he man who would know
the Divine Secret must unshackle himself more thoroughly than
ever before from the tyranny of the image-making power. As it is
not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life,
so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know
God.

"For of all other creatures and their works," says the author of
_The Cloud of Unknowing_, "yea, and of the works of God's self,
may a man through grace have full-head of knowing, and well he
can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And
therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose
to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well
be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden;
but by thought never."

"Gotten and holden": homely words, that suggest rather the
outstretching of the hand to take something lying at your very
gates, than the long outward journey or terrific ascent of the
contemplative soul. Reality indeed, the mystics say, is "near and
far"; far from our thoughts, but saturating and supporting our
lives. Nothing would be nearer, nothing dearer, nothing sweeter,
were the doors of our perception truly cleansed. You have then
but to focus attention upon your own deep reality, "realise your
own soul," in order to find it. "We dwell in Him and He in us":
you participate in the Eternal Order now. The vision of the
Divine Essence--the participation of its own small activity in the
Supernal Act--is for the spark of your soul a perpetual process.
On the apex of your personality, spirit ever gazes upon Spirit,
melts and merges in it: from and by this encounter its life arises
and is sustained. But you have been busy from your childhood
with other matters. All the urgent affairs of "life," as you absurdly
called it, have monopolised your field of consciousness. Thus all
the important events of your real life, physical and spiritual--the
mysterious perpetual growth of you, the knitting up of fresh bits
of the universe into the unstable body which you confuse with
yourself, the hum and whirr of the machine which preserves your
contacts with the material world, the more delicate movements
which condition your correspondences with, and growth within,
the spiritual order--all these have gone on unperceived by you.
All the time you have been kept and nourished, like the "Little
Thing," by an enfolding and creative love; yet of this you are less
conscious than you are of th