e 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 silenc