"press," "push," "strive"--these are strong words: yet
they are constantly upon the lips of the contemplatives when
describing the earlier stages of their art. Clearly, the abolition of
discursive thought is not to absolve you from the obligations of
industry. You are to "energise enthusiastically" upon new planes,
where you shall see more intensely, hear more intensely, touch
and taste more intensely than ever before: for the modes of
communion which these senses make possible to you are now to
operate as parts of the one single state of perfect intuition, of
loving knowledge by union, to which you are growing up. And
gradually you come to see that, if this be so, it is the ardent will
that shall be the prime agent of your undertaking: a will which
has now become the active expression of your deepest and purest
desires. About this the recollected and simplified self is to gather
itself as a centre; and thence to look out--steadily, deliberately--
with eyes of love towards the world.

To "look with the eyes of love" seems a vague and sentimental
recommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion is
summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this
exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete
humility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without clever
analysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender
your I-hood; see things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not
for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to
the unity that is in them: and you achieve the "Simple Vision" of
the poet and the mystic--that synthetic and undistorted
apprehension of things which is the antithesis of the single vision
of practical men. The doors of perception are cleansed, and
everything appears as it is. The disfiguring results of hate, rivalry,
prejudice, vanish away. Into that silent place to which
recollection has brought you, new music, new colour, new light,
are poured from the outward world. The conscious love which
achieves this vision may, indeed must, fluctuate--"As long as
thou livest thou art subject to mutability; yea, though thou wilt
not!" But the _will_ which that love has enkindled can hold
attention in the right direction. It can refuse to relapse to unreal
and egotistic correspondences; and continue, even in darkness,
and in the suffering which such darkness brings to the awakened
spirit, its appointed task, cutting a way into new levels o