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which was effected by recollection, was the prelude 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 existence with which your bodily
senses have no attachments: which is not merely misrepresented by your
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ordinary concepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. It must
therefore sink inwards towards its own centre, "away from all that can be
thought or felt," as the mystics say, "away from every image, every no-
tion, every thing," towards that strange condition of obscurity 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 yourself, emptied and freed, in a place
stripped bare of all the machinery of thought; and achieve the condition
of simplicity which those same specialists call nakedness of spirit or
"Wayless Love," and which they declare to be above all human images
and ideas a state of consciousness in which "all the workings of the
reason fail." Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense
and vivid silence: a silence which exists in itself, through and in spite of
the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this world of silence
you seem as it were to lose yourself, "to ebb and to flow, to wander and
be lost in the Imageless Ground," says Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe
the sensations of the self in this, its first initiation into the "wayless
world, beyond image," where "all is, yet in no wise."
Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of 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 Psalmist
meant, when he said, "Be still, and know." You are lost in a wilderness, a
solitude, a dim strange state of which you can say nothing, since it offers
no material to your image-making mind.
But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate, from
another is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowful questionings are
answered without utterance; it is the All, and you are within it and part
of it, and know that it is good. It calls forth the utmost adoration of
which you are capable; and, mysteriously, gives love for love. You have
ascended now, say the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are
become part of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it were
upon its bosom and though never perhaps before has your soul been so
truly active seems to you a stillness, 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 veri-
fied in your own experience. You perceive that these are the two
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complementary ways of apprehending and uniting with Reality the
one as a dynamic process, the other as an eternal whole. Thus under-
stood, they do not conflict. You know that the flow, the broken-up world
of change and multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of
the time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to the de-
velopment 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 or-
dinary man may learn to practise it, is like the sudden change of atmo-
sphere, the shifting of values, which we experience 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 window we may glimpse a per-
petual star.
The walls of the church, limiting the range of our attention, shutting
out the torrent of life, with its insistent demands and appeals, make pos-
sible our apprehension of this deep eternal peace. The character of our
consciousness, intermediate between Eternity and Time, and ever ready
to swing between them, makes such a device, such a concrete aid to con-
centration, essential 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]