, your universe and the possibilities of life within it:
can discern too, if you be at all inclined to mystical adventure, the
stages of the road along which you must pass on your way
towards harmony with the Real.

This universe, these possibilities, are far richer, yet far simpler
than you have supposed. Seen from the true centre of personality,
instead of the usual angle of self-interest, their scattered parts
arrange themselves in order: you begin to perceive those
graduated levels of Reality with which a purified and intensified
consciousness can unite. So, too, the road is more logically
planned, falls into more comprehensible stages, than those who
dwell in a world of single vision are willing to believe.

Now it is a paradox of human life, often observed even by the
most concrete and unimaginative of philosophers, that man seems
to be poised between two contradictory orders of Reality. Two
planes of existence--or, perhaps, two ways of apprehending
existence--lie within the possible span of his consciousness. That
great pair of opposites which metaphysicians call Being and
Becoming, Eternity and Time, Unity and Multiplicity, and others
mean, when they speak of the Spiritual and the Natural Worlds,
represents the two extreme forms under which the universe can
be realised by him. The greatest men, those whose consciousness
is extended to full span, can grasp, be aware of, both. They
know themselves to live, both in the discrete, manifested,
ever-changeful parts and appearances, and also in the Whole Fact.
They react fully to both: for them there is no conflict between the
parochial and the patriotic sense. More than this, a deep instinct
sometimes assures them that the inner spring or secret of that
Whole Fact is also the inner spring and secret of their individual
lives: and that here, in this third factor, the disharmonies between
the part and the whole are resolved. As they know themselves to
dwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcending
it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably
exceeds all that they know to be--as the soul of the musician
controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody,
but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadences
must play their part. That invulnerable spark of vivid life, that
"inward light" which these men find at their own centres when
they seek for it, is for them an earnest of the Uncreated Light, the
ineffabl