analysis of its
properties. The Simple Ear which discerns the celestial melody,
hears that Tone in which all music is resumed; thus achieving
that ecstatic life of "sensation without thought" which Keats
perceived to be the substance of true happiness.

But you, practical man, have lived all your days amongst the
illusions of multiplicity. Though you are using at every instant
your innate tendency to synthesis and simplification, since this
alone creates the semblance of order in your universe--though
what you call seeing and hearing are themselves great unifying
acts--yet your attention to life has been deliberately adjusted to a
world of frittered values and prismatic refracted lights: full of
incompatible interests, of people, principles, things. Ambitions
and affections, tastes and prejudices, are fighting for your
attention. Your poor, worried consciousness flies to and fro
amongst them; it has become a restless and a complicated thing.
At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of
bees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to
be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as
hopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon the
periphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of
appearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you are
not able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one with
the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists:
the permanent being which persists through and behind the flow
and change of your conscious states. You have been snatched to
that centre once or twice. Turn your consciousness inward to it
deliberately. Retreat to that point whence all the various lines of
your activities flow, and to which at last they must return. Since
this alone of all that you call your "selfhood" is possessed of
eternal reality, it is surely a counsel of prudence to acquaint
yourself with its peculiarities and its powers. "Take your seat
within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus," cries the Eastern
visionary. "Hold thou to thy Centre," says his Christian brother,
"and all things shall be thine." This is a practical recipe, not a
pious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but you
can do it if you will: standing back, as it were, from the vague
and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital
energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain
detachment