nce perpetually makes upon you: attention
and your desire, make much use of the new power which Recollection
has disclosed to you; and this Recollection itself, so long
as it remains merely a matter of attention and does not involve
the heart, is no better than a psychic trick. You are committed
therefore, as the fruit of your first attempts at self-knowledge,
to a deliberate--probably a difficult--rearrangement of
your character; to the stern course of self-discipline, the
voluntary acts of choice on the one hand and of rejection on the
other, which ascetic writers describe under the formidable names
of Detachment and Mortification. By Detachment they mean the
eviction of the limpet from its crevice; the refusal to anchor
yourself to material things, to regard existence from the personal
standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity. By Mortification,
they mean the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currents
of your own conflicting passions, interests, desires; the killing out
of all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollection
would condemn, and which create the fundamental opposition
between your interior and exterior life.

What then, in the last resort, is the source of this opposition; the
true reason of your uneasiness, your unrest? The reason lies, not
in any real incompatibility between the interests of the temporal
and the eternal orders; which are but two aspects of one Fact, two
expressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself; in your attitude
towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb "to
have": all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual
demands, appetites, wants. That "love of life" of which we
sometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love. We are quick to snap
at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding which
we dignify by the name of pessimism. The mystic knows not this
attitude of demand. He tells us again and again, that "he is rid of
all his asking"; that "henceforth the heat of having shall never
scorch him more." Compare this with your normal attitude to the
world, practical man: your quiet certitude that you are well within
your rights in pushing the claims of "the I, the Me, the Mine";
your habit, if you be religious, of asking for the weather and the
government that you want, of persuading the Supernal Powers to
take a special interest in your national or personal health and
prosperity. How often in each day do you deliberately