Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People

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 gre

ever apt to fail them. Unless they be spurred to it by that passion for ultimate things which expresses it

ve, 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 fr

eat tradition of the Christian contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure of long experience--that the process is a gradual one. The method to be employed is a slow, patient training of material which the licence of years has made intractable; not the su

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. "

to Reality is not asked to look at anything new, to peer into the deeps of things: only to gaze with a new and cleansed vision on the ordinary intellectual images, the labels and the formula, the "objects" and ideas--even the external symbols--amongst which it has always dwelt. It is not yet advanced to the seeing of fresh landscapes: it is only able to re-examine the

: all sentient beings may find subjects of meditation to their taste, for there lies a universal behind every particular o

moons, but m

or'd on

ng her as

delight

lative views of Reality, and try to meditate on Time, Succession, even Being itself: or again on human intercourse, birth, growth, and death, on a flower, a river, the various tapestries of the sky. Even your own emotional life will provide you with the

presently attack you. This, too, must be resisted at sword-point. The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditation will be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convince you how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, how miserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from the captaincy of your own soul. It should convince, too, th

it will happen to you to find that you have indeed--though how you know not

f attention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is the one agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were int

ss 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 unre

that there is something within you--something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire--which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this real You is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not merely believe th