e which exists in itself, through and in spite
of the ceaseless noises of your normal world. Within this world
of silence you seem as it were to lose yourself, "to ebb and to
flow, to wander and be lost in the Imageless Ground," says
Ruysbroeck, struggling to describe the sensations of the self in
this, its first initiation into the "wayless world, beyond image,"
where "all is, yet in no wise."

Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of
Unknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it is
well to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a
strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin to
understand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, "Be still, and
know." You are lost in a wilderness, a solitude, a dim strange
state of which you can say nothing, since it offers no material to
your image-making mind.

But this wilderness, from one point of view so bare and desolate,
from another is yet strangely homely. In it, all your sorrowful
questionings are answered without utterance; it is the All, and
you are within it and part of it, and know that it is good. It calls
forth the utmost adoration of which you are capable; and,
mysteriously, gives love for love. You have ascended now, say
the mystics, into the Freedom of the Will of God; are become
part of a higher, slower duration, which carries you as it were
upon its bosom and--though never perhaps before has your soul
been so truly active--seems to you a stillness, a rest.

The doctrine of Plotinus concerning a higher life of unity, a lower
life of multiplicity, possible to every human spirit, will now
appear to you not a fantastic theory, but a plain statement of fact,
which you have verified in your own experience. You perceive
that these are the two complementary ways of apprehending and
uniting with Reality--the one as a dynamic process, the other as
an eternal whole. Thus understood, they do not conflict.
You know that the flow, the broken-up world of change and
multiplicity, is still going on; and that you, as a creature of the
time-world, are moving and growing with it. But, thanks to the
development of the higher side of your consciousness, you are
now lifted to a new poise; a direct participation in that simple,
transcendent life "broken, yet not divided," which gives to this
time-world all its meaning and validity. And you know, without
derogation from the realness of that life of flux within which yo