them," that you will gradually resolve the
opposition between the recollective and the active sides of your
personality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which
the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect
freedom--for these are two aspects of one thing--will become
possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and
throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at
last arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit;
where the various forces of your character--brute energy, keen
intellect, desirous heart--long dissipated amongst a thousand little
wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a
strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can
force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.

CHAPTER VI

LOVE AND WILL

This steady effort towards the simplifying of your tangled
character, its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal,
is not to dispense you from that other special training of the
attention which the diligent practice of meditation and
recollection effects. Your pursuit of the one must never involve
neglect of the other; for these are the two sides--one moral, the
other mental--of that unique process of self-conquest which
Ruysbroeck calls "the gathering of the forces of the soul into the
unity of the spirit": the welding together of all your powers, the
focussing of them upon one point. Hence they should never,
either in theory or practice, be separated. Only the act of
recollection, the constantly renewed retreat to the quiet centre of
the spirit, gives that assurance of a Reality, a calmer and more
valid life attainable by us, which supports the stress and pain of
self-simplification and permits us to hope on, even in the teeth of
the world's cruelty, indifference, degeneracy; whilst diligent
character-building alone, with its perpetual untiring efforts at
self-adjustment, its bracing, purging discipline, checks the human
tendency to relapse into and react to the obvious, and makes
possible the further development of the contemplative power.

So it is through and by these two great changes in your attitude
towards things--first, the change of attention, which enables you
to perceive a truer universe; next, the deliberate rearrangement of
your ideas, energies, and desires in harmony with that which you
have seen--that a progressive uniformity of life and experience is
secured to you,