attention is
focussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its rich
simplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: for
you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now
to characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your own
dwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, the
sense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal of
contact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual self-donation, shall
animate it too. When the greater love overwhelms the lesser, and
your small self-consciousness is lost in the consciousness of the
Whole, it will be felt as an intense stillness, a quiet fruition of
Reality. Then, your very selfhood seems to cease, as it does in all
your moments of great passion; and you are "satisfied and
overflowing, and with Him beyond yourself eternally fulfilled."
Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground,
your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper
and deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, and
seeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of the
Infinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewed
encounter than a final achievement. Since you are a child of Time
as well as of Eternity, such effort and satisfaction, active and
passive love are both needed by you, if your whole life is to be
brought into union with the inconceivably rich yet simple One in
Whom these apparent opposites are harmonised. Therefore
seeking and finding, work and rest, conflict and peace, feeding on
God and self-immersion in God, spiritual marriage and spiritual
death--these contradictory images are all wanted, if we are to
represent the changing moods of the living, growing human
spirit; the diverse aspects under which it realises the simple fact
of its intercourse with the Divine.

Each new stage achieved in the mystical development of the
spirit has meant, not the leaving behind of the previous
stages, but an adding on to them: an ever greater extension of
experience, and enrichment of personality. So that the total result
of this change, this steady growth of your transcendental self, is
not an impoverishment of the sense-life in the supposed interests
of the super-sensual, but the addition to it of another life--a huge
widening and deepening of the field over which your attention
can play. Sometimes the mature contemplative consciousness
narrows to an intense point of feeling, in which it seems
indeed "alone w