ourself utterly part of it, moving with it, suffering with it, and
partake of its whole conscious life; so here. Self-mergence is a
gradual process, dependent on a progressive unlimiting of
personality. The apprehension of Reality which rewards it is
gradual too. In 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 is done away; an unbroken
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 contemplatives, returning from
their highest ascents, can only tell us of a world that is
"unwalled."

But this growth into higher realities, this blossoming of your
contemplative consciousness--though it be, like all else we know
in life, an unbroken process of movement and change--must be
broken up and reduced to the series of concrete forms which we
call "order" if our inelastic minds are to grasp it. So, we will
consider it as the successive achievement of those three levels or
manifestations 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
experience 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 realisation that you may best think of
them, and of your own gradual upgrowth to the full stature of
humanity. 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
natur