in order that we may enter the pure temple of the
Mysteries. For this a candid and unbiassed attitude of mind is
necessary.

The important point for the Mystic is at first the frame of mind in
which he approaches that which to him is the highest, the answers to
the riddles of existence. Just in our day, when only gross physical
science is recognised as containing truth, it is difficult to believe
that in the highest things we depend upon the key-note of the soul.
Knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is
what it really is to the Mystic. Tell some one the solution of the
riddle of the universe! Give it him ready-made! The Mystic will find
it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the
solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is
nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling is not kindled at its
contact. A divinity approaches you. It is either everything or
nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you
confront everyday matters. Everything, if you are prepared, and
attuned to the meeting. What the Divinity is in itself is a matter
which does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it
leaves you as it found you or makes another man of you. But this
depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special
education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality
for the work of kindling and releasing what a divinity is able to
kindle and release in you. What is brought to you depends on the
reception you give to it.

Plutarch has told us about this education, and of the greeting which
the Mystic offers the divinity approaching him; "For the god, as it
were, greets each one who approaches him, with the words, 'Know
thyself,' which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting,
'Welcome.' Then we answer the divinity in the words, 'Thou art,' and
thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting
for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no
part here, for every mortal being, situated between birth and
destruction, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain
image of itself. If we try to grasp it with our understanding, it is
as when water is tightly compressed and runs over merely through the
pressure, spoiling what it touches. For the understanding, pursuing a
too definite conception of each being that is subject to accidents and
change,