her
who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her
who remains jagged and broken."

CHAPTER VIII
the second form of contemplation
"And here," says Ruysbroeck of the self which
has reached this point, "there begins a hunger
and a thirst which shall never more be stilled."
In the First Form of Contemplation that self
has been striving to know better its own natural
plane of existence. It has stretched out the
feelers of its intuitive love into the general stream
of duration of which it is a part. Breaking down
the fences of personality, merging itself in a
larger, consciousness, it has learned to know the
World of Becoming from within — as a citizen,
a member of the great society of life, not merely
as a spectator. But the more deeply and com
pletely you become immersed in and aware of
this life, the greater the extension of your con
sciousness; the more insistently will mmours and
intimations of a higher plane of experience, a
closer unity and more complete synthesis, begin
105

io6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
to besiege you. You feel that hitherto you nave
received the messages of life in a series of dis
connected words and notes, from which your mind
constructed as best it could certain coherent
sentences and tunes — laws, classifications, rela
tions, and the rest. But now you reach out to
wards the ultimate sentence and melody, which
exist independently of your own constructive
efforts; and realise that the words and notes
which so often puzzled you by displaying an in
tensity that exceeded the demands of your little
world, only have beauty and meaning just be
cause and in so far as you discern them to be the
partial expressions of a greater whole which is
still beyond your reach.
You have long been like a child tearing up
the petals of flowers in order to make a mosaic
on the garden path; and the results of this mur
derous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of
the world. When the bits fitted with unusual
exactitude, you called if science. Now at last
you have perceived the greater truth and loveli
ness of the living plant from which you broke
them: have, in fact, entered into direct commun-

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 107
ion with it, "united" with its reality. But this
very recognition of the living growing plant does
and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper
realities, which, as yet, you have not touched:
of the intangible things and forces which feed and
support it; of the whole universe that touches
you through its life, A mere cataloguing of all
the plants — though this were far better than your
old game of indexing your own poor photographs
of them — will never give you access to the Unity,
the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests
itself through them. To suppose that it can do
so is the cardinal error of the "nature mystic" :
an error parallel with that of the psychologist
who looks for the soul in "psychic states."
The deeper your realisation of the plant in its
wonder, the more perfect your union with the
world of growth and change, the quicker, the more
subtle your response to its countless suggestions;
so much the more acute will become your craving
for Something More. You will now find and
feel the Infinite and Eternal, making as it were
veiled and sacramental contacts with you under
these accidents — through these its ceaseless crea-

loS PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
tive activities — and you will want to press through
and beyond them, to a fuller realisation of, a
more perfect and unmediated union with, the
Substance of all That Is. With the great widen
ing and deepening of your life that has ensued
from the abolition of a narrow selfhood, your
entrance into the larger consciousness of living
things, there has necessarily come to you an in
stinctive knowledge of a final and absolute group-
relation, transcending and including all lesser
unions in its sweep. To this, the second stage
of contemplation, in which human consciousness
enters into its peculiar heritage, something within
you now seems to urge you on.
If you obey this inward push, pressing forward
with the "sharp dart of your longing love," forcing
the point of your wilful attention further and
further into the web of things, such an ever-
deepening realisation, such an extension of your
conscious life, will indeed become possible to you.
Nothing but your own apathy, your feeble and
limited desire, limits this realisation. Here there
is a strict relation between demand and supply —
your achievement shall be in proportion to the

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 109
greamess of your desire. The fact, and the in-
pressing energy, of the Reality without does not
vary. Only the extent to which you are able to
receive it depends upon your courage and gener
osity, the measure in which you give yourself to
its embrace. Those minds which set a limit to
their self-donation must feel as they attain it,
not a sense of satisfaction but a sense of 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 wildemess that is unwalled;
that wild strange place of silence where "lovers
lose themselves."
Yet you must begin this great adventure
humbly; and take, as Julian of Norwich did, the
first stage of your new outward-going 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 one
ness of the created universe, her deep and loving
sight perceived in it successively three properties,

110 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
which she expressed as well as she might under
the symbols of her own theology: "The first is
that God made it; the second is that God loveth
it; the third is that God keepeth it." Here are
three phases in the ever-widening contemplative
apprehension of Reality. Not three opinions,
but three facts, for which she struggles to find
words. The first is that each separate living
thing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree
of life, and there destined to mature, age, and
die, is the outbirth of another power, of a
creative push: that the World of Becoming in
all its richness and variety is not ultimate, but
formed by Something other than, and utterly
transcendent to, itself. This, of course, the
religious mind invariably takes for granted: but
we are concerned with immediate experience
rather than faith. To feel and know those two
aspects of Reality which we call "created" and
"uncreated," nature and spirit — to be as sharply
aware of them, as sure of them, as we are of land
and sea — is to be made free of the supersensual
world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's
side, and see that Poem of which you have de-

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND iii
ciphered separate phrases in the earlier form of
contemplation. Then you were learning to read :
and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas, an
astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how
much greater the significance of every detail
would appear to you, how much more truly you
would possess its life, were you acquainted with
the Poem : not as a mere succession of such lines
and stanzas, but as a non-successional whole.
From this Julian passes to that deeper knowl
edge of the heart which comes from a humble
and disinterested acceptance of life; that this
Creation, this whole changeful natural order,
with all its apparent collisions, cruelties, and
waste, yet springs from an ardour, an immeas
urable love, a perpetual donation, which generates
it, upholds it, drives it; for "all-thing hath the
being by the love of God." Blake's anguished
question here receives its answer: the Mind that
conceived the lamb conceived the tiger too.
Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gra
cious, terrible, or malignant, is enwrapped in
love: and is part of a world produced, not by
mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire.

112 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing
despicable ; nothing, however perverted, irredeema
ble. The blasphemous other-worldliness of the
false mystic who conceives of matter as an evil
thing and flies from its "deceits," is corrected by
this loving sight. Hence, the more beautiful and
noble a thing appears to us, the more we love it —
so much the more truly do we see it : for then we
perceive within it the Divine ardour surging up
towards expression, and share that simplicity and
purity of vision in which most saints and some
poets see all things "as they are in God."
Lastly, this love-driven world of duration —
this work within which the Divine Artist pas
sionately and patiently expresses His infinite
dream under finite forms — is held in another,
mightier embrace. It is "kept," says Julian.
Paradoxically, the perpetual changeful energies of
love and creation which inspire it are gathered up
and made complete within the unchanging fact
of Being : the Eternal and Absolute, within which
the world of things is set as the tree is set in the
supporting earth, the enfolding air. There,
finally, is the rock and refuge of the seeking con-

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 1 1 3
sciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the
flux. There that flux exists in its wholeness, "all
at once"; in a manner which we can never com
prehend, but which in hours of withdrawal we
may sometimes taste and feel. It is in man's
moments of contact with this, when he penetrates
beyond all images, however lovely, however
significant, to that ineffable awareness which the
mystics call "Naked Contemplation" — since it is
stripped of all the clothing with which reason and
imagination drape and disguise both our devils
and our gods — that the hunger and thirst of the
heart is satisfied, and we receive indeed an assur
ance of ultimate Reality. This assurance is not
the cool conclusion of a successful argument. It
is rather the seizing at last of Something which
we have ever felt near us and enticing us: the
unspeakably simple because completely inclusive
solution of all the puzzles of life.
As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up
yet actual reality of the natural world, in order
that it might give itself to you, and your pos
session of its secret was achieved, first by sur
render of selfhood, next by a diligent thrusting

114 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
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 con
sciousness, and gather itself again to one intense
point of personality. It has too an innate
knowledge of — an instinct for — another, greater
rhythm, another order of Reality, as yet outside
its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for
the Infinite, This capacity, this unfulfilled crav
ing, 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

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 115
to still that strange hunger for some final object
of devotion, some completing and elucidating
vision, some total self -donation, some great and
perfect Act within which your little activity can
be merged.
St, Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only
withheld from this desired vision of the Divine
Essence, this discovery of the Pure Act (which
indeed is everywhere pressing in on him and sup
porting him), by the apparent necessity which
he is under of turning to bodily images, of break
ing up his continuous and living intuition into
conceptual scraps ; in other words, because he can
not live the life of sensation without thought.
But it is not the man, it is merely his mental
machinery which is under this "necessity." This
it is which translates, analyses, incorporates in
finite images the boundless perceptions of the
spirit: passing through its prism the White Light
of Reality, and shattering it to a succession of
coloured rays. Therefore the man who would
know the Divine Secret must unshackle himself
more thoroughly than ever before from the
tyranny of the image-making power. As it is

ii6 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn
to know life, so it is not by the methods of the
intellect that we learn to know God.
"For of all other creatures and their works,"
says the author of The Cloud of Unknowing,
"yea, and of the works of God's self, may a man
through grace have full-head of knowing, and
well he can think of them: but of God Himself
can no man think. And therefore I would leave
all that thing that I can think, and choose to
my love that thing that I cannot think. For
why; He may well be loved, but not thought.
By love may He be gotten and holden; but by
thought never."
"Gotten and holden" : homely words, that
suggest rather the outstretching of the hand to
take something lying at your very gates, than the
long outward journey or terrific ascent of the
contemplative soul. Reality indeed, the mystics
say, is "near and far"; far from our thoughts,
but samrating and supporting our lives. Noth
ing would be nearer, nothing dearer, nothing
sweeter, were the doors of our perception truly
cleansed. You have then but to focus attention

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 1 1 7
upon your own deep reality, "realise your own
soul," in order to find it. "We dwell in Him
and He in us" : you participate in the Eternal
Order now. The vision of the Divine Essence
— the participation of its own small activity in
the Supernal Act — is for the spark of your soul
a perpetual process. On the apex of your per
sonality, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit, melts and
merges in it: from and by this encounter its life
arises and is sustained. But you have been busy
from your childhood with other matters. All the
urgent affairs of "life," as you absurdly called
it, have monopolised your field of consciousness.
Thus all the important events of your real life,
physical and spiritual — the mysterious perpetual
growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits of the
universe into the unstable body which you confuse
with yourself, the hum and whirr of the machine
which preserves your contacts with the material
world, the more delicate movements which condi
tion your correspondences with, and growth with
in, the spiritual order — all these have gone on
unperceived by you. All the time you have been
kept and nourished, like the "Little Thing," by

ii8 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
an enfolding and creative love; yet of this you
are less conscious than you are of the air that
you breathe.
Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you
learned and established, as a patent and experi
enced fact, your fratemal relation with all the
other children of God, entering into the rhythm
of their existence, participating in their stress and
their joy; will you not at least try to make patent
this your filial relation too ? This actualisation of
your true status, your place in the Etemal World,
is waiting for you. It represents the next phase
in your gradual achievement of Reality. The
method by which you will attain to it is strictly
analogous to that by which you obtained a more
vivid awareness of the natural world in which
you grow and move. Here too it shall be direct
intuitive contact, sensation rather than thought,
which shall bring you certitude — "tasting food,
not talking about it," as St. Bonaventura says.
Yet there is a marked difference between these
two stages. In the first, the deliberate inward
retreat and gathering together of your faculties
which was effected by recollection, was the prelude

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 119
to a new coming forth, an outflow from the
narrow limits of a merely personal life to the
better and truer apprehension of the created
world. Now, in the second stage, the disciplined
and recollected attention seems to take an opposite
course. It is directed towards a plane of ex
istence with which your bodily senses have no
attachments: which is not merely misrepresented
by your ordinary concepts, but cannot be rep
resented 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 obscu
rity which St, John of the Cross calls the "Night
of Sense." Do this steadily, checking each
vagrant instinct, each insistent thought, however
"spiritual" it may seem ; pressing ever more deeply
inwards towards that ground, that simple and
undifferentiated Being from which your diverse
faculties emerge. Presently you will find your
self, emptied and freed, in a place stripped bare
of all the machinery of thought; and achieve the
condition of simplicity which those same special-

120 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love,"
and which they declare to be above all human
images and ideas — a state of consciousness in
which "all the workings of the reason fail."
Then you will observe that you have entered into
an intense and vivid silence: a silence which ex
ists in itself, through and in spite of the cease
less noises of your normal world. Within this
world of silence you seem as it were to lose your
self, "to ebb and to flow, to wander and be lost
in the Imageless Ground," says Ruysbroeck,
stmggling to describe the sensations of the self
in this, its first initiation into the "wayless world,
beyond image," where "all is, yet in no wise."
Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you,
the Cloud of Unknowing into which you have
plunged, you are sure that it is well to be here.
A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse,
a strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into
you. You begin to understand what the Psalm
ist meant, when he said, "Be still, and know."
You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim
strange state of which you can say nothing, since
it offers no material to your image-making mind.

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 121
But this wilderness, from one point of view so
bare and desolate, from another is yet strangely
homely. In it, all your sorrowful questionings
are answered without utterance; it is the All,
and you are within it and part of it, and know
that it is good. It calls forth the utmost adora
tion 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 tmly active — seems to you a stillness, a rest.
The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher
life of unity, a lower life of multiplicity, possible
to every human spirit, will now appear to you not
a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact,
which you have verified in your own experience.
You perceive that these are the two complemen
tary ways of apprehending and uniting with Real
ity — the one as a dynamic process, the other as
an eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not
conflict. You know that the flow, the broken-up
world of change and multiplicity, is still going

122 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
on ; and that you, as a creature of the time- world,
are moving and growing with it. But, thanks
to the development of the higher side of your
consciousness, you are now lifted to a new poise;
a direct participation in that simple, transcendent
life "broken, yet not divided," which gives to this
time-world all its meaning and validity. And
you know, without derogation from the realness
of that life of flux within which you first made
good your attachments to the universe, that you
are also a true constituent of the greater whole;
that since you are man, you are also spirit, and are
living Eternal Life now, in the midst of time.
The effect of this form of contemplation, in the
degree in which the ordinary man may learn to
practise it, is like the sudden change of atmos
phere, the shifting of values, which we experi
ence when we pass from the busy streets into a
quiet church; where a lamp burns, and a silence
reigns, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
Thence is poured forth a stillness which strikes
through the tumult without. Eluding the flicker
of the arc-lamps, thence through an upper win
dow we may glimpse a perpetual star.

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 123
The walls of the church, limiting the range of
our attention, shutting out the torrent of life,
with its insistent demands and appeals, make
possible our apprehension of this deep eternal
peace. The character of our consciousness, inter
mediate between Eternity and Time, and ever
ready to swing between them, makes such a de
vice, such a concrete aid to concentration, essen
tial to us. But the peace, the presence, is every
where — for us, not for it, is the altar and the
sanctuary required — and your deliberate, humble
practice of contemplation will teach you at last
to find it; outside the sheltering walls of recollec
tion as well as within. You will realise then
what Julian meant, when she declared the ulti
mate property of all that was made to be that
"God keepeth it" : will feel the violent conscious
ness of an enfolding Presence, utterly transcend
ing the fluid changeful nature-life, and incompre
hensible to the intelligence which that nature-life
has developed and trained. And as you knew
the secret of that nature-life best by surrendering
yourself to it, by entering its currents, and re
fusing to analyse or arrange : so here, by a deliber-

124 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ate giving of yourself to the silence, the rich
"nothingness," the "Cloud," you will draw near
est to the Reality it conceals from the eye of
sense. "Lovers put out the candle and draw the
curtains," says Patmore, "when they wish to see
the God and the Goddess : and in the higher com
munion, the night of thought is the light of per
ception." Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment
of that intuitive awareness, that meek and simple
self-mergence, which the mystics call sometimes,
according to its degree and special circumstances,
the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark,
represents the utmost that human consciousness
can do of itself towards the achievement of union
with Reality. To some it brings joy and peace,
to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of the
lowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at
last can measure itself by the august standards of
the Infinite. Though the trained and diligent
will of the contemplative can, if control of the
attention be really established, recapture this
state of awareness, retreat into the Quiet again
and again, yet it is of necessity a fleeting experi-

CONTEMPLATION— SECOND 125
ence; for man is immersed in duration, subject to
it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease
with the cessation of physical life — perhaps not
then. Perpetual absorption in the Transcendent
is a human impossibility, and the effort to achieve
it is both unsocial and silly. But this experience,
this "ascent to the Nought," changes for ever the
proportions of the life that once has known it;
gives to it depth and height, and prepares the way
for those further experiences, that great trans
figuration of existence which comes when the per
sonal activity of the finite will gives place to the
great and compelling action of another Power,

CHAPTER IX
THE THIRD FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
The hard separation which some mystical writers
insist upon making between "natural" and "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 beliefs, ghosts, and other disagreeable
interferences with the order which he calls
"natural" ; and inclines him to his old attitude of
suspicion in respect of all mystical things. But
some word we must have, to indicate the real
cleavage which exists between the second and
third stages in the development of the contempla
tive consciousness: the real change which, if you
would go further on these interior paths, must
now take place in the manner of your apprehen
sion of Reality, Hitherto, all that you have at-
J26

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 127
tained has been — or at least has seemed to you —
the direct result of your own hard work. A diffi
cult self -discipline, the slowly achieved control of
your vagrant thoughts and desires, the steady
daily practice of recollection, a diligent pushing
out of your consciousness from the superficial to
the fundamental, an unselfish loving attention;
all this has been rewarded by the gradual broaden
ing and deepening of your perceptions, by an
initiation into the movements of a larger life.
You have been a knocker, a seeker, an asker : have
beat upon the Cloud of Unknowing "with a sharp
dart of longing love," A perpetual effort of the
will has characterised your inner development.
Your contemplation, in fact, as the specialists
would say, has been "active," not "infused."
But now, having achieved an awareness — ob
scure and indescribable indeed, yet actual — of the
enfolding presence of Reality, under those two
forms which the theologians call the "immanence"
and the "transcendence" of the Divine, a change
is to take place in the relation between your finite
human spirit and the Infinite Life in which at
last it knows itself to dwell. All that will now

128 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
come to you — and much perhaps will come — will
happen as it seems without effort on your own
part: though really it will be the direct result of
that long stress and discipline which has gone be
fore, and has made it possible for you to feel the
subtle contact of deeper realities. It will depend
also on the steady continuance — often perhaps
through long periods of darkness and boredom —
of that poise to which you have been trained : the
stretching-out of the loving and surrendered will
into the dimness and silence, the continued trust
ful habitation of the soul in the atmosphere of the
Essential World. You are like a traveller ar
rived in a new country. The journey has been a
long one; and the hardships and obstacles in
volved in it, the effort, the perpetual conscious
pressing forward, have at last come to seem the
chief features of your inner life. Now, with their
cessation, you feel curiously lost; as if the chief
object of your existence had been taken away.
No need to push on any further: yet, though
there is no more that you can do of yourself, there
is much that may and must be done to you. The
place that you have come to seems strange and

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 129
bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons
of human thought. There are no familiar land
marks, nothing on which you can lay hold. You
"wander to and fro," as the mystics say, "in this
fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and
darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air.
Like those who go to live in new latitudes, you
must become acclimatised. Your state, then,
should now be wisely passive; in order that the
great influences which surround you may take
and adjust your spirit, that the unaccustomed
light, which now seems to you a darkness, may
clarify your eyes, and that you may be trans
formed 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

130 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
clearer certitude that this darkness enveils the
goal for which you have been seeking from the
first; the final Reality with which you are destined
to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ar
dent and most sacred desires. It is there, but you
cannot by your efforts reach it. This realisation
of your own complete impotence, of the resistance
which the Transcendent — long sought and faith
fully served — now seems to offer to your busy
outgoing will and love, your ardour, your deliber
ate 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 decentralisa
tion 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

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 131
further, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper,
more searching purification than that which was
forced upon you by your first experience of the
recollective state is needed. The last fragments
of selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfac
tion — the fundamental human tendency to drag
down the Simple Fact and make it ours, instead
of offering ourselves to it — ^must be sought out
and killed. In this deep contemplation, this pro
found Quiet, your soul gradually becomes con
scious of a constriction, a dreadful narrowness of
personality; something still existing in itself, still
tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and
keeping it from that absolute surrender which is
the only way to peace. An attitude of perfect
generosity, complete submission, willing acquies
cence in anything that may happen — even in fail
ure and death — is here your only hope: for union
with Reality can only be a union of love, a glad
and humble self-mergence in the universal life.
You must, so far as you are able, give yourself
up to, "die into," melt into the Whole; abandon
all efforts to lay hold of It. More, you must be
willing that it should lay hold of you. "A pure

132 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
bare going forth," says Tauler, trying to describe
the sensations of the self at this moment.
"None," says Ruysbroeck, putting this same ex
perience, this meek outstreaming of the bewildered
spirit, into other language, "is sure of Eternal
Life, unless he has died with his own attributes
wholly into God."
It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will ac
company this utter self -surrender; for everything
will now seem to be taken from you, nothing given
in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a
mighty transformation will result. From the
transitional plane of darkness, you will be re
born into another "world," another stage of real
isation: 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 de
scribe, as well as our concrete language will per
mit, the new and vivid consciousness which now
invades the contemplative; the sense which he has
of being as it were helpless in the grasp of another

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 133
Power, so utterly part of him, so completely dif
ferent from him — so rich and various, so trans
fused with life and feeling, so urgent and so all-
transcending — that he can only think of it as
God. It is for this that the dimness and steadily
increasing passivity of the stage of Quiet has been
preparing him; and it is out of this willing
quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the
new experiences come.
"O night that didst lead thus,
O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover's sight —
Lover with loved in marriage of delight,"
says St. John of the Cross in the most wonderful
of all mystical poems. "He who has had ex
perience of this," says St. Teresa of the same stage
of apprehension, "will understand it in some
measure: but it cannot be more clearly described
because what then takes place is so obscure. All
I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as
being close to God; and that there abide a con
viction thereof so certain and strong, that it can
not possibly help believing so."

134 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
This sense, this conviction, which may be trans
lated by the imagination into many different
forms, is the substance of the greatest experiences
and highest joys of the mystical saints. The in
tensity with which it is realised will depend upon
the ardour, purity, and humility of the experienc
ing soul: but even those who feel it faintly are
convinced by it for evermore. In some great and
generous spirits, able to endure the terrific on
slaught of Reality, it may even reach a vividness
by which all other things are obliterated; and the
self, utterly helpless under the inundations of this
transcendent life-force, passes into that simple
state of consciousness which is called Ecstasy.
But you are not to be frightened by these special
manifestations; or to suppose that here the road
is barred against you. Though these great spirits
have as it were a genius for Reality, a suscepti
bility to supernal impressions, so far beyond your
own small talent that there seems no link between
you : yet you have, since you are human, a capacity
for the Infinite too. With less intensity, less
splendour, but with a certitude which no argu
ments will ever shake, this sense of the Living

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 135
Fact, and of its mysterious contacts with and in
vasions of the human spirit, may assuredly be real
ised by you. This realisation — sometimes felt
under the symbols of personality, sometimes under
those of an impersonal but life-giving Force,
Light, Energy, or Heat — is the ruling character
of the third phase of contemplation; and the re
ward of that meek passivity, that "busy idleness"
as the mystics sometimes call it, which you have
been striving to attain. Sooner or later, if you
are patient, it will come to you through the dark
ness: 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 sec
ond phase, is hardly felt by you ; perhaps, if your
nature be ardent and unstable, with a sudden
shattering violence, in a "storm of love."
In either case, the advent of this experience is
incalculable, and completely outside your own
control. So far, to use St. Teresa's well-known
image, you have been watering the garden of your
spirit by hand; a poor and laborious method, yet
one in which there is a definite relation between

136 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
effort and result. But now the watering-can is
taken from you, and you must depend upon the
rain : more generous, more fruitful, than anything
which your own efforts could manage, but, in its
incalculable visitations, utterly beyond your con
trol. Here all one can say is this: that if you
acquiesce in the heroic demands which the spiritual
life now makes upon you, if you let yourself go,
eradicate the last traces of self-interest even of the
most spiritual kind — then, you have established
conditions under which the forces of the spiritual
world can work on you, heightening your suscepti
bilities, deepening and purifying your attention,
so that you are able to taste and feel more and
more of the inexhaustible riches of Reality.
Thus dying to your own will, waiting for what
is given, infused, you will presently find that a
change in your apprehension has indeed taken
place: and that those who said self-loss was the
only way to realisation taught no pious fiction but
the truth. The highest contemplative experience
to which you have yet attained has seemed above
all else a still awareness. The cessation of your
own striving, a resting upon and within the Ab-

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 137
solute World — these were its main characteristics
for your consciousness. But now, this Ocean of
Being is no longer felt by you as an emptiness, a
solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it
to be instinct with a movement and life too great
for you to apprehend. You are thrilled by a
mighty energy, uncontrolled by you, unsolicited
by you : its higher vitality is poured into your soul.
You enter upon an experience for which all the
terms of power, thought, motion, even of love,
are inadequate: yet which contains within itself
the only complete expression of all these things.
Your strength is now literally made perfect in
weakness: because of the completeness of your
dependence, a fresh life is infused into you, such
as your old separate existence never knew.
Moreover, to that diffused and impersonal sense of
the Infinite, in which you have dipped yourself,
and which swallows up and completes all the
ideas your mind has ever built up with the help
of the categories of time and space, is now added
the consciousness of a Living Fact which includes,
transcends, completes all that you mean by the
categories of personality and of life. Those in-

138 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
effective, half-conscious attempts towards free ac
tion, clear apprehension, true union, which we
dignify by the names of will, thought, and love
are now seen matched by an Absolute Will,
Thought, and Love; instantly recognised by the
contemplating spirit as the highest reality it yet
has known, and evoking in it a passionate and a
humble joy.
This unmistakable experience has been achieved
by the mystics of every religion; and when we
read their statements, we know that all are speak
ing of the same thing. None who have had it
have ever been able to doubt its validity. It has
always become for them the central fact, by which
all other realities must be tested and graduated.
It has brought to them the deep consciousness of
sources of abundant life now made accessible to
man; of the impact of a mighty energy, gentle,
passionate, self-giving, creative, which they can
only call Absolute Love. Sometimes they feel
this strange life moving and stirring within them.
Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege
them. In every case, they are the passive objects
upon which it works. It is now another Power

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 139
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, stir
ring, compelling it; which sometimes, by its secret
irresistible pressure, wins even the most recal
citrant in spite of themselves. Sometimes this
Power is felt as an impersonal force, the unifying
cosmic energy, the indrawing love which gathers
all things into One; sometimes as a sudden access
of vitality, a light and heat, enfolding and pene
trating the self and making its languid life more
vivid and more real; sometimes as a personal and
friendly Presence which counsels and entreats the
soul. In each case, the mystics insist again that this is
God; that here under these diverse manners the
soul has immediate intercourse with Him. But
we must remember that when they make this
declaration, they are speaking from a plane of
consciousness far above the ideas and images of
popular religion; and from a place which is be
yond the judiciously adjusted horizon of philoso
phy. They mean by this word, not a notion, how-

140 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
ever august; but an experienced Fact so vivid, that
against it the so-called facts of daily life look
shadowy and insecure. They say that this Fact
is "immanent"; dwelling in, transfusing, and dis
coverable through every aspect of the universe,
every movement of the game of life — as you have
found in the first stage of contemplation. There
you may hear its melody and discern its form.
And further, that It is "transcendent" ; in essence
exceeding and including the sum of those glimpses
and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence in
life, and in Its simplest manifestations above and
beyond anything to which reason can attain —
"the Nameless Being, of Whom nought can be
said." This you discovered to be tme in the sec
ond stage. But in addition to this, they say also,
that this all-pervasive, all-changing, and yet
changeless One, Whose melody is heard in all
movement, and within Whose Being "the worlds
are being told like beads," calls the human spirit
to an immediate intercourse, a unity, a fruition,
a divine give-and-take, for which the contradict
ory symbols of feeding, of touching, of marriage,
of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 141
in the fully conscious soul a passionate and a
humble love. "He devours us and He feeds us !"
exclaims Ruysbroeck. "Here," says St. Thomas
Aquinas, "the soul in a wonderful and unspeakable
manner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and
is herself devoured, embraces and is violently em
braced : 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
liberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound
of Heaven chasing the separated soul, the on
slaughts, demands, and caresses of this "stormy,
generous, and unfathomable love" — all this is an
attempt, often of course oblique and symbolic in
method, to express and impart this transcendent
secret, to describe that intense yet elusive state in
which alone union with the living heart of Reality
is possible. "How delicately Thou teachest love
to me !" cries St. John of the Cross ; and here in
deed we find all the ardours of all earthly lovers
justified by an imperishable Objective, which re-

142 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
veals Itself in all things that we truly love, and
beyond all these things both seeks us and compels
us, "giving more than we can take and asking
more than we can pay."
You do not, you never will know, what this
Objective is: for as Dionysius teaches, "if any
one saw God and understood what he saw, then
it was not God that he saw, but something that
belongs to Him." But you do know now that it
exists, with an intensity which makes all other
existences unreal ; save in so far as they participate
in this one Fact. "Some contemplate the Form
less, and others meditate on Form: but the wise
man knows that Brahma is beyond both." As
you yield yourself more and more completely to
the impulses of this intimate yet unseizable Pres
ence, so much the sweeter and stronger — so much
the more constant and steady — will your inter
course 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

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 143
yet not conditioned by you. The wonder and
variety of this intercourse is never-ending. It in
cludes in its sweep every phase of human love and
self-devotion, all beauty and all power, all suffer
ing and effort, all gentleness and rapture: here
found in synthesis. Going forth into the bare
ness 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 do
ing in the course of your mystical development.
As your narrow heart stretched to a wider sym
pathy with life, you have been surrendering pro
gressively to larger and larger existences, more
and more complete realities: have been learning
to know them, to share their very being, through
the magic of disinterested love. First, the mani
fested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt
by you in its wonder and wholeness, once you
learned to yield yourself to its rhythms, received
in simplicity the undistorted messages of sense.
Then, the actual unchanging ground of life, the

144 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
eternal and unconditioned Whole, transcending all
succession: a world inaccessible alike to senses
and intelligence, but felt — vaguely, darkly, yet
intensely — ^by the quiet and surrendered con
sciousness. But now you are solicited, whether
you will or no, by a greater Reality, the final in
clusive Fact, the Unmeasured Love, which "is
through all things everlastingly": and yielding
yourself to it, receiving and responding to its
obscure yet ardent communications, you pass be
yond the cosmic experience to the personal en
counter, the simple yet utterly inexpressible union
of the soul with its God.
And this threefold union with Reality, as your
attention is focussed now on one aspect, now on
another, of its rich simplicity, will be actualised
by you in many different ways : for you are not to
suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now
to characterise your inner life. Though the sense
of your own dwelling within the Eternal transfuses
and illuminates it, the sense of your own necessary
efforts, a perpetual renewal of contact with the
Spiritual World, a perpetual self-donation, shall
animate it too. When the greater love over-

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 145
whelms the lesser, and your small self-conscious
ness 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 ful
filled." Again, when your own necessary activity
comes into the foreground, your small energetic
love perpetually pressing to deeper and deeper
realisation — "tasting through and through, and
seeking through and through, the fathomless
ground" of the Infinite and Eternal — it seems
rather a perpetually renewed encounter than a
final achievement. Since you are a child of Time
as well as of Eternity, such effort and satisfaction,
active and passive love are both needed by you, if
your whole life is to be brought into union with
the inconceivably rich yet simple One in Whom
these apparent opposites are harmonised. There
fore seeking and finding, work and rest, conflict
and peace, feeding on God and self-immersion in
God, spiritual marriage and spiritual death — these
contradictory images are all wanted, if we are to

146 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
represent the changing moods of the living, grow
ing 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 de
velopment of the spirit has meant, not the leaving
behind of the previous stages, but an adding on
to them: an ever greater extension of experience,
and enrichment of personality. So that the total
result of this change, this steady growth of your
transcendental self, is not an impoverishment of
the sense-life in the supposed interests of the super
sensual, but the addition to it of another life — a
huge widening and deepening of the field over
which your attention can play. Sometimes the
mature contemplative consciousness narrows to an
intense point of feeling, in which it seems indeed
"alone with the Alone" : sometimes it spreads to a
vast apprehension of the Universal Life, or per
ceives the common things of sense aflame with
God. It moves easily and with no sense of in
congruity from hours of close personal commun
ion with its Friend and Lover to self-loss in the
"deep yet dazzling darkness" of the Divine

CONTEMPLATION— THIRD 147
Abyss : or, re-entering that living world of change
which the first form of contemplation disclosed
to it, passes beyond those discrete manifestations
of Reality to realise the Whole which dwells in
and inspires every part. Thus ascending to the
mysterious fruition of that Reality which is be
yond image, and descending again to the loving
contemplation and service of all struggling grow
ing things, it now finds and adores everywhere —
in the sky and the nest, the soul and the void —
one Energetic Love which "is measureless, since
it is all that exists," and of which the patient up-
climb of the individual soul, the passionate out
pouring of the Divine Mind, form the completing
opposites.

CHAPTER X
the mystical life
And here the practical man, who has been
strangely silent during the last stages of our dis
course, shakes himself like a terrier which has
achieved dry land again after a bath; and asks
once more, with a certain explosive violence, his
dear old question, "What is the use of all this?"
"You have introduced me," he says further,
"to some curious states of consciousness, interest
ing enough in their way; and to a lot of peculiar
emotions, many of which are no doubt most valu
able to poets and so on. But it is all so remote
from daily life. How is it going to fit in with
ordinary existence? How, above all, is it all go
ing to help me?"
Well, put upon its lowest plane, this new way
of attending to life — this deepening and widening
of outlook — ^may at least be as helpful to you as
148

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 149
many things to which you have unhesitatingly
consecrated much time and diligence in the past:
your long journeys to new countries, for instance,
or long hours spent in acquiring new "facts," re
labelling old experiences, gaining skill in new arts
and games. These, it is true, were quite worth
the effort expended on them: for they gave you,
in exchange for your labour and attention, a fresh
view of certain fragmentary things, a new point
of contact with the rich world of possibilities, a
tiny enlargement of your universe in one direc
tion 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 in
clude and transcend all these; and be conditioned
only by the perfection of your generosity, cour
age, and surrender.
Nor are you to suppose that this enlargement
will be limited to certain new spiritual perceptions,
which the art of contemplation has made possi
ble for you: that it will merely draw the curtain

150 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
from a window out of which you have never
looked. This new wide world is not to be for
you something seen, but something lived in: and
you — since man is a creature of responses — will
insensibly change under its influence, growing up
into a more perfect conformity with it. Living
in this atmosphere of Reality, you will, in fact,
yourself become more real. Hence, if you accept
in a spirit of trust the suggestions which have been
made to you — and I acknowledge that here at the
beginning an attitude of faith is essential — and
if you practise with diligence the arts which I
have described : then, sooner or later, you will in
evitably find yourself deeply and permanently
changed by them — will perceive that you have
become a "new man." Not merely have you ac
quired new powers of perception and new ideas
of Reality; but a quiet and complete transforma
tion, a strengthening and maturing of your per
sonality has taken place.
You are still, it is true, living the ordinary life
of the body. You are immersed in the stream of
duration; a part of the human, the social, the
national group. The emotions, instincts, needs.

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 1151
of that group affect you. Your changing scrap of
vitality contributes to its corporate life; and con
tributes the more effectively since a new, intuitive
sympathy has now made its interests your own.
Because of that corporate life, transfusing you,
giving to you and taking from you — conditioning
you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent
ways — you are still compelled to react to many
suggestions which you are no longer able to re
spect: controlled, to the last moment of your
bodily existence and perhaps afterwards, by habit,
custom, the good old average way of misunder
standing 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 con
sciousness 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-gov
erning 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 illu-

152 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
sions which supported your old, enslaved career.
As a matter of fact, you were driven along a road,
unaware of anything that lay beyond the hedges,
pressed on every side by other members of the
flock; getting perhaps a certain satisfaction out
of the deep warm stir of the collective life, but
ignorant of your destination, and with your per
sonal 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, tmer 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 spirit-

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 153
ual contacts, or occupy itself in the mild con
templation 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 inequali
ties of the road, the bunts and blunders of the
flock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort that
you are called. Since the transcendental aspect
of your being has been brought into focus you
are now raised out of the mere push-forward, the
blind passage through time of the flock, into a
position of creative responsibility. You are
aware of personal correspondences with the
Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger,
deeper, broader world. The sky and the hedges,
the wide lands through which you are moving, the
corporate character and meaning of the group to
which you belong — all these are now within the
circle of your consciousness ; and each little event,
each separate demand or invitation which comes
to you is now seen in a tmer 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:

154 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
for "things" are now under you, you are no longer
under them.
You will hardly deny that this is a practical
gain: that this widening and deepening of the
range over which your powers of perception work
makes you more of a man than you were before,
and thus adds to rather than subtracts from your
total practical efficiency. It is indeed only when
he reaches these levels, and feels within himself
this creative freedom — this full actualisation of
himself — on the one hand : on the other hand the
sense of a world-order, a love and energy on
which he depends and with whose interests he is
now at one, that man becomes fully human, capa
ble of living the real life of Eternity in the midst
of the world of time.
And what, when you have come to it, do you
suppose to be your own function in this vast two
fold scheme ? Is it for nothing, do you think, that
you are thus a meeting-place of two orders?
Surely it is your business, so far as you may, to
express in action something of the real character
of that universe within which you now know
yourself to live? Artists, aware of a more vivid

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 155
and more beautiful world than other men, are al
ways driven by their love and enthusiasm to try
and express, bring into direct manifestation, those
deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm, which
they have been able to apprehend : and, doing this,
they taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever
closer unions with the Real. For them, the duty of
creation is tightly bound up with the gift of love.
In their passionate outflowing to the universe
which offers itself under one of its many aspects
to their adoration, that other-worldly fruition of
beauty is always followed, balanced, completed,
by a this-world impulse to creation: a desire to
fix within the time-order, and share with other
men, the vision by which they were possessed.
Each one, thus bringing new aspects of beauty,
new ways of seeing and hearing within the reach
of the race, does something to amend the sorry
universe of common sense, the more hideous uni
verse of greed, and redeem his fellows from their
old, slack servitude to a lower range of signifi
cances. It is in action, then, that these find their
truest and safest point of insertion into the living,
active world of Reality : in sharing and furthering

156 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
its work of manifestation they know its secrets
best. For them contemplation and action are
not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a
life that is one — a life that rushes out to a passion
ate communion with the true and beautiful, only
that it may draw from this direct experience of
Reality a new intensity wherewith to handle the
world of things; and remake it, or at least some
little bit of it, "nearer to the heart's desire."
Again, the great mystics tell us that the "vision
of God in His own light" — the direct contact of
the soul's substance with the Absolute — to which
awful experience you drew as near as the quality
of your spirit would permit in the third degree of
contemplation, is the prelude, not to a further
revelation of the eternal order given to you, but
to an utter change, a vivid life springing up within
you, which they sometimes call the "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 Reality, is as it were
fertilised by this profound communion with its

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 157
origin; becomes strong and vigorous, invades and
transmutes the whole personality, and makes of
it, not a "dreamy mystic" but an active and im
passioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom.
So that when these full-grown, fully vital mys
tics try to tell us about the life they have achieved,
it is always an intensely active life that they de
scribe. They say, not that they "dwell in restful
fruition," though the deep and joyous knowledge
of this, perhaps too the perpetual longing for an
utter self-loss in it, is always possessed by them
— but that they "go up and down the ladder of
contemplation," They stretch up towards the
Point, the unique Reality to which all the intri
cate and many-coloured lines of life flow, and in
which they are merged; and rush out towards
those various lives in a passion of active love and
service. This double activity, this swinging be
tween rest and work — this alone, they say, is truly
the life of man; because this alone represents on
human levels something of that inexhaustibly rich
yet simple life, "ever active yet ever at rest,"
which they find in God. When he gets to this,
then man has indeed actualised his union with

158 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Reality ; because then he is a part of the perpetual
creative act, the eternal generation of the Divine
thought and love. Therefore contemplation,
even at its highest, dearest, and most intimate, is
not to be for you an end in itself. It shall only
be truly yours when it impels you to action : when
the double movement of Transcendent Love,
drawing inwards to unity and fruition, and rush
ing out again to creative acts, is realised in you.
You are to be a living, ardent tool with which
the Supreme Artist works : one of the instruments
of His self-manifestation, the perpetual process
by which His Reality is brought into concrete
expression. Now the expression of vision, of reality, of
beauty, at an artist's hands — the creation of new
life in all forms — has two factors: the living
moulding creative spirit, and the material in which
it works. Between these two there is inevitably
a difference of tension. The material is at best
inert, and merely patient of the informing idea;
at worst, directly recalcitrant to it. Hence, ac
cording to the balance of these two factors, the
amount of resistance offered by stuff to tool, a

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 159
greater or less energy must be expended, greater
or less perfection of result will be achieved. You,
accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic,
and the responsibilities that go with it, have by
this act taken sides once for all with creative
spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxed
effort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more
significant life. The adoration to which you are
vowed is not an affair of red hassocks and author
ised hymn books; but a burning and consuming
fire. You will find, then, that the world, going
its own gait, busily occupied with its own system
of correspondences — yielding to every gust of pas
sion, intent on the satisfaction of greed, the
struggle for comfort or for power — will oppose
your new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but
more probably with the exasperating calmness of
a heavy animal which refuses to get up. If your
new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper
power when it strikes against this dogged inertness
of things: for you need resistances on which to
act. "The road to a Yea lies through a Nay,"
and righteous warfare is the only way to a living
and a lasting peace.

i6o PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
Further, you will observe more and more
clearly, that the stuff of your external world, the
method and machinery of the common life, is not
merely passively but actively inconsistent with
your sharp interior vision of truth. The heavy
animal is diseased as well as indolent. All man's
perverse ways of seeing his universe, all the per
verse and hideous acts which have sprung from
them — these have set up reactions, have produced
deep disorders in the world of things, Man is
free, and holds the keys of hell as well as the
keys of heaven. Within the love-driven universe
which you have learned to see as a whole, you will
therefore find egotism, rebellion, meanness, brutal
ity, squalor: the work of separated selves whose
energies are set athwart the stream. But every
aspect of life, however falsely imagined, can still
be "saved," turned to the purposes of Reality:
for "all-thing hath the being by the love of God."
Its oppositions are no part of its realness; and
therefore they can be overcome. Is there not here,
then, abundance of practical work for you to do;
work which is the direct outcome of your mystical
experience? Are there not here, as the French

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 161
proverb has it, plenty of cats for you to comb?
And isn't it just here, in the new foothold it gives
you, the new clear vision and certitude — in its
noble, serious, and invulnerable faith — that mysti
cism is "useful"; even for the most scientific of
social reformers, the most belligerent of politi
cians, the least sentimental of philanthropists?
To "bring Eternity 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 all the great
mystics. One and all, they demand earnest and
deliberate action, the insertion of the purified and
ardent will into the world of things. The mys
tics are artists; and the stuff in which they work is
most often human life. They want to heal the
disharmony between the actual and the real : and
since, in the white-hot radiance of that faith, hope,
and charity which burns in them, they discem
such a reconciliation to be possible, they are able
to work for it with a singleness of purpose and an
invincible optimism denied to other men. This
was the instinct which drove St. Francis of Assisi
to the practical experience of that poverty which

ii62 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
he recognised as the highest wisdom; St. Catherine
of Siena from contemplation to politics; Joan of
Arc to the salvation of France; St. Teresa to the
formation of an ideal religious family ; Fox to the
proclaiming of a world-religion in which all men
should be guided by the Inner Light; Florence
Nightingale to battle with officials, vermin, dirt,
and disease in the soldiers' hospitals ; Octavia Hill
to make in London slums something a little nearer
"the shadows of the angels' houses" than that
which the practical landlord usually provides.
All these have felt sure that a great part in the
drama of creation has been given to the free spirit
of man : that bit by bit, through and by him, the
scattered worlds of love and thought and action
shall be realised again as one. It is for those who
have found the thread on which those worlds are
strung, to bring this knowledge out of the hidden-
ness ; to use it, as the old alchemists declared that
they could use their tincture, to transmute all baser
metals into gold.
So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so
various in its opportunities, that you can hardly
fail to find something to do. It is your business

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 163
to actualise within the world of time and space —
perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic
action, perhaps only by small ones in field and
market, tram and tube, office and drawing-room,
in the perpetual give-and-take of the common life
— that more real life, that holy creative energy,
which this world manifests as a whole but indif
ferently. You shall work for mercy, order,
beauty, significance: shall mend where you find
things broken, make where you find the need.
"Adoro te devote, latens Deltas," said St. Thomas
in his great mystical hymn : and the practical side
of that adoration consists in the bringing of the
Real Presence from its hiddenness, and exhibiting
it before the eyes of other men. Hitherto you
have not been very active in this matter: yet it
is the purpose for which you exist, and your con
templative consciousness, if you educate it, will
soon make this fact clear to you. The teeming
life of nature has yielded up to your loving at
tention many sacramental images of Reality : seen
in the light of charity, it is far more sacred and
significant than you supposed. What about your
life? Is that a theophany too? "Each oak

i64 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
doth cry I am," says Vaughan. Do you proclaim
by your existence the grandeur, the beauty, the in
tensity, the living wonder of that Etemal Real
ity within which, at this moment, you stand?
Do your hours of contemplation and of action
harmonise? If they did harmonise — if everybody's did —
then, by these individual adjustments the com
plete group-consciousness of humanity would be
changed, brought back into conformity with the
Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be
actualised within the temporal order at last.
Then, that world of false imagination, senseless
conflicts, and sham values, into which our children
are now born, would be annihilated. The whole
race, not merely a few of its noblest, most clear
sighted spirits, would be "in union with God";
and men, transfused by His light and heat, direct
and willing agents of His Pure Activity, would
achieve that completeness of life which the mys
tics dare to call "deification." This is the sub
stance of that redemption of the world, which all
religions proclaim or demand: the consummation
which is crudely imagined in the Apocalyptic

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 165
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 sometimes been asked to "think im
perially." Mystics are asked to think celestially;
and this, not when considering the things usually
called spiritual, but when dealing with the con
crete accidents, the evil and sadness, the cruelty,
failure, and degeneration of life.
So, what is being offered to you is not merely a
choice amongst new states of consciousness, new
emotional experiences — though these are indeed
involved in it — but, above all else, a larger and
intenser life, a career, a total consecration to the
interests of the Real, This life shall not be ab
stract and dreamy, made up, as some imagine, of
negations. It shall be violently practical and
affirmative ; giving scope for a limitless activity of
will, heart, and mind working within the rhythms
of the Divine Idea, It shall cost much, making
perpetual demands on your loyalty, tmst, and self-
sacrifice : proving now the need and the worth of

i66 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
that training in renunciation which was forced on
you at the beginning of your interior life. It
shall be both deep and wide, embracing in its
span all those aspects of Reality which the gradual
extension of your contemplative powers has dis
closed to you : making "the inner and outer worlds
to be indivisibly One." And because the empha
sis is now for ever shifted from the accidents to
the substance of life, it will matter little where
and how this career is actualised — whether in
convent or factory, study or battlefield, multitude
or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctua
tions of circumstance will no longer dominate
you ; since "it is Love that payeth for all,"
Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening
up of the universe, the vivid consciousness of a
living Reality and your relation with it, which
came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be
a constant or a governable feature of your experi
ence. Even under the most favourable circum
stances, you shall and must move easily and fre
quently between that spiritual fruition and active
work in the world of men. Often enough it will
slip from you utterly; often your most diligent

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 167
effort will fail to recapture it, and only its frag
rance will remain. The more intense those con
tacts have been, the more terrible will be your
hunger and desolation when they are thus with
drawn: for increase of susceptibility means more
pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist
knows. But you will find in all that happens to
you, all that opposes and grieves you — even in
those inevitable hours of darkness when the doors
of true perception seem to close, and the cruel
tangles of the world are all that you can discern
— an inward sense of security which will never
cease. All the waves that buffet you about, shak
ing 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 trans
fusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all
life and joy. Whether you realise it in its per
sonal or impersonal manifestation, the universe
is now friendly to you; and as he is a suspicious
and unworthy lover who asks every day for re
newed demonstrations of love, so you do not
demand from it perpetual reassurances. It is

i68 PRACTICAL MYSTICISM
enough, that once it showed you its heart. A
link of love now binds you to it for evermore;
in spite of derelictions, in spite of darkness and
suffering, your will is harmonised with the Will
that informs the Whole.
We said, at the beginning of this discussion,
that mysticism was the art of union with Reality :
that it was, above all else, a Science of Love.
Hence, the condition to which it looks forward
and towards which the soul of the contemplative
has been stretching out, is a condition of being,
not of seeing. As the bodily senses have been pro
duced under pressure of man's physical environ
ment, and their true aim is not the enhancement
of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting
of his adjustment to those aspects of the natural
world which concern him — so the use and meaning
of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too.
These, when developed by a suitable training,
reveal to man a certain measure of Reality: not
in order that he may gaze upon it, but in order
that he may react to it, learn to live in, with, and
for it; growing and stretching into more perfect
harmony with the Eternal Order, until at last,

THE MYSTICAL LIFE 169
like the blessed ones of Dante's vision, the clear
ness of his flame responds to the unspeakable
radiance of the Enkindling Light.

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