CHAPTER V

SELF-ADJUSTMENT
So, in a measure, you have found yourself : have retreated behind all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You. Thanks to this recollective act, you have discovered in your inmost sanctuary a being not wholly practical, who refuses to be satisfied by your busy life of corre- spondences with the world of normal men, and hun- gers for communion with a spiritual universe. And this thing so foreign to your surface consciousness, j yet familiarto it and continuous with it, you recognise as the true Self whose existence you always took for, granted, but whom you have only known hitherto in its scattered manifestations. “ That art thou."
This climb up the mountain of self-knowledge, said the Victorine mystics, is the necessary preludi to all illumination. Only at its summit do we dis-
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cover, as Dante did, the beginning of the pathway to Reality, It is a lonely and an arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity : for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their more obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth. True and complete self-know-] ledge, indeed, is the privilege of the strongest alone Few can bear to contemplate themselves face face ; for the vision is strange and terrible, am brings awe and contrition in its wake. The life o; the seer is changed by it for ever. He is converted, in the deepest and most drastic sense ; is forced ta take up a new attitude towards himself and all othel things. Likely enough, if you really knew yourself — saw your own dim character, perpetually at th t mercy of its environment ; your true motive , stripped for inspection and measured against eterm 1 values; your unacknowledged self-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates — you would be com ■ pelled to remodel your whole existence, and becom : for the first time a practical man.
But you have done what you can in this direction ; have at last discovered your own deeper being, your
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eternal spark, the agent of all your contacts with Reality. You have often read about it. Now you have met it; know for a fact that it is there. What next i What changes, what readjustments will this self-revelation involve for you i You will have noticed, as with practice your r familiarity with the state of Recollection has in- creased, that the kind of consciousness which it brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands of you, conflict sharply with the consciousness and the attitude which you have found so appropriate to your ordinary life in the past. They make this old attitude appear childish, unworthy, at last absurd. By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reality you are at once brought face to face with that dreadful revelation of disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which the blunt moralists call “ conviction of sin.” Never again need those moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things : your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on. None the less, this attitude persists. Again and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the
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world. This game which you have played so long has formed and conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abey- ance : so that now, suddenly asked to play another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic remodelling of character which the mystics call “ Purgation,” the second stage in the training of the human conscious- ness for participation in Reality.
It is not merely that your intellect has assimilatedi united with a superficial and unreal view of tha world. Far worse : your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have be- come accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain valueless things, certain specific positions. For years your treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that “ really count ” (if they still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair ; and thither your heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You are not free. The
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awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspon- j dence with the Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony between the simple but inex-: orable longings and instincts of the buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of meditation — pushing out, as it were, towards the light — and the various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the surface-self. Between j these two no peace is possible : they conflict at every turn. It becomes apparent to you that the declaration of Plotinus, accepted or repeated by all the mystics, concerning a “ higher ” and a “ lower ” life, and the cleavage that exists between them, has a certain justification even in the experience of the ordinary man.
That great thinker and ecstatic said, that all | human personality was thus two-fold : thus capable: of correspondence with two orders of existence. The “ higher life " was always tending towards union with Reality ; towards the gathering of itself up into One. The “ lower life," framed for corre- spondence with the outward world of multiplicity, was always tending to fall downwards, and fritter the
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powers of the self among external things. This is but a restatement, in terms of practical existence, of the fact which Recollection brought home to us : that the human self is transitional, neither angel nor animal, capable of living towards either Eternity or Time. But it is one thing to frame beautiful theories on these subjects : another when the un- resolved dualism of your own personality (though you may not give it this high-sounding name) be- comes the main fact of consciousness, perpetually reasserts itself as a vital problem, and refuses to take academic rank.
This state of things means the acute discomfort which ensues on being pulled two ways at once. The uneasy swaying of attention between two in- compatible ideals, the alternating conviction that there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the life which your inner- most inhabitant wants to live — these disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between their attractions and their claims ; and will have no peace until these claims have been
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met, and the apparent opposition between them resolved. You are sure now that there is another, more durable and more 44 reasonable/* life possible to the human consciousness than that on which it usually spends itself. But it is also clear to you that you must yourself be something more, or other, than you are now, if you are to achieve this life, dwell in it, and breathe its air. You have had in your brief spells of recollection a first quick vision of that plane of being which Augustine called 44 the land of peace,” the 44 beauty old and new.” You know for evermore that it exists : that the real thing within yourself belongs to it, might live in it, is being all the time invited and enticed to it. You begin, in fact, to feel and know in every fibre of your being the mystical need of 44 union with Reality”; and to realise that the natural scene which you have accepted so trustfully cannot provide the correspondences towards which you are stretching out. I
Nevertheless, it is to correspondences with this natural order that you have given for many years your full attention, your desire, your will. The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession
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of the conscious field, has grown strong, and ce- mented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious ; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of " fixed ideas.” It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging lifea protected by its hard shell from the living waters of] the sea, must now come to an end. A conflict of some kind — a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices — is here inevitable for you ; and a decision as to the form which the new adjustments must take.
Now although in a general way we may regard the practical man's attitude to existence as a limpet-like adherence to the unreal ; yet, from another point of view, fixity of purpose and desire is the last thing we can attribute to him. His mind is full of little whirlpools, twists and currents, conflicting systems, incompatible desires. One after another, he centres himself on ambition, love, duty, friendship, social convention, politics, religion, self-interest in one of its myriad forms ; making of each a core round
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which whole sections of his life are arranged. One after another, these things either fail him or enslave him. Sometimes they become obsessions, distort- ing his judgment, narrowing his outlook, colouring his whole existence. Sometimes they develop incon- sistent characters which involve him in public diffi- culties, private compromises and self-deceptions of every kind. They split his attention, fritter his powers. This stateof affairs, which usuallypasses for an “ active life," begins to take on a different com- plexion when looked at with the simple eye of meditation. Then we observe that the plain man's world is in a muddle,just because he has .fried to arrange its major interests round himself asrpund a centre ; and he is neither strong enough nor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched* little whirlpool in die mighty River of Becoming^ interrupting — as he imagines, in his own interest—-' its even flow : and within that whirlpool are numer- ous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a con- tinual state of unrest. The man who makes la success of his life, in any department, is he who has chosen one from amongst these claims and interests,
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and devoted to it his energetic powers of heart and will ; “ unifying ” himself about it, and from within it resisting all counter- claims . He has one objec- tive, one centre ; has killed out the lesser ones, and simplified himself. J
Now the artist, the discoverer, the philosopher; the lover, the patriot — the true enthusiast for any form of life — can only achieve the full reality to which his special art or passion gives access by innumerable renunciations. He must kill out the smaller centres ofjnterest, in order that his whole will, love, and attention may pour itself out towards, seize upon, unite with, that special mani-
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festation of the beauty and significance of the universe to which he is drawn. So,too,adeliberate| self-simplification, a “ purgation *' of the heart at will, is demanded of those who would develop the form of consciousness called “ mystical/* All your [ power, all your resolution, is needed if you are to succeed in this adventure : there must be no frittering of energy, no mixture of motives. We hear much of the mystical temperament, the ' mystical vision. The mystical character is far mor important : and its chief ingredients are couraget
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singleness of heart, and self-control. It is towards J die perfecting of these military virtues, not to the production of a pious softness, that the discipline of asceticism is largely directed ; and the ascetic foundation, in one form or another, is the only enduring foundation of a sane contemplative life.
You cannot, until you have steadied yourself, f found a poise, and begun to resist some amongst the! innumerable claims which the world of appearance perpetually makes upon your attention and youf desire, make much use of the new power whies Recollection has disclosed to you ; and this Recoil lection itself, so long as it remains merely a matter 0$ attention and does not involve the heart, is no better than a psychic trick. You are committed therefore, as the fruit of your first attempts at self- knowledge, to a deliberate — probably a difficult — rearrangement of your character; to the stern course of self-discipline, the voluntary acts of choice on the one hand and of rejection on the other, which ascetic writers describe under the formidable names of Detachment and Mortification. By Detachment they mean the eviction of the limpet from its crevice ; the refusal to anchor yourself to material
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things, to regard existence from the personal standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity. By Mortification, they mean the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currents of your own con- flicting passions, interests, desires ; the ki lli n g out of all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollection would condemn, and which create the fundamental opposition between your interior and exterior life.
What then, in the last resort? is the source of this opposition; the true reason of your uneasiness, your unrest i The reason lies, not in any real' incompatibility between the interests of the temporal and the eternal orders ; which are but two aspects of one Fact, two expressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself ; in your attitude towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb “tojhave ” : all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual demands, appetites, wants. That “ love of life ” of which we sometimes speak is mostly^ cupboard-love. We are quick to snap at her ankles when she locks the larder door : a proceeding which we dignify by the name of pessimism. The
mystic knows not this attitude of demand. He
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( tells us again and again, that “ he is rid of all his asking " ; that ** henceforth die heat of having shall never scorch him more/' Compare this with your normal attitude to the world, practical man : your quiet certitude that you are well within your rights in pushing the claims of " the I, the Me, the Mine ” } your habit, if you be religious, of asking for the weather and the government that you want, of persuading the Supernal Powers to take a special interest in your national or personal health and | prosperity. How often in each day do you delibex- I ately revert to an attitude of disinterested adoration i ! Yet this is the only attitude in which true com l munion with the universe is possible.
The very mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet you have not : wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friend- ship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right to some of these things : to a certain recog- nition of your powers, a certain immunity from failure or humiliation. You resent anything which opposes you in these matters. You become rest- less when you see other selves more skilful in the
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game of acquisition than yourself. You hold tight against all comers your own share of the spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boring responsi- bilities and unattractive, unremunerative toil ; are greedy of pleasure and excitement, devoted to die art of having a good time. If you possess a social sense, you demand these things not only for your- self but for your tribe — the domestic or racial group to which you belong. These dispositions, so ordinary that they almost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers the Seven Deadly] Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony,! and Lust. Perhaps you would rather call them — as indeed they are — the seven common forms of j ] egotism. They represent die natural reactions to life of the self-centred human consciousness, enslaved by the “ world of multiplicity " ; and con- stitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as these dispositions govern character wd|| can never see or feel things as they are ; but only as they affect ourselves, our family, our party, out business, our church, our empire — the I, the Me, tfy Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detached and purified heart can view all
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things — the irrational cruelty of circumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life, the' acts and beliefs of enemy and friend — in true pro- portion ; and reckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore the mystics tell us per- petually that “selfhood must be killed" before Reality can be attained. I
“ Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but none other thing than thyself ,” says The Cloud of Unknowing. “When the I, the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done," says Kabir. The sub^^ce of that wrongness oL act and relation which constitutes “ sin " is the separation of the individual spirit from the whole ; the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turn- ing inwards and condensation of his energies and desires, till they do indeed form a “ lump " ; a hard, tight core about which all the currents of his existence swirl. This heavy weight within the heart resists every outgoing impulse of the ^spirit ; and tends to draw all things inward and downward to itself, -never to pour itself forth in love, enthu- siasm, sacrifice. “ So long," says the Theologia
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Germanica, " as a man seeketh his own will and his own highest good, because it is his, and for his own sake, he will never find it : for so long as he doeth this, he is not seeking his own highest good, and how then should he find it i For so long as he doeth this, he seeketh himself, and dreameth that he is himself the highest good. . . . But who-t soever seeketh, loveth, and pursueth goodness, as goodness and for the sake of goodness, and maketh that his end — for nothing but the love of goodness, not for love of the I, Me, Mine, Self, and die like — he will find the highest 4^od, for he seeketh it aright, and they who seek it otherwise do err/'
So it is disinterestedness, the saint's and poet's 1 love of things for their own sakes, the vision of th charitable heart, which is the secret of union wit! Reality -and the condition of all real knowledge This brings with it the precious quality of supple- ness, the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the great rhythms of life ; and this will onjy come when the ungainly “ lump " of sin is broken, and the verb “ to have," which expresses 1 its reaction to existence, is ejected from the centre of ] your consciousness. Then your attitude to life will (If
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cease to be commercial, and become artistic. Then it f the guardian at the gate, scrutinising and sorting! the incoming impressions, will no longer ask,
“ What use is this to met ” before admitting th angel of beauty or significance who demands youi hospitality. Then things will cease to have powei over you. You will become free. " Son,” says i Kempis, “ thou oughtest diligently to attend to this ; that in every place, every action or outward occupa- tion, thou be inwardly free and mighty in thyself, and all things be under thee, and thou not under them; that thou be lord and governor of thy deeds, not servant.”
It is therefore by the withdrawal of your will/ from its feverish attachment to things, till “ they are under thee and thou not under them,” that you will gradually resolve the opposition between the recollective and the active sides of your personality By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude whict the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom — for these are two aspects of one thing — will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last
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arrive at the point which they call the summit j of the spirit; where the various forces of your character — brute energy, keen intellect, desirous heart — long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a strong and disciplined instrument where- with your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality,
V**'"
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