has received, mediates between Reality and the race. In the game
of give and take which goes on between the human consciousness
and the external world, both have learned to put the emphasis
upon the message from without, rather than on their own reaction
to and rearrangement of it. Both have exchanged the false
imagination which draws the sensations and intuitions of the self
into its own narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them,
for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager,
adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater universe.

CHAPTER III

THE PREPARATION OF THE MYSTIC

Here the practical man will naturally say: And pray how am I
going to do this? How shall I detach myself from the artificial
world to which I am accustomed? Where is the brake that shall
stop the wheel of my image-making mind?

I answer: You are going to do it by an educative process; a drill,
of which the first stages will, indeed, be hard enough. You have
already acknowledged the need of such mental drill, such
deliberate selective acts, in respect to the smaller matters of life.
You willingly spend time and money over that narrowing and
sharpening of attention which you call a "business training," a
"legal education," the "acquirement of a scientific method." But
this new undertaking will involve the development and the
training of a layer of your consciousness which has lain fallow in
the past; the acquirement of a method you have never used
before. It is reasonable, even reassuring, that hard work and
discipline should be needed for this: that it should demand of
you, if not the renunciation of the cloister, at least the virtues of
the golf course.

The education of the mystical sense begins in self-simplification.
The feeling, willing, seeing self is to move from the various and
the analytic to the simple and the synthetic: a sentence which
may cause hard breathing and mopping of the brows on the part
of the practical man. Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these
pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of
rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this
message so needed by your time--or rather, by your want of time--
is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the
advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe
the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of
the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf. The essence