bout it.
Now you have met it; know for a fact that it is there. What next?
What changes, what readjustments will this self-revelation
involve for you?

You will have noticed, as with practice your familiarity with the
state of Recollection has increased, that the kind of consciousness
which it brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands of
you, conflict sharply with the consciousness and the attitude
which you have found so appropriate to your ordinary life in the
past. They make this old attitude appear childish, unworthy, at
last absurd. By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reality you
are at once brought face to face with that dreadful revelation of
disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which the blunt
moralists call "conviction of sin." Never again need those
moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest
pursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration upon
the game of getting on. None the less, this attitude persists. Again
and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation
is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the
world. This game which you have played so long has formed and
conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions,
leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to play
another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different
sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses
to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic
remodelling of character which the mystics call "Purgation," the
second stage in the training of the human consciousness for
participation in Reality.

It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a
superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will,
your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the
wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become
accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain
valueless things, certain specific positions. For years your
treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of
Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if they
still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your
heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You
are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which
knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with
the Real, awakens you at once to th