Practical Mysticism | Page 9

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 notion of it. And it is just such an act of
union, reached through the clarified channels of sense and
unadulterated by the content of thought, which the great artist or poet
achieves.
We seem in these words to have come far from the mystic, and that
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 race. In the game of give
and take which goes on between the human consciousness and the
external world, both have learned to put the emphasis upon the message
from without, rather than on their own reaction to and rearrangement of
it. Both have exchanged the false imagination which draws the
sensations and intuitions of the self into its own narrow circle, and
there distorts and transforms them, for the true imagination which
pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater
universe.
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 educative 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
scientific 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 never
used before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, 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 addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy
reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly
observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of
the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The essence of
mystical contemplation is summed in these two experiences-- union
with the flux of life, and union with the Whole in which all lesser
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 happened 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