your
spirit by hand; a poor and laborious method, yet one in which
there is a definite relation between effort and result. But now the
watering-can is taken from you, and you must depend upon the
rain: more generous, more fruitful, than anything which your own
efforts could manage, but, in its incalculable visitations, utterly
beyond your control. Here all one can say is this: that if you
acquiesce in the heroic demands which the spiritual life now
makes upon you, if you let yourself go, eradicate the last traces of
self-interest even of the most spiritual kind--then, you have
established conditions under which the forces of the spiritual
world can work on you, heightening your susceptibilities,
deepening and purifying your attention, so that you are able to
taste and feel more and more of the inexhaustible riches of
Reality.

Thus dying to your own will, waiting for what is given, infused,
you will presently find that a change in your apprehension has
indeed taken place: and that those who said self-loss was the only
way to realisation taught no pious fiction but the truth. The
highest contemplative experience to which you have yet attained
has seemed above all else a still awareness. The cessation of your
own striving, a resting upon and within the Absolute World--
these were its main characteristics for your consciousness. But
now, this Ocean of Being is no longer felt by you as an
emptiness, a solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it to be
instinct with a movement and life too great for you to apprehend.
You are thrilled by a mighty energy, uncontrolled by you,
unsolicited by you: its higher vitality is poured into your soul.
You enter upon an experience for which all the terms of power,
thought, motion, even of love, are inadequate: yet which contains
within itself the only complete expression of all these things.
Your strength is now literally made perfect in weakness: because
of the completeness of your dependence, a fresh life is infused
into you, such as your old separate existence never knew.
Moreover, to that diffused and impersonal sense of the Infinite, in
which you have dipped yourself, and which swallows up and
completes all the ideas your mind has ever built up with the
help of the categories of time and space, is now added the
consciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends,
completes all that you mean by the categories of personality and
of life. Those ineffective, half-conscious att