tion.

Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great dialogue on the
Supersensual Life.

"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I come to the supersensual
life, that I may see God and hear Him speak?

"His Master said: When thou canst throw thyself for a moment into that
where no creature dwelleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh.

"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far off?

"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for a while cease from
all thinking and willing, thou shalt hear the unspeakable words of God.

"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand still from thinking and
willing?

"The Master said: When thou standest still from the thinking and willing
of self, then the eternal hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed
in thee."[86]

In this passage we have a definite invitation to retreat from
volitional to affective thought: from the window to the quiet place
where "no creature dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase "the night of
thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.

The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
exist in virtual conflic