ends.

Moreover, as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you
from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. You will hear the
busy hum of that world as a distant exterior melody, and know
yourself to be in some sort withdrawn from it. You have set a
ring of silence between you and it; and behold! within that
silence you are free. You will look at the coloured scene, and it
will seem to you thin and papery: only one amongst countless
possible images of a deeper life as yet beyond your reach. And
gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a _You_, who
can thus hold at arm's length, be aware of, look at, an idea--a
universe--other than itself. By this voluntary painful act of
concentration, this first step upon the ladder which goes--as the
mystics would say--from "multiplicity to unity," you have to
some extent withdrawn yourself from that union with unrealities,
with notions and concepts, which has hitherto contented you; and
at once all the values of existence are changed. "The road to a
Yea lies through a Nay." You, in this preliminary movement of
recollection, are saying your first deliberate No to the claim
which the world of appearance makes to a total possession of
your consciousness: and are thus making possible some contact
between that consciousness and the World of Reality.

Now turn this new purified and universalised gaze back upon
yourself. Observe your own being in a fresh relation with things,
and surrender yourself willingly to the moods of astonishment,
humility, joy--perhaps of deep shame or sudden love--which
invade your heart as you look. So doing patiently, day after day,
constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the
struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there
is something within you--something behind the fractious,
conflicting life of desire--which you can recollect, gather up,
make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own
soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this
real _You_ is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which
you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on
the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when
you have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of making
this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the
initial stage of the contemplative life has been won. It is not
much more of an achievement than that first