The Second Form Of Contemplation


"And here," says Ruysbroeck of the self which has reached this

point, "there begins a hunger and a thirst which shall never more

be stilled."



In the First Form of Contemplation that self has been striving to

know better its own natural plane of existence. It has stretched

out the feelers of its intuitive love into the general stream of

duration of which it is a part. Breaking down the fences of

> personality, merging itself in a larger consciousness, it

has learned to know the World of Becoming from within--as a

citizen, a member of the great society of life, not merely as a

spectator. But the more deeply and completely you become

immersed in and aware of this life, the greater the extension of

your consciousness; the more insistently will rumours and

intimations of a higher plane of experience, a closer unity and

more complete synthesis, begin to besiege you. You feel that

hitherto you nave received the messages of life in a series of

disconnected words and notes, from which your mind constructed

as best it could certain coherent sentences and tunes--laws,

classifications, relations, and the rest. But now you reach

out towards the ultimate sentence and melody, which exist

independently of your own constructive efforts; and realise that

the words and notes which so often puzzled you by displaying an

intensity that exceeded the demands of your little world, only

have beauty and meaning just because and in so far as you

discern them to be the partial expressions of a greater whole

which is still beyond your reach.



You have long been like a child tearing up the petals of flowers

in order to make a mosaic on the garden path; and the results of

this murderous diligence you mistook for a knowledge of the

world. When the bits fitted with unusual exactitude, you called it

science. Now at last you have perceived the greater truth and

loveliness of the living plant from which you broke them: have,

in fact, entered into direct communion with it, "united" with its

reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does

and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities,

which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and

forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that

touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants--

though this were far better than your old game of indexing your

own poor photographs of them--will never give you access to the

Unity, the Fact, whatever it may be, which manifests itself

through them. To suppose that it can do so is the cardinal error of

the "nature mystic": an error parallel with that of the psychologist

who looks for the soul in "psychic states."



The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more

perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the

quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless

suggestions; so much the more acute will become your craving

for Something More. You will now find and feel the Infinite and

Eternal, making as it were veiled and sacramental contacts with

you under these accidents--through these its ceaseless creative

activities--and you will want to press through and beyond them,

to a fuller realisation of, a more perfect and unmediated union

with, the Substance of all That Is. With the great widening and

deepening of your life that has ensued from the abolition of a

narrow selfhood, your entrance into the larger consciousness of

living things, there has necessarily come to you an instinctive

knowledge of a final and absolute group-relation, transcending

and including all lesser unions in its sweep. To this, the second

stage of contemplation, in which human consciousness enters

into its peculiar heritage, something within you now seems to

urge you on.



If you obey this inward push, pressing forward with the "sharp

dart of your longing love," forcing the point of your wilful

attention further and further into the web of things, such an

ever-deepening realisation, such an extension of your conscious

life, will indeed become possible to you. Nothing but your own

apathy, your feeble and limited desire, limits this realisation.

Here there is a strict relation between demand and supply--your

achievement shall be in proportion to the greatness of your

desire. The fact, and the in-pressing energy, of the Reality

without does not vary. Only the extent to which you are able to

receive it depends upon your courage and generosity, the measure

in which you give yourself to its embrace. Those minds which set

a limit to their self-donation must feel as they attain it, not a sense

of satisfaction but a sense of constriction. It is useless to offer

your spirit a garden--even a garden inhabited by saints and

angels--and pretend that it has been made free of the universe.

You will not have peace until you do away with all banks and

hedges, and exchange the garden for the wilderness that is

unwalled; that wild strange place of silence where "lovers lose

themselves."



Yet you must begin this great adventure humbly; and take, as

Julian of Norwich did, the first stage of your new outward-going

journey along the road that lies nearest at hand. When Julian

looked with the eye of contemplation upon that "little thing"

which revealed to her the oneness of the created universe, her

deep and loving sight perceived in it successively three

properties, which she expressed as well as she might under the

symbols of her own theology: "The first is that God made it; the

second is that God loveth it; the third is that God keepeth it."

Here are three phases in the ever-widening contemplative

apprehension of Reality. Not three opinions, but three facts, for

which she struggles to find words. The first is that each separate

living thing, budding "like an hazel nut" upon the tree of life, and

there destined to mature, age, and die, is the outbirth of another

power, of a creative push: that the World of Becoming in all its

richness and variety is not ultimate, but formed by Something

other than, and utterly transcendent to, itself. This, of course, the

religious mind invariably takes for granted: but we are concerned

with immediate experience rather than faith. To feel and know

those two aspects of Reality which we call "created" and

"uncreated," nature and spirit--to be as sharply aware of them, as

sure of them, as we are of land and sea--is to be made free of the

supersensual world. It is to stand for an instant at the Poet's side,

and see that Poem of which you have deciphered separate phrases

in the earlier form of contemplation. Then you were learning to

read: and found in the words, the lines, the stanzas, an

astonishing meaning and loveliness. But how much greater the

significance of every detail would appear to you, how much more

truly you would possess its life, were you acquainted with the

Poem: not as a mere succession of such lines and stanzas, but as a

non-successional whole.



From this Julian passes to that deeper knowledge of the heart

which comes from a humble and disinterested acceptance of life;

that this Creation, this whole changeful natural order, with all its

apparent collisions, cruelties, and waste, yet springs from an

ardour, an immeasurable love, a perpetual donation, which

generates it, upholds it, drives it; for "all-thing hath the being

by the love of God." Blake's anguished question here receives its

answer: the Mind that conceived the lamb conceived the tiger

too. Everything, says Julian in effect, whether gracious, terrible,

or malignant, is enwrapped in love: and is part of a world

produced, not by mechanical necessity, but by passionate desire.



Therefore nothing can really be mean, nothing despicable;

nothing, however perverted, irredeemable. The blasphemous

other-worldliness of the false mystic who conceives of matter as

an evil thing and flies from its "deceits," is corrected by this

loving sight. Hence, the more beautiful and noble a thing appears

to us, the more we love it--so much the more truly do we see it:

for then we perceive within it the Divine ardour surging up

towards expression, and share that simplicity and purity of vision

in which most saints and some poets see all things "as they are in

God."



Lastly, this love-driven world of duration--this work within

which the Divine Artist passionately and patiently expresses His

infinite dream under finite forms--is held in another, mightier

embrace. It is "kept," says Julian. Paradoxically, the perpetual

changeful energies of love and creation which inspire it are

gathered up and made complete within the unchanging fact of

Being: the Eternal and Absolute, within which the world of

things is set as the tree is set in the supporting earth, the enfolding

air. There, finally, is the rock and refuge of the seeking

consciousness wearied by the ceaseless process of the flux. There

that flux exists in its wholeness, "all at once"; in a manner which

we can never comprehend, but which in hours of withdrawal we

may sometimes taste and feel. It is in man's moments of contact

with this, when he penetrates beyond all images, however lovely,

however significant, to that ineffable awareness which the

mystics call "Naked Contemplation"--since it is stripped of all the

clothing with which reason and imagination drape and disguise

both our devils and our gods--that the hunger and thirst of the

heart is satisfied, and we receive indeed an assurance of ultimate

Reality. This assurance is not the cool conclusion of a successful

argument. It is rather the seizing at last of Something which we

have ever felt near us and enticing us: the unspeakably simple

because completely inclusive solution of all the puzzles of life.



As, then, you gave yourself to the broken-up yet actual reality of

the natural world, in order that it might give itself to you, and

your possession of its secret was achieved, first by surrender of

selfhood, next by a diligent thrusting out of your attention, last by

a union of love; so now by a repetition upon fresh levels of that

same process, you are to mount up to higher unions still. Held

tight as it seems to you in the finite, committed to the perpetual

rhythmic changes, the unceasing flux of "natural" life--compelled

to pass on from state to state, to grow, to age, to die--there is yet,

as you discovered in the first exercise of recollection, something

in you which endures through and therefore transcends this world

of change. This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and

merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one

intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of--an

instinct for--another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as

yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the

Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning

mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can,

is the source of all your unrest. More, it is the true origin of all

your best loves and enthusiasms, the inspiring cause of your

heroisms and achievements; which are but oblique and tentative

efforts to still that strange hunger for some final object of

devotion, some completing and elucidating vision, some total

self-donation, some great and perfect Act within which your little

activity can be merged.



St. Thomas Aquinas says, that a man is only withheld from this

desired vision of the Divine Essence, this discovery of the

Pure Act (which indeed is everywhere pressing in on him and

supporting him), by the apparent necessity which he is under of

turning to bodily images, of breaking up his continuous and

living intuition into Conceptual scraps; in other words, because

he cannot live the life of sensation without thought. But it is not

the man, it is merely his mental machinery which is under this

"necessity." This it is which translates, analyses, incorporates in

finite images the boundless perceptions of the spirit: passing

through its prism the White Light of Reality, and shattering it to a

succession of coloured rays. Therefore the man who would know

the Divine Secret must unshackle himself more thoroughly than

ever before from the tyranny of the image-making power. As it is

not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life,

so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know

God.



"For of all other creatures and their works," says the author of

The Cloud of Unknowing, "yea, and of the works of God's self,

may a man through grace have full-head of knowing, and well he

can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And

therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose

to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well

be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden;

but by thought never."



"Gotten and holden": homely words, that suggest rather the

outstretching of the hand to take something lying at your very

gates, than the long outward journey or terrific ascent of the

contemplative soul. Reality indeed, the mystics say, is "near and

far"; far from our thoughts, but saturating and supporting our

lives. Nothing would be nearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter,

were the doors of our perception truly cleansed. You have then

but to focus attention upon your own deep reality, "realise your

own soul," in order to find it. "We dwell in Him and He in us":

you participate in the Eternal Order now. The vision of the

Divine Essence--the participation of its own small activity in the

Supernal Act--is for the spark of your soul a perpetual process.

On the apex of your personality, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit,

melts and merges in it: from and by this encounter its life arises

and is sustained. But you have been busy from your childhood

with other matters. All the urgent affairs of "life," as you absurdly

called it, have monopolised your field of consciousness. Thus all

the important events of your real life, physical and spiritual--the

mysterious perpetual growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits

of the universe into the unstable body which you confuse with

yourself, the hum and whirr of the machine which preserves your

contacts with the material world, the more delicate movements

which condition your correspondences with, and growth within,

the spiritual order--all these have gone on unperceived by you.

All the time you have been kept and nourished, like the "Little

Thing," by an enfolding and creative love; yet of this you are less

conscious than you are of the air that you breathe.



Now, as in the first stage of contemplation you learned and

established, as a patent and experienced fact, your fraternal

relation with all the other children of God, entering into the

rhythm of their existence, participating in their stress and their

joy; will you not at least try to make patent this your filial

relation too? This actualisation of your true status, your place in

the Eternal World, is waiting for you. It represents the next phase

in your gradual achievement of Reality. The method by which

you will attain to it is strictly analogous to that by which you

obtained a more vivid awareness of the natural world in which

you grow and move. Here too it shall be direct intuitive contact,

sensation rather than thought, which shall bring you certitude--

"tasting food, not talking about it," as St. Bonaventura says.



Yet there is a marked difference between these two stages. In the

first, the deliberate inward retreat and gathering together of your

faculties which was effected by recollection, was the prelude to a

new coming forth, an outflow from the narrow limits of a merely

personal life to the better and truer apprehension of the created

world. Now, in the second stage, the disciplined and recollected

attention seems to take an opposite course. It is directed towards

a plane of existence with which your bodily senses have no

attachments: which is not merely misrepresented by your

ordinary concepts, but cannot be represented by them at all. It

must therefore sink inwards towards its own centre, "away from

all that can be thought or felt," as the mystics say, "away from

every image, every notion, every thing," towards that strange

condition of obscurity which St. John of the Cross calls the

"Night of Sense." Do this steadily, checking each vagrant

instinct, each insistent thought, however "spiritual" it may seem;

pressing ever more deeply inwards towards that ground, that

simple and undifferentiated Being from which your diverse

faculties emerge. Presently you will find yourself, emptied and

freed, in a place stripped bare of all the machinery of thought;

and achieve the condition of simplicity which those same

specialists call nakedness of spirit or "Wayless Love," and which

they declare to be above all human images and ideas--a state of

consciousness in which "all the workings of the reason fail."

Then you will observe that you have entered into an intense and

vivid silence: a silence which exists in itself, through and in spite

of the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this world

of silence you seem as it were to lose yourself, "to ebb and to

flow, to wander and be lost in the Imageless Ground," says

Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensations of the self in

this, its first initiation into the "wayless world, beyond image,"

where "all is, yet in no wise."



Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of

Unknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it is

well to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a

strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin to

understand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, "Be still, and

know." You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim strange

state of which you can say nothing, since it offers no material to

your image-making mind.



But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate,

from another is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowful

questionings are answered without utterance; it is the All, and

you are within it and part of it, and know that it is good. It calls

forth the utmost adoration of which you are capable; and,

mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended now, say

the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are become

part of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it were

upon its bosom and--though never perhaps before has your soul

been so truly active--seems to you a stillness, a rest.



The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lower

life of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will now

appear to you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact,

which you have verified in your own experience. You perceive

that these are the two complementary ways of apprehending and

uniting with Reality--the one as a dynamic process, the other as

an eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not conflict.

You know that the flow, the broken-up world of change and

multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of the

time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to the

development of the higher side of your consciousness, you are

now lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple,

transcendent life "broken, yet not divided," which gives to this

time-world all its meaning and validity. And you know, without

derogation from the realness of that life of flux within which you

first made good your attachments to the universe, that you are

also a true constituent of the greater whole; that since you are

man, you are also spirit, and are living Eternal Life now, in the

midst of time.



The effect of this form of contemplation, in the degree in which

the ordinary man may learn to practise it, is like the sudden

change of atmosphere, the shifting of values, which we experience

when we pass from the busy streets into a quiet church; where

a lamp burns, and a silence reigns, the same yesterday, to-day,

and for ever. Thence is poured forth a stillness which strikes

through the tumult without. Eluding the flicker of the arc-lamps,

thence through an upper window we may glimpse a perpetual star.



The walls of the church, limiting the range of our attention,

shutting out the torrent of life, with its insistent demands and

appeals, make possible our apprehension of this deep eternal

peace. The character of our consciousness, intermediate between

Eternity and Time, and ever ready to swing between them, makes

such a device, such a concrete aid to concentration, essential to

us. But the peace, the presence, is everywhere--for us, not for it,

is the altar and the sanctuary required--and your deliberate,

humble practice of contemplation will teach you at last to find it;

outside the sheltering walls of recollection as well as within. You

will realise then what Julian meant, when she declared the

ultimate property of all that was made to be that "God keepeth

it": will feel the violent consciousness of an enfolding

Presence, utterly transcending the fluid changeful nature-life, and

incomprehensible to the intelligence which that nature-life has

developed and trained. And as you knew the secret of that

nature-life best by surrendering yourself to it, by entering its

currents, and refusing to analyse or arrange: so here, by a

deliberate giving of yourself to the silence, the rich "nothingness,"

the "Cloud," you will draw nearest to the Reality it conceals

from the eye of sense. "Lovers put out the candle and draw the

curtains," says Patmore, "when they wish to see the God and the

Goddess: and in the higher communion, the night of thought is

the light of perception."



Such an experience of Eternity, the attainment of that intuitive

awareness, that meek and simple self-mergence, which the

mystics call sometimes, according to its degree and special

circumstances, the Quiet, the Desert of God, the Divine Dark,

represents the utmost that human consciousness can do of itself

towards the achievement of union with Reality. To some it brings

joy and peace, to others fear: to all a paradoxical sense of the

lowliness and greatness of the soul, which now at last can

measure itself by the august standards of the Infinite. Though the

trained and diligent will of the contemplative can, if control of

the attention be really established, recapture this state of

awareness, retreat into the Quiet again and again, yet it is of

necessity a fleeting experience; for man is immersed in duration,

subject to it. Its demands upon his attention can only cease with

the cessation of physical life--perhaps not then. Perpetual

absorption in the Transcendent is a human impossibility, and the

effort to achieve it is both unsocial and silly. But this experience,

this "ascent to the Nought," changes for ever the proportions of

the life that once has known it; gives to it depth and height, and

prepares the way for those further experiences, that great

transfiguration of existence which comes when the personal

activity of the finite will gives place to the great and compelling

action of another Power.



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