t to be.

"I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who
shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who
remains jagged and broken."

CHAPTER VIII

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 f