Mysticism; Practical Mysticism

The rarest of the automatic activities reported to us in connection with mysticism is that of "automatic writing." This form of subliminal action has already been spoken of in an earlier chapter;¹ where two of the most marked examples—Blake and Madame Guyon—are discussed. As with voice and vision, so this power of automatic composition may and does exist in various degrees of intensity: ranging from that "inspiration," that irresistible impulse to write, of which all artists are aware, to the extreme form in which the hand of the conscious self seems to have become the agent of another personality. We are not here in the presence of phenomena which require a "supernatural" explanation. From the point of view of the psychologist, the inspirational writing of the mystics differs in degree rather than in kind from such poetic creation as that described by de Russet: "it is not work, it is listening; it is as if some unknown person were speaking in your ear."² Such subliminal activity is probably present to some extent in all the literary work of the great mystics, whose creative power, like that of most poets, is largely dissociated from the control of the will and the surface intelligence.

St. Catherine of Siena, we are told, dictated her great Dialogue to her secretaries whilst in the state of ecstasy: which may mean no more than the absorbed state of recollection in which the creative faculty works most freely, or may have been a condition of consciousness resembling the "trance" of mediums, in which the deeper mind governs the tongue. Had she been more accustomed to the use of the pen—she did not learn writing until after the beginning of her apostolic life—that deeper mind would almost certainly have expressed itself by means of automatic script. As it is, in the rhythm and exaltation of its periods, the Dialogue bears upon it all the marks of true automatic composition of the highest type. The very discursiveness of its style, its loose employment of metaphor, the strangely mingled intimacy and remoteness of its tone, link it with prophetic literature; and are entirely characteristic of subliminal energy of a rich type, dissociated from the criticism and control of the normal consciousness.³

So too the writings of Rulman Merswin, if we accept the ingenious and interesting theory of his psychic state elaborated by M. Jundt,⁴ were almost wholly of this kind. So Blake insisted that he was "under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily and Nightly,"⁵ and stated on his deathbed that the credit for all his works belonged not to himself, but to his "celestial friends,"⁶ i.e., to the inspiration of a personality which had access to levels of truth and beauty unknown to his surface mind.

St. Teresa was of much the same opinion in respect of her great mystical works: which were, she said, like the speech of a parrot repeating, though he cannot understand, the things which his master has taught him. There is little doubt that her powers of composition—as we might expect in one so apt at voice and vision—were largely of the uncontrolled, inspired, or "automatic" kind. She wrote most usually after the reception of Holy Communion—that is to say, when her mystic consciousness was in its most active state—and always swiftly, without hesitations or amendments. Ideas and images welled up from her rich and active subliminal region too quickly, indeed, for her eager, hurrying pen: so that she sometimes exclaimed, "Oh, that I could write with many hands, so that none were forgotten!"⁷ In Teresa's unitive state, a slight suggestion was enough to change the condition of her consciousness, place her under the complete domination of her deeper mind. Often, she said, when composing the "Interior Castle," her work reacted upon herself. She would suddenly be caught up into the very degree of contemplation which she was trying to describe, and continued to write in this absorbed or entranced condition, clearly perceiving that her pen was guided by a power not her own, and expressed ideas unknown to her surface mind, which filled her with astonishment.

In the evidence given during the process for St. Teresa's beatification, Maria de San Francisco of Medina, one of her early nuns, stated that on entering the saint's cell whilst she was writing this same "Interior Castle" she found her so absorbed in contemplation as to be unaware of the external world. "If we made a noise close to her," said another, Maria del Nacimiento, "she neither ceased to write nor complained of being disturbed." Both these nuns, and also Ana de la Encarnacion, prioress of Granada, affirmed that she wrote with immense speed, never stopping to erase or to correct: being anxious, as she said, to "write what the Lord had given her, before she forgot it." They and many others declared that when she was thus writing she seemed like another being: and that her face, excessively beautiful in expression, shone with an unearthly splendour which afterwards faded away.⁸

As for Madame Guyon, whose temperament had in it almost as much of the medium as of the mystic, and whose passion for quietism and mental passivity left her almost wholly at the mercy of subconscious impulses, she exhibits by turns the phenomena of clairvoyance, prophecy, telephathy, and automatic writing, in bewildering profusion.

"I was myself surprised," she says, "at the letters which Thou didst cause me to write, and in which I had no part save the actual movement of my hand: and it was at this time that I received that gift of writing according to the interior mind, and not according to my own mind, which I had never known before. Also my manner of writing was altogether changed, and every one was astonished because I wrote with such great facility."⁹

Again, "... Thou didst make me write with so great a detachment that I was obliged to leave off and begin again as Thou didst choose. Thou didst try me in every way: suddenly Thou wouldst cause me to write, then at once to cease, and then to begin again. When I wrote during the day, I would be suddenly interrupted, and often left words half written, and afterwards Thou wouldst give me whatever was pleasing to Thee. Nothing of that which I wrote was in my mind: my mind, in fact, was so wholly at liberty that it seemed a blank, I was so detached from that which I wrote that it seemed foreign to me.... All the faults in my writings come from this: that being unaccustomed to the operations of God, I was often unfaithful to them, thinking that I did well to continue writing when I had time, without being moved thereto, because I had been told to finish the work. So that it is easy to distinguish the parts which are fine and sustained, and those which have neither savour nor grace. I have left them as they are; so that the difference between the Spirit of God and the human or natural spirit may be seen.... I continued always to write, and with an inconceivable swiftness, for the hand could hardly keep up with the dictating spirit: and during this long work, I never changed my method, nor did I make use of any book. The scribe could not, however great his diligence, copy in five days that which I wrote in a single night.... I will add to all that I have been saying on my writings, that a considerable part of the book on Judges' was lost. Being asked to complete it, I rewrote the lost portions. Long afterwards, when I was moving house, these were found in a place where no one could have imagined that they would be; and the old and new versions were exactly alike—a circumstance which greatly astonished those persons of learning and merit who undertook its verification."¹⁰

A far greater and stronger mystic than Madame Guyon, Jacob Boehme, was also in his literary composition the more or less helpless tool of some power other than his normal surface-mind. It is clear from his own words that his first book, the "Aurora," produced after the great illumination which he received in the year 1610, was no deliberate composition, but an example of inspired or automatic script. This strange work, full of sayings of a deep yet dazzling darkness, was condemned by the local tribunal; and Boehme was forbidden to write more. For seven years he obeyed. Then "a new motion from on high" seized him, and under the pressure of this subliminal impulse—which, characteristically, he feels as coming from without not from within—he began to write again.

This second outburst of composition, too, was almost purely automatic in type. The transcendental consciousness was in command, and Boehme's surface-intellect could exert but little control. "Art," he says of it himself, "has not wrote here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it punctually down, according to the Understanding of the Letters, but all was ordered according to the Direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste, so that in many words Letters may be wanting, and in some Places a Capital Letter for a Word; so that the Penman's Hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And though I could have wrote in a more accurate, fair and plain Manner, yet the Reason was this, that the burning Fire often forced forward with Speed and the Hand and Pen must hasten directly after it, for it comes and goes as a sudden shower."¹¹

No description could give more vividly than this the spontaneous and uncontrollable character of these automatic states; the welling-up of new knowledge, the rapid formation of sentences: so quick, that the hand of the subject can hardly keep pace with that "burning Fire," the travail of his inner mind. As in vision, so here, the contents of that inner mind, its hoarded memories will influence the form of the message. Hence, in Boehme's works, the prevalence of that obscure Kabalistic and Alchemical imagery which baffles even his most eager readers, and which is the result of an earlier acquaintance with the works of Paracelsus, Weigel, and Sebastian Franck.¹² Such language, however, no more discredits the "power behind the pen," than the form under which St. Catherine of Siena apprehended the mystic marriage discredits her attainment of the unitive life. In the fruit of such automatic travail, such a "wrestling with the Angel in the way," the mystic offers to our common humanity the chalice of the Spirit of Life. We may recognize the origins of the ornament upon the chalice: but we cannot justly charge him with counterfeiting the Wine.

We have been dealing throughout this section with means rather than with ends: means snatched at by the struggling self which has not yet wholly shaken itself free from "image," in its efforts to seize somehow—actualize, enjoy, and adore—that Absolute which is the sum of its desires. No one will ever approach an understanding of this phase of the mystical consciousness, who brings to it either a contempt for the minds which could thus simply and sometimes childishly objectivize the Divine, or a superstitious reverence for the image, apart from the formless Reality at which it hints. Between these two extremes lies our hope of grasping the true place of automatisms on the Mystic Way: of seeing in them instances of the adaptation of those means by which we obtain consciousness of the phenomenal world, to an apprehension of that other world whose attainment is humanity's sublimest end.

I n our study of the First Mystic Life, its purification and illumination, we have been analysing and considering a process of organic development; an evolution of personality. We may treat this either as a movement of consciousness towards higher levels, or as a remaking of consciousness consequent on the emergence and growth of a factor which is dormant in ordinary man, but destined to be supreme in the full-grown mystic type. We have seen the awakening of this factor—this spark of the soul—with its innate capacity for apprehending the Absolute. We have seen it attack and conquer the old sense-fed and self-centred life of the normal self, and introduce it into a new universe, lit up by the Uncreated Light. These were the events which, taken together, constituted the "First Mystic Life"; a complete round upon the spiral road which leads from man to God.

What we have been looking at, then, is a life-process, the establishment of a certain harmony between the created self and that Reality whose invitation it has heard: and we have discussed this life-process rather as if it contained no elements which were not referable to natural and spontaneous growth, to the involuntary adjustments of the organism to that extended or transcendental universe of which it gradually becomes aware. But side by side with this organic growth there always goes a specific kind of activity which is characteristic of the mystic: an education which he is called to undertake, that his consciousness of the Infinite may be stabilized, enriched and defined. Already once or twice we have been in the presence of this activity, have been obliged to take its influence into account: as, were we studying other artistic types, we could not leave on one side the medium in which they work.

Contemplation is the mystic's medium. It is an extreme form of that withdrawal of attention from the external world and total dedication of the mind which also, in various degrees and ways, conditions the creative activity of musician, painter and poet: releasing the faculty by which he can apprehend the Good and Beautiful, enter into communion with the Real. As "voice" or "vision" is often the way in which the mystical consciousness presents its discoveries to the surface-mind, so contemplation is the way in which it makes those discoveries, perceives the suprasensible over against itself. The growth of the mystic's effective genius, therefore, is connected with his growth in this art: and that growth is largely conditioned by education.

The painter, however great his natural powers, can hardly dispense with some technical training; the musician is wise if he acquaint himself at least with the elements of counterpoint. So too the mystic. It is true that he sometimes seems to spring abruptly to the heights, to be caught into ecstasy without previous preparation: as a poet may startle the world by a sudden masterpiece. But unless they be backed by discipline, these sudden and isolated flashes of inspiration will not long avail for the production of great works. "Ordina quest' amore, o tu che m'ami" is the imperative demand made by Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, by every aspect of Reality, upon the human soul. Lover and philosopher, saint, artist, and scientist, must alike obey or fail.

Transcendental genius, then, obeys the laws which govern all other forms of genius, in being susceptible of culture: and, indeed, cannot develop its full powers without an educative process of some kind. This strange art of contemplation, which the mystic tends to practise during the whole of his career—which develops step by step with his vision and his love—demands of the self which undertakes it the same hard dull work, the same slow training of the will, which lies behind all supreme achievement, and is the price of all true liberty. It is the want of such training—such "supersensual drill"—which is responsible for the mass of vague, ineffectual, and sometimes harmful mysticism which has always existed: the dilute cosmic emotion and limp spirituality which hang, as it were, on the skirts of the true seekers of the Absolute, and bring discredit upon their science.

In this, as in all the other and lesser arts which have been developed by the race, education consists largely in a humble willingness to submit to the discipline, and profit by the lessons, of the past. Tradition runs side by side with experience; the past collaborates with the present. Each new and eager soul rushing out towards the only end of Love passes on its way the landmarks left by others upon the pathway to Reality. If it be wise it observes them: and finds in them rather helps towards attainment than hindrances to that freedom which is of the essence of the mystic act. This act, it is true, is in the last resort a solitary experience, "the flight of the Alone to the Alone"; even though no achievement of the soul truly takes place in vacao, or leaves the universe of souls unchanged. At the same time, here as elsewhere, man cannot safely divorce his personal history from that of the race. The best and truest experience does not come to the eccentric and individual pilgrim whose intuitions are his only law: but rather to him who is willing to profit by the culture of the spiritual society in which he finds himself, and submit personal intuition to the guidance afforded by the general history of the mystic type. Those who refuse this guidance expose themselves to all the dangers which crowd about the individualist: from heresy at one end of the scale to madness at the other. Vae Soli! Nowhere more clearly than in the history of mysticism do we observe the essential solidarity of mankind, the penalty paid by those who will not acknowledge it.

The education which tradition has ever prescribed for the mystic, consists in the gradual development of an extraordinary faculty of concentration, a power of spiritual attention. It is not enough that he should naturally be "aware of the Absolute," unless he be able to contemplate it: just as the mere possession of eyesight or hearing, however acute, needs to be supplemented by trained powers of perception and reception, if we are really to appreciate—see or hear to any purpose—the masterpieces of Music or of Art. More, Nature herself reveals little of her secret to those who only look and listen with the outward ear and eye. The condition of all valid seeing and hearing, upon every plane of consciousness, lies not in the sharpening of the senses, but in a peculiar attitude of the whole personality: in a self-forgetting attentiveness, a profound concentration, a self-merging, which operates a real communion between the seer and the seen—in a word, in Contemplation.

Contemplation, then, in the most general sense is a power which we may—and often must—apply to the perception, not only of Divine Reality, but of anything. It is a mental attitude under which all things give up to us the secret of their life. All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative. In so far as they surrender themselves without selfish preoccupation, they see Creation from the point of view of God.¹³ "Innocence of eye" is little else than this: and only by its means can they see truly those things which they desire to show the world. I invite those to whom these statements seem a compound of cheap psychology and cheaper metaphysics to clear their minds of prejudice and submit this matter to an experimental test. If they will be patient and honest—and unless they belong to that minority which is temperamentally incapable of the simplest contemplative act—they will emerge from the experiment possessed of a little new knowledge as to the nature of the relation between the human mind and the outer world.

All that is asked is that we shall look for a little time, in a special and undivided manner, at some simple, concrete, and external thing. This object of our contemplation may be almost anything we please: a picture, a statue, a tree, a distant hillside, a growing plant, running water, little living things. We need not, with Kant, go to the starry heavens. "A little thing the quantity of an hazel nut" will do for us, as it did for Lady Julian long ago.¹⁴ Remember, it is a practical experiment on which we are set; not an opportunity of pretty and pantheistic meditation.

Look, then, at this thing which you have chosen. Wilfully yet tranquilly refuse the messages which countless other aspects of the world are sending; and so concentrate your whole attention on this one act of loving sight that all other objects are excluded from the conscious field. Do not think, but as it were pour out your personality towards it: let your soul be in your eyes. Almost at once, this new method of perception will reveal unsuspected qualities in the external world. First, you will perceive about you a strange and deepening quietness; a slowing down of our feverish mental time. Next, you will become aware of a heightened significance, an intensified existence in the thing at which you look. As you, with all your consciousness, lean out towards it, an answering current will meet yours. It seems as though the barrier between its life and your own, between subject and object, had melted away. You are merged with it, in an act of true communion: and you know the secret of its being deeply and unforgettably, yet in a way which you can never hope to express.

Seen thus, a thistle has celestial qualities: a speckled hen a touch of the sublime. Our greater comrades, the trees, the clouds, the rivers, initiate us into mighty secrets, flame out at us "like shining from shook foil." The "eye which looks upon Eternity" has been given its opportunity. We have been immersed for a moment in the "life of the All": a deep and peaceful love unites us with the substance of all things, a "Mystic Marriage" has taken place between the mind and some aspect of the external world. Cor ad cor loquitur:Life has spoken to life, but not to the surface-intelligence. That surface-intelligence knows only that the message was true and beautiful: no more.

The price of this experience has been a stilling of that surface-mind, a calling in of all our scattered interests: an entire giving of ourselves to this one activity, without self-consciousness, without reflective thought. To reflect is always to distort: our minds are not good mirrors. The contemplative, on whatever level his faculty may operate, is contented to absorb and be absorbed: and by this humble access he attains to a plane of knowledge which no intellectual process can come near.

I do not suggest that this simple experiment is in any sense to be equated with the transcendental contemplation of the mystic. Yet it exercises on a small scale, and in regard to visible Nature, the same natural faculties which are taken up and used—it is true upon other levels, and in subjection to the transcendental sense—in his apprehension of the Invisible Real. Though it is one thing to see truthfully for an instant the flower in the crannied wall, another to be lifted up to the apprehension of "eternal Truth, true Love and loved Eternity," yet both according to their measure are functions of the inward eye, operating in the "suspension of the mind."

This humble receptiveness, this still and steady gazing, in which emotion, will, and thought are lost and fused, is the secret of the great contemplative on fire with love of that which he has been allowed to see. But whilst the contemplation of Nature entails an outgoing towards somewhat indubitably external to us, and has as its material the world of sensible experience: the contemplation of Spirit, as it seems to those who practise it, requires a deliberate refusal of the messages of the senses, an ingoing or "introversion" of our faculties, a "journey towards the centre." The Kingdom of God, they say, is within you: seek it, then, in the most secret habitations of the soul. The mystic must learn so to concentrate all his faculties, his very self, upon the invisible and intangible, that all visible things are forgot: to bring it so sharply into focus that everything else is blurred. He must call in his scattered faculties by a deliberate exercise of the will, empty his mind of its swarm of images, its riot of thought. In mystical language he must "sink into his nothingness": into that blank abiding place where busy, clever Reason cannot come. The whole of this process, this gathering up and turning "inwards" of the powers of the self, this gazing into the ground of the soul, is that which is called Introversion.

Introversion is an art which can be acquired, as gradually and as certainly, by the born mystic, as the art of piano-playing can be acquired by the born musician. In both cases it is the genius of the artist which makes his use of the instrument effective: but it is also his education in the use of the instrument which enables that genius to express itself in an adequate way. Such mystical education, of course, presumes a something that can be educated: the "New Birth," the awakening of the deeper self, must have taken place before it can begin. It is a psychological process, and obeys psychological laws. There is in it no element of the unexpected or the abnormal. In technical language, we are here concerned with "ordinary" not "extraordinary" contemplation.

In its early stages the practice of introversion is voluntary, difficult, and deliberate; as are the early stages of learning to read or write. But as reading or writing finally becomes automatic, so as the mystic's training in introversion proceeds, habits are formed: and those contemplative powers which he is educating establish themselves amongst his normal faculties. Sometimes they wholly dominate these faculties, escape the control of the will, and appear spontaneously, seizing upon the conscious field. Such violent and involuntary invasions of the transcendental powers, when they utterly swamp the surface-consciousness and the subject is therefore cut off from his ordinary "external world," constitute the typical experience of rapture or ecstasy. It is under the expansive formula of such abrupt ecstatic perception, "not by gradual steps, but by sudden ecstatic flights soaring aloft to the glorious things on high,"¹⁵ that the mystical consciousness of Divine Transcendence is most clearly expressed. Those wide, exalted apprehensions of the Godhead which we owe to the mystics have usually been obtained, not by industrious meditation, but by "a transcending of all creatures, a perfect going forth from oneself: by standing in an ecstasy of mind."¹⁶ Hence the experiences peculiar to these ecstatic states have a great value for the student of mysticism. It will be our duty to consider them in detail in a later section of this book. The normal and deliberate practice of introversion, on the contrary, is bound up with the sense of Divine Immanence. Its emphasis is on the indwelling God Who may be found "by a journey towards the centre": on the conviction indeed that "angels and archangels are with us, but He is more truly our own who is not only with us but in us."¹⁷

Contemplation—taking that term in its widest sense, as embracing all the degrees and kinds of mystical prayer—establishes communion between the soul and the Absolute by way of these complementary modes of apprehending that which is One. A. The usually uncontrollable, definitely outgoing, ecstatic experience; the attainment of Pure Being, or "flight to God." B. The more controllable ingoing experience; the breaking down of the barrier between the surface-self and those deeper levels of personality where God is met and known "in our nothingness," and a mysterious fusion of divine and human life takes place. The one, says the Christian mystic, is the "going forth to the Father"; the other is the "marriage with the Son." Both are operated by the Spirit whose dwelling is in the "spark of the soul." Yet it is probable, in spite of the spatial language which the mystics always use concerning them, that these two experiences, in their most sublime forms, are but opposite aspects of one whole: the complementary terms of a higher synthesis beyond our span. In that consummation of love which Ruysbroeck has called "the peace of the summits" they meet: then distinctions between inward and outward, near and far, cease to have any meaning, in "the dim silence where lovers lose themselves." "To mount to God," says the writer of "De Adhaerando Deo," "is to enter into one's self. For he who inwardly entereth and intimately penetrateth into himself, gets above and beyond himself and truly mounts up to God."¹⁸

Says Tauler of this ineffable meeting-place, which is to the intellect an emptiness, and to the heart a fulfillment of all desire, "All there is so still and mysterious and so desolate: for there is nothing there but God only, and nothing strange.... This Wilderness is the Quiet Desert of the Godhead, into which He leads all who are to receive this inspiration of God, now or in Eternity."¹⁹ From this "quiet desert," this still plane of being, so near to her though she is far from it, the normal self is separated by all the "unquiet desert" of sensual existence. Yet it stretches through and in her, the stuff of Reality, the very Ground of her being, since it is, in Julian's words, "the Substance of all that is": linking that being at once with the universe and with God. "God is near us, but we are far from Him, God is within, we are without, God is at home, we are in the far country," said Meister Eckhart, struggling to express the nature of this "intelligible where."²⁰ Clearly, if the self is ever to become aware of it, definite work must be undertaken, definite powers of perception must be trained: and the consciousness which has been evolved to meet the exigencies of the World of Becoming must be initiated into that World of Being from which it came forth.

Plato long ago defined the necessity of such a perception, and the nature of that art of contemplation by which the soul can feed upon the Real, when he said in one of his most purely mystical passages, "When the soul returns into itself and reflects, it passes into... the region of that which is pure and everlasting, immortal and unchangeable: and, feeling itself kindred thereto, it dwells there under its own control, and has rest from its wanderings."²¹ In the "contemplation" of Plato and of the Platonic Schools generally, however, the emphasis lies at least as much on intellect as on intuition: with him the head and not the heart is the meeting-place between man and the Real. "Anciently," says Augustine Baker, "there was a certain kind of false contemplation, which we may call philosophical, practised by some learned heathens of old, and imitated by some in these days, which hath for its last and best end only the perfection of knowledge, and a delightful complacency in it.... To this rank of philosophical contemplations may be referred those scholastic wits which spend much time in the study and subtle examination of the mysteries of faith, and have not for their end the increasing of divine love in their hearts."²²

We cannot long read the works of the mystics without coming across descriptions—often first-hand descriptions of great psychological interest—of the processes through which the self must pass, the discipline which it must undertake, in the course of acquiring the art of contemplation. Most of these descriptions differ in detail; in the divisions adopted, the emotions experienced, the number of "degrees" through which the subject passes, from the first painful attempt to gather up its faculties to the supreme point at which it feels itself to be "lost in God." In each there is that quality of uniqueness which is inherent in every expression of life: in each the temperamental bias and analytical powers of the writer have exerted a further modifying influence. All, however, describe a connected experience, the progressive concentration of the entire self under the spur of love upon the contemplation of transcendental reality. As the Mystic Way involves transcendence of character, the sublimation of the instinctive life and movement of the whole man to higher levels of vitality, his attainment of freedom, so the ascent of the ladder of contemplation involves such a transcendence, or movement to high levels of liberty, of his perceptive powers.

The steps of the ladder, the substance of the progressive exercises undertaken by the developing self, its education in the art of contemplation, are usually know by the Christian mystics as the "degrees of prayer" or "orison." But the common implications of the word "prayer," with its suggestions of formal devotion, detailed petition—a definite something asked for, and a definite duty done, by means of extemporary or traditional allocutions—do not really suggest the nature of those supersensual activities which the mystics mean to express in their use of this term.

Mystical prayer, or "orison"—the term which I propose for the sake of clearness to use here—has nothing in common with petition. It is not articulate; it has no forms. "It is," says "The Mirror of St. Edmund," "naught else but yearning of soul."²³ —the expression of man's metaphysical thirst. In it, says Grou, "the soul is united to God in its ground, the created intelligence to the Intelligence Increate, without the intervention of imagination or reason, or of anything but a very simple attention of the mind and an equally simple application of the will."²⁴ On the psychological side its development involves a steady discipline of the mystic's rich subliminal mind, slowly preparing the channels in which the deeper consciousness is to flow. This discipline reduces to some sort of order, makes effective for life, those involuntary states of passivity, rapture and intuition which are the characteristic ways in which an uncontrolled, uncultivated genius for the Absolute breaks out. To the subject himself, however, his orison seems rather a free and mutual act of love; a supernatural intercourse between the soul and the divine, or some aspect of the divine, sometimes full of light and joy, sometimes dark and bare.²⁵ In some of its degrees it is a placid, trustful waiting upon messages from without. In others, it is an inarticulate communion, a wordless rapture, a silent gazing upon God. The mystics have exhausted all the resources of all tongues in their efforts to tell us of the rewards which await those who will undertake this most sublime and difficult of arts.

As we come to know our friends better by having intercourse with them, so by this deliberate intercourse the self enters more and more deeply into the Heart of Reality. Climbing like Dante step by step up the ladder of contemplation, it comes at last to the Empyrean, "ivi è perfetta, matura ed intera ciascuna disianza."²⁶ The true end of orison, like the true end of that mystical life within which it flowers, is the supreme meeting between Lover and Beloved, between God and the soul. Its method is the method of the mystic life, transcendence: a gradual elimination of sensible image, and bit by bit approximation of the contemplative self to reality, gradually producing within it those conditions in which union can take place. This entails a concentration, a turning inwards, of all those faculties which the normal self has been accustomed to turn outwards, and fritter upon the manifold illusions of daily life. It means, during the hours of introversion, a retreat from and refusal of the Many, in order that the mind may be able to apprehend the One. "Behold," says Boehme, "if thou desirest to see God's Light in thy Soul, and be divinely illuminated and conducted, this is the short way that thou art to take; not to let the Eye of thy Spirit enter into Matter or fill itself with any Thing whatever, either in Heaven or Earth, but to let it enter by a naked faith into the Light of the Majesty."²⁷

"What this opening of the ghostly eye is," says Hilton, "the greatest clerk on earth could not imagine by his wit, nor show fully by his tongue. For it may not be got by study nor through man's travail only, but principally by grace of the Holy Ghost and with travail of man. I dread mickle to speak aught of it, for me thinketh I cannot; it passeth mine assay, and my lips are unclean. Nevertheless, for I expect love asketh and love biddeth, therefore I shall say a little more of it as I hope love teacheth. This opening of the ghostly eye is that lighty murkness and rich nought that I spake of before, and it may be called: Purity of spirit and ghostly rest, inward stillness and peace of conscience, highness of thought and onlyness of soul, a lively feeling of grace and privily of heart, the waking sleep of the spouse and tasting of heavenly savour burning in love and shining in light, entry of contemplation and reforming in feeling... they are divers in showing of words, nevertheless they are all one in sense of soothfastness."²⁸

"Human industry," says Hilton here, must be joined to "grace." If the spiritual eye is to be opened, definite work must be done. So long as the "eye which looks upon Time" fills itself with things and usurps the conscious field, that spiritual eye which "looks upon Eternity" can hardly act at all: and this eye must not only be opened, it must be trained, so that it may endure to gaze steadfastly at the Uncreated Light. This training and purging of the transcendental sight is described under many images; "diverse in showing of words, one in sense and soothfastness." Its essence is a progressive cleaning of the mirror, a progressive self-emptying of all that is not real the attainment of that unified state of consciousness which will permit a pure, imageless apprehension of the final Reality which "hath no image" to be received by the self. "Naked orison," "emptiness," "nothingness," "entire surrender," "peaceful love in life naughted," say the mystics again and again. Where apprehension of the divine comes by way of vision or audition, this is but a concession to human weakness; a sign, they think, that "sensitive nature" is not yet wholly transcended. It is a translation of the true tongue of angels into a dialect that the normal mind can understand. A steady abolition of sense imagery, a cutting off of all possible sources of illusion, all possible encouragements of selfhood and pride—the most fertile of all sources of deception—this is the condition of pure sight; and the "degrees of orison," the "steep stairs of love" which they climb so painfully, are based upon this necessity.

The terms used by individual mystics, the divisions which they adopt in describing the self's progress in contemplation, are bewildering in their variety. Here, more than elsewhere, the mania for classification has obsessed them. We find, too, when we come to compare one with another, that the language which they employ is not always so exact as it seems: nor are traditional terms always used in the same sense. Sometimes by the word "contemplation" they intend to describe the whole process of introversion: sometimes they reserve it for the "orison of union," sometimes identify it with ecstasy. It has been pointed out by Delacroix that even St. Teresa's classification of her own states is far from lucid, and varies in each of her principal works.²⁹ Thus in the "Life" she appears to treat Recollection and Quiet as synonymous, whilst in "The Way of Perfection" these conditions are sharply differentiated. In "The Interior Castle" she adopts an entirely different system; the prayer of quiet being there called "tasting of God."³⁰ Finally, Augustine Baker, in treating of the "Prayer of Interior Silence and Quiet," insists that by the term "Quiet" St. Teresa did not mean this at all, but a form of "supernatural contemplation."³¹

Thus we are gradually forced to the conclusion that the so-called "degrees of orison" so neatly tabulated by ascetic writers are largely artificial and symbolic: that the process which they profess to describe is really, like life itself, one and continuous—not a stairway but a slope—and the parts into which they break it up are diagrammatic. Nearly every mystic makes these breaks in a different place, though continuing to use the language of his predecessors. In his efforts towards self-analysis he divides and subdivides, combines and differentiates his individual moods. Hence the confusion of mind which falls upon those who try to harmonize different systems of contemplation: to identify St. Teresa's "Four Degrees"³² with Hugh of St. Victor's other four,³³ and with Richard of St. Victor's "four steps of ardent love":³⁴ or to accommodate upon this diagram Hilton's simple and poetic "three steps of contemplations—Knowing, Loving, and Knowing-and-Loving—where the adventurer rather than the map-maker speaks. Such fine shades, says Augustine Baker in this connection, are "nicely distinguished" by the author "rather out of a particular experience of the effects passing in his own soul³⁵ which perhaps are not the same in all" than for any more general reason.³⁶

Some diagram, however, some set scheme, the writer on introversion must have, if he is to describe with lucidity the normal development of the contemplative consciousness: and so long as the methodological nature of this diagram is kept in mind, there can be little objection to the use of it. I propose then to examine under three divisions that continuous and orderly growth, that gradual process of change, by which the mystical consciousness matures, and develops its apprehension of God. We will give to these three divisions names familiar to all readers of ascetic literature: Recollection, Quiet, and Contemplation. Each of these three parts of the introversive experience may be discerned in embryo in that little experiment at which the reader has been invited to assist: the act of concentration, the silence, the new perception which results. Each has a characteristic beginning which links it with its predecessor, and a characteristic end which shades off into the next state. Thus Recollection commonly begins in Meditation and develops into the "Orison of Inward Silence or Simplicity," which again melts into the true "Quiet." "Quiet" as it becomes deeper passes into Ordinary Contemplation: and this grows through Contemplation proper to that Orison of Passive Union which is the highest of the non-ecstatic introversive states. Merely to state the fact thus is to remind ourselves how smoothly continuous is this life-process of the soul.

It is the object of contemplative prayer, as it is the object of all education, to discipline and develop certain growing faculties. Here, the faculties are those of the "transcendental self," the "new man"—all those powers which we associate with the "spiritual consciousness." The "Sons of God," however, like the sons of men, begin as babies; and their first lessons must not be too hard. Therefore the educative process conforms to and takes advantage of every step of the natural process of growth: as we, in the education of our children, make the natural order in which their faculties develop the basis of our scheme of cultivation. Recollection, Quiet, and Contemplation, then, answer to the order in which the mystic's powers unfold. Roughly speaking, we shall find that the form of spiritual attention which is called "Meditative" or "Recollective" goes side by side with the Purification of the Self; that "Quiet" tends to be characteristic of Illumination; that Contemplation proper—at any rate in its higher forms—is most fully experienced by those who have attained, or nearly attained, the Unitive Way. At the same time, just as the self in its "first mystic life," before it has passed through the dark night of the spirit, often seems to run through the whole gamut of spiritual states, and attain that immediate experience of the Absolute which it seeks—though as a fact it has not reached those higher levels of consciousness on which true and permanent union takes place—so too in its orison. At any point in its growth it may experience for brief periods that imageless and overpowering sense of identity with the Absolute Life—that loving and exalted absorption in God—which is called "passive union," and anticipates the consciousness which is characteristic of the unitive life. Over and over again in its "prayerful process" it recapitulates in little the whole great process of its life. It runs up for an instant to levels where it is not yet strong enough to dwell: "seeks God in its ground" and finds that which it seeks. Therefore we must not be too strict in our identification of the grades of education with the stages of growth.

This education, rightly understood, is one coherent process: it consists in a steady and voluntary surrender of the awakened consciousness, its feeling, thought, and will, to the play of those transcendental influences, that inflowing vitality, which it conceives of as divine. In the preparative process of Recollection, the unruly mind is brought into subjection. In "Quiet" the eager will is silenced, the "wheel of imagination" is stilled. In Contemplation, the heart at last comes to its own— Cor ad cor loquitur. In their simplest forms, these three states involve the deliberate concentration upon, the meek resting in, the joyous communing with, the ineffable Object of man's quest. They require a progressive concentration of the mystic's powers, a gradual handing over of the reins from the surface intelligence to the deeper mind; that essential self which alone is capable of God. In Recollection the surface-mind still holds, so to speak, the leading strings: but in "Quiet" it surrenders them wholly, allowing consciousness to sink into that "blissful silence in which God works and speaks." This act of surrender, this deliberate negation of thought, is an essential preliminary of the contemplative state. "Lovers put out the candles and draw the curtains when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and in the higher communion the night of thought is the light of perception."³⁷

The education of the self in the successive degrees of orison has been compared by St. Teresa, in a celebrated passage in her Life, to four ways of watering the garden of the soul so that it may bring forth its flowers and fruits.³⁸ The first and most primitive of these ways is meditation. This, she says, is like drawing water by hand from a deep well: the slowest and most laborious of all means of irrigation. Next to this is the orison of quiet, which is a little better and easier: for here soul seems to receive some help, i.e., with the stilling of the senses the subliminal faculties are brought into play. The well has now been fitted with a windlass—that little Moorish water-wheel possessed by every Castilian farm. Hence we get more water for the energy we expend: more sense of reality in exchange for our abstraction from the unreal. Also "the water is higher, and accordingly the labour is much less than it was when the water had to be drawn out of the depths of the well. I mean that the water is nearer to it, for grace now reveals itself more distinctly to the soul." In the third stage, or orison of union, we leave all voluntary activities of the mind: the gardener no longer depends on his own exertions, contact between subject and object is established, there is no more stress and strain. It is as if a little river now ran through our garden and watered it. We have but to direct the stream. In the fourth and highest stage, God Himself waters our garden with rain from heaven "drop by drop." The attitude of the self is now that of perfect receptivity, "passive contemplation," loving trust. Individual activity is sunk in the "great life of the All."³⁹

The measure of the mystic's real progress is and must always be his progress in love; for his apprehension is an apprehension of the heart. His education, his watering of the garden of the soul, is a cultivation of this one flower—this Rosa Mystica which has its root in God. His advance in contemplation, then, will be accompanied step by step by those exalted feeling-states which Richard of St. Victor called the Degrees of Ardent Love. Without their presence, all the drill in the world will not bring him to the time contemplative state; though it may easily produce abnormal powers of perception of the kind familiar to students of the occult.

Thus our theory of mystic education is in close accord with our theory of mystic life. In both, there is a progressive surrender of selfhood under the steady advance of conquering love; a stilling of that "I, Me, and Mine," which is linked by all the senses, and by all its own desires, to the busy world of visible things. This progressive surrender usually appears in the practice of orison as a progressive inward retreat from circumference to centre, to that ground of the soul, that substantial somewhat in man, deep buried for most of us beneath the great rubbish heap of our surface-interests, where human life and divine life meet. To clear away the rubbish-heap so that he may get down to this treasure-house is from one point of view the initial task of the contemplative. This clearing away is the first part of "introversion": that journey inwards to his own centre where, stripped of all his cleverness and merit, reduced to his "nothingness," he can "meet God without intermediary." This ground of the soul, this strange inward sanctuary to which the normal man so seldom penetrates, is, says Eckhart, "immediately receptive of the Divine Being," and "no one can move it but God alone."⁴⁰ There the finite self encounters the Infinite; and, by a close and loving communion with and feeding on the attributes of the Divine Substance, is remade in the interests of the Absolute Life. This encounter, the consummation of mystical culture, is what we mean by contemplation in its highest form. Here we are on the verge of that great self-merging act which is of the essence of pure love: which Reality has sought of us, and we have unknowingly desired of It. Here contemplation and union are one. "Thus do we grow," says Ruysbroeck, "and, carried above ourselves, above reason, into the very heart of love, there do we feed according to the spirit; and taking flight for the Godhead by naked love, we go to the encounter of the Bridegroom, to the encounter of His Spirit, which is His love; and thus we are brought forth by God, out of our selfhood, into the immersion of love, in which we possess blessedness and are one with God."⁴¹