of mystical contemplation is summed in these two experiences--
union with the flux of life, and union with the Whole in which all
lesser realities are resumed--and these experiences are well
within your reach. Though it is likely that the accusation will
annoy you, you are already in fact a potential contemplative: for
this act, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, is proper to all men--is,
indeed, the characteristic human activity.

More, it is probable that you are, or have been, an actual
contemplative too. Has it never happened to you to lose yourself
for a moment in a swift and satisfying experience for which you
found no name? When the world took on a strangeness, and you
rushed out to meet it, in a mood at once exultant and ashamed?
Was there not an instant when you took the lady who now orders
your dinner into your arms, and she suddenly interpreted to you
the whole of the universe? a universe so great, charged with so
terrible an intensity, that you have hardly dared to think of it
since. Do you remember that horrid moment at the concert, when
you became wholly unaware of your comfortable seven-and-sixpenny
seat? Those were onsets of involuntary contemplation; sudden
partings of the conceptual veil. Dare you call them the least
significant, moments of your life? Did you not then, like the
African saint, "thrill with love and dread," though you were not
provided with a label for that which you adored?

It will not help you to speak of these experiences as "mere
emotion." Mere emotion then inducted you into a world which
you recognised as more valid--in the highest sense, more rational--
than that in which you usually dwell: a world which had a
wholeness, a meaning, which exceeded the sum of its parts. Mere
emotion then brought you to your knees, made you at once proud
and humble, showed you your place. It simplified and unified
existence: it stripped off the little accidents and ornaments which
perpetually deflect our vagrant attention, and gathered up the
whole being of you into one state, which felt and knew a Reality
that your intelligence could not comprehend. Such an emotion is
the driving power of spirit, and august and ultimate thing: and
this your innermost inhabitant felt it to be, whilst your eyes were
open to the light.

Now that simplifying act, which is the preliminary of all mystical
experience, that gathering of the scattered bits of personality into
the _one_ which is really you--into the "unity