editation; a
perfectly natural form of mental exercise, though at first a hard
one.

Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking and
contemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value from
this transitional character. The real mystical life, which is the
truly practical life, begins at the beginning; not with supernatural
acts and ecstatic apprehensions, but with the normal faculties of
the normal man. "I do not require of you," says Teresa to her
pupils in meditation, "to form great and curious considerations in
your understanding: I require of you no more than to _look_."

It might be thought that such looking at the spiritual world,
simply, intensely, without cleverness--such an opening of the Eye
of Eternity--was the essence of contemplation itself: and indeed
one of the best definitions has described that art as a "loving
sight," a "peering into heaven with the ghostly eye." But the self
who is yet at this early stage of the pathway to Reality is not
asked to look at anything new, to peer into the deeps of things:
only to gaze with a new and cleansed vision on the ordinary
intellectual images, the labels and the formula, the "objects" and
ideas--even the external symbols--amongst which it has always
dwelt. It is not yet advanced to the seeing of fresh landscapes: it
is only able to re-examine the furniture of its home, and obtain
from this exercise a skill, and a control of the attention, which
shall afterwards be applied to greater purposes. Its task is here to
_consider_ that furniture, as the Victorines called this preliminary
training: to take, that is, a more starry view of it: standing back
from the whirl of the earth, and observing the process of things.

Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst the common stock,
and hold it before your mind. The selection is large enough: all
sentient beings may find subjects of meditation to their taste, for
there lies a universal behind every particular of thought, however
concrete it may appear, and within the most rational propositions
the meditative eye may glimpse a dream.

"Reason has moons, but moons not hers!
Lie mirror'd on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers
But, O delighting me."

Even those objects which minister to our sense-life may well be
used to nourish our spirits too. Who has not watched the intent
meditations of a comfortable cat brooding upon the Absolute
Mouse? You, if you have a philosophic tw