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 disinterested love — by these strange paths the practical man has now been led, in order that he may know by com-, munion 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 readjustments, 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, perhaps, he may share to some extent in that illumination, that extended and in- tensified perception of things, which they declare to be the heritage of the liberated consciousness.
This illumination shall be gradual. The attain-
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ment of it depends not so much upon a philosophy accepted, or a new gift of vision suddenly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing and widening of] character ; a progressive growth towards the Real, an ever more profound harmonisation of the seifs life with the greater and inclusive rhythms of existence. It shall therefore develop in width and depth as the sphere of that seifs intuitive love extends. As your own practical sympathy with and understanding of other lives, your realisation on them, may be narrowed and stiffened to include nc more than the family group, or spread over you fellow-workers, your class, your city, party, country or religion — even perhaps the whole race — till yot 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, depen ^deat on-'ff progres sive nnnm.finy 5Zp5s55ainyr— The apprehension of Reality which rewards it is gradual too. hi essence, it is one continuous out- flowing movement towards that boundless heavenly consciousness where the " flaming ramparts ” which shut you from true communion with all other selves and things are done away; an unbroken
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process of expansion and simplification, 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 individuality, 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 unselfing 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 oontemplatives, returning from their | highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is j " unwalled”
But this growth into higher realities, this blossoming 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 forms which we call " order ” if ou r inelast ic minds are to grasp it. So, we will consider it as the succes- sive achievement of those three levels or manifests- ’
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dons 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 ex- perience are so plaited together, that intimations from the deeper layers of being constantly reach you through the natural scene, it is in this order of reali- sation that you may best think of them, and of your own gradual upgrowth to the full stature of human- ity. 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 natural life, is content with this increase of sensi-f bility ; and, becoming a “ nature-mystic/' asks no ,
So you are to begin with that first form of con- templation which die 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 exploration of the
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world that lies at your gates ; the “ ebb and flow and ever-during power ” of which your own exist- ence 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 vou: find in every manifestation of life — even those
muck you have pett 3 antiy classified as cruel or
ent Being wh ose sparkburns deep in your own soul, ^TE?Tndian mystics speaic perpetually of the visible universe as the Lila or Sp ort o f God : the Infinite deliberately expressing HimselTTlt^finite ; form, t hp musical manifestation of His cre ative joy.' All gracious and all courteous souls, they 1 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 sacrifice and triumph — than their personal conquests, disappointments, and| fatigues. In the first form of contemplation are to realise the movement of this game, in whic you have played so long a languid and involunt part, and find your own place in it. It is flowing,)
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growing, changing, making perpetual unexpected patterns within the evolving .melody of the Divinel T houg ht. In all things it is incomplete, unsta ble ;1 and so are you. Your fellow-men, enduring oo| the battlefield, living and breeding in the slum!
adventurous and studious, sensuous and pure— j j 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. The y 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 ritua l faprr and obedient 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 S' Part of you, practical man. There is but one music in the world : and to it you
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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
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keep as it were a plate-glass window between your- ^ self and your fellow -dancers — all those other j thoughts of God, perpetually becoming, changing, / and growing beside you — and commit yourself to I the unsocial attitude of the “ cat that walks by 1 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 unless you happen to need them.# Pour yourself out towards it, do not draw its! image towards you. Deliberate — more, impas- sioned — attentiveness, 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 contem- plation, it matters little. From Alp to insea, anything will do, provided that your attitude be right : for all things in this world towards which,
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you are stretching out are linked together, and one truly apprehended will be the gateway to the rest.
Look with the eye of contemplation on the most 1 dissipated tabby of the streets, and you shall dis- ' cem the celestial quality of life set like an aureole about his tattered ears, and hear in his strident mew an echo of
44 The deep enthusiastic joy.
The rapture of the hallelujah sent From all that breathes and is . 94
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 y ou wo uld look int o the eyes of a friend : arden tly, selflessly, with- out considering his reputation, Ids practical us es, his anatomical peculiarities, or the vices which might emergeTwere 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, y ou will presently discover a relationshTp— far 'mSl?(^ intimate than anything you imagined — between
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yourself and t he surrounding 44 objects of sense "ill and in those objects of sense a profound slgnUP* cance, a personal quality, an actual power of re- spo nse, w hich you might in cooler moments 'fiStiSI «S 3 T Making good your correspondences with these fellow-travellers, you will learn to say with Whitman :
“ You air that term me with breath to speak !
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape 1
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers I
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadside 1 I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.”
A subtle interpenetration of your spirit with the 1 spirit of those 44 unseen existences/' now so deeply V and thrillingly felt by you, will take place. Old I barriers will vanish : and you will become aware 1 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
44 The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we ought all to be happy as kings."
> t hiiigS '~ W Br'gp ulL lu JULl. l / 1 1
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They will oiler you news at least as definite and credible as that which the paper-boy is hawking in the street: direct mes sages from that Beauty which the artist reports at best at second hand^ Because of your new sensitiveness, anthems will be heard of you from every gutter ; poems of intolerable loveli- ness will bud for you on every weed. Best and greatest, your fellow-men will shi ne for you with ] n ew sigm ficancejind Hoht Hnmilfty am & awe wilf] be evoked in you by the beautiful and patient figures of the poor, their long dumb heroisms, their willing acceptance 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 adven- / turous endeavours/ all spietidour of'Pfl&r and all / beauty of play — more, that grey unceasing effort of existence which makes up the groundwork of the social web, and the ineffective hopes, enthusiasmsl i and loves which transfuse it — all these will be seen,
\ and felt by you at last as full of glory, full of meaning a i for you will see them with innocent, attentive, dis-/
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interested 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 persons enjoy ; still less, with a self-conscious and deliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable condition of awaren ess ; a direct perception, not an opinioh Of SB idea. For tEoseTwEo attain itj the spaa of the senses is extended . These live in a world which is lit with an intenser light ; has, as George Fox in- sisted, “ another smell than before.” They hear all about them the delicate music of growth, and see the 44 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
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•° - Tg§CTt*tEat the sense-world has become for you, as |
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respects* Then, it was an idea or image f rom amongst the common stock — one of those concf jtwl-lahels
to the direct message poured out towards jypu by the thing. Then, you considered : now, you are to absorb. This experience will be, in the very highest sense, the experience of sensation without thought : the essential sensation, the 44 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 com- munion, this 44 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 concentrating upon them, accepting their reports in simplicity. You have, in this con- templative outlook, carried the peculiar methods of
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Erigena said that all creatures were , 44 ajhegBfaa»y> j ] or appearance of God/' Not, you observe, a
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symb ol, but a showing : a very different thing . You have begun now dbie Plotinian ascent from multipli- city to unity, and therefore begin to perceive in the Many the de ar and actual presence of the One : the changeless and absolute Life, manifesting itself la _ all the myri ad nascent, crescent, cadent live s. Poets, gazing thus at the " flower in the crannied wall ” or the “ green thing that stands in the way/' have been. le d deep into the heart of its life ; there to discern} the sec ret of the unive rse. j
^nTtEffteater 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 desperate 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 “ Imagina- tion.” For these, the contemplation 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 thap
anything that we have known. Yet your own little
o
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efforts towards the attainment of this level of con- sciousness will at least give to you, together with a more vivid universe, a wholly new comprehen- sion 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 be the only artistic creations to which the name of Realism is appropriate ; and it is by the I standard of reality that you shall now criticise them, j 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 s tate of conscious ness whic h Blake 1 called “ imagination uncorrupt/'
It was from those purified and heightened leveld of perception to which the first form of contempla-j tion inducts the soul, that Julian of Norwich, gaging upon “ a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut,’1 found in it the epitome of all that was made ; fori therein s he perceived the royal character of life. Sol small and helpless in its mightiest torms/so august j even in its meanest, that life in its wholeness was| then realised by her as the direct outbirth of, ana the meek dependant upon, the Energy of Divi^
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jLove. She felt at once the fugitive character of 1 its apparent existence, the perdurable Reality within j which it was held. 44 I marvelled/' she said, 44 how' it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding : It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it . And so All-thing hath the being by the love ofGod/' To this same apprehension of Reality, this linking up of each finite expression wit its Origin, this search for the inner significance off every fragment of life, one of the greatest and most balanced contemplatives of the nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale, reached out when she ex- claimed in an hour of self-examination, 44 1 must 1 strive to see only God in my friends, and God in 1
ret 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 44 living faith/' 44 A pleasing stirring
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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 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 inevitably 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, there- fore, 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 richness and meaning. Its paradoxes and inequalities will be disclosed as true constituents
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of its beauty, an inconceivable splendour wi(pke shaken out from its dingiest folds. Then, and then, escaping the single vision of the selfish, yl will begin to guess all that your senses were mean to be.
44 1 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/ 9
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