f Reality.

Therefore this transitional stage in the development of the
contemplative powers--in one sense the completion of their
elementary schooling, in another the beginning of their true
activities--is concerned with the toughening and further training
of that will which self-simplification has detached from its old
concentration upon the unreal wants and interests of the self.
Merged with your intuitive love, this is to become the true agent
of your encounter with Reality; for that Simple Eye of Intention,
which is so supremely your own, and in the last resort the maker
of your universe and controller of your destiny, is nothing else
but a synthesis of such energetic will and such uncorrupt desire,
turned and held in the direction of the Best.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST FORM OF CONTEMPLATION

Concentration, recollection, a profound self-criticism, the stilling
of his busy surface-intellect, his restless emotions of enmity and
desire, the voluntary achievement of an attitude of disinterested
love--by these strange paths the practical man has now been led,
in order that he may know by communion something of the
greater Life in which he is immersed and which he has so long
and so successfully ignored. He has managed in his own small
way something equivalent to those drastic purifications, those
searching readjustments, which are undertaken by the heroic
seekers for Reality; the arts whereby they defeat the tyranny of
"the I, the Me, the Mine" and achieve the freedom of a wider life.
Now, perhaps, he may share to some extent in that illumination,
that extended and intensified perception of things, which they
declare to be the heritage of the liberated consciousness.

This illumination shall be gradual. The attainment of it depends
not so much upon a philosophy accepted, or a new gift of vision
suddenly received, as upon an uninterrupted changing and
widening of character; a progressive growth towards the Real, an
ever more profound harmonisation of the self's life with the
greater and inclusive rhythms of existence. It shall therefore
develop in width and depth as the sphere of that self's
intuitive love extends. As your own practical sympathy with and
understanding of other lives, your realisation of them, may be
narrowed and stiffened to include no more than the family group,
or spread over your fellow-workers, your class, your city, party,
country, or religion--even perhaps the whole race--till you feel
y