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realise your own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, in
its relation to that living guide you have a far deeper, truer knowledge
than ever before both of the general and the individual existence; and so
are able to handle life with a surer hand.
Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetually
supported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itself in the mild
contemplation of the great world through which you move. True, it is
said of the Shepherd that he carries the lambs in his bosom: but the
sheep are expected to walk, and put up with the inequalities of the road,
the bunts and blunders of the flock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort
that you are called. Since the transcendental aspect of your being has
been brought into focus you are now raised out of the mere push-for-
ward, the blind passage through time of the flock, into a position of cre-
ative responsibility. You are aware of personal correspondences with the
Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broader world.
The sky and the hedges, the wide lands through which you are moving,
the corporate character and meaning of the group to which you be-
long all these are now within the circle of your consciousness; and each
little event, each separate demand or invitation which comes to you is
now seen in a truer proportion, because you bring to it your awareness
of the Whole. Your journey ceases to be an automatic progress, and takes
on some of the characters of a free act: for "things" are now under you,
you are no longer under them.
You will hardly deny that this is a practical gain: that this widening
and deepening of the range over which your powers of perception work
makes you more of a man than you were before, and thus adds to rather
than subtracts from your total practical efficiency. It is indeed only when
he reaches these levels, and feels within himself this creative free-
dom this full actualisation of himself on the one hand: on the other
hand the sense of a world-order, a love and energy on which he depends
and with whose interests he is now at one, that man becomes fully hu-
man, capable of living the real life of Eternity in the midst of the world of
time.
And what, when you have come to it, do you suppose to be your own
function in this vast twofold scheme? Is it for nothing, do you think, that
you are thus a meeting-place of two orders? Surely it is your business, so
far as you may, to express in action something of the real character of
that universe within which you now know yourself to live? Artists,
aware of a more vivid and more beautiful world than other men, are
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always driven by their love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring in-
to direct manifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound,
rhythm, which they have been able to apprehend: and, doing this, they
taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with the Real.
For them, the duty of creation is tightly bound up with the gift of love. In
their passionate outflowing to the universe which offers itself under one
of its many aspects to their adoration, that other-worldly fruition of
beauty is always followed, balanced, completed, by a this-world impulse
to creation: a desire to fix within the time-order, and share with other
men, the vision by which they were possessed. Each one, thus bringing
new aspects of beauty, new ways of seeing and hearing within the reach
of the race, does something to amend the sorry universe of common
sense, the more hideous universe of greed, and redeem his fellows from
their old, slack servitude to a lower range of significances. It is in action,
then, that these find their truest and safest point of insertion into the liv-
ing, active world of Reality: in sharing and furthering its work of mani-
festation they know its secrets best. For them contemplation and action
are not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a life that is one a
life that rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beauti-
ful, only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new in-
tensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it, or at
least some little bit of it, "nearer to the heart's desire."
Again, the great mystics tell us that the "vision of God in His own
light" the direct contact of the soul's substance with the Absolute to
which awful experience you drew as near as the quality of your spirit
would permit in the third degree of contemplation, is the prelude, not to
a further revelation of the eternal order given to you, but to an utter
change, a vivid life springing up within you, which they sometimes call
the "transforming union" or the "birth of the Son in the soul." By this they
mean that the spark of spiritual stuff, that high special power or charac-
ter of human nature, by which you first desired, then tended to, then
achieved contact with Reality, is as it were fertilised by this profound
communion with its origin; becomes strong and vigorous, invades and
transmutes the whole personality, and makes of it, not a "dreamy mystic"
but an active and impassioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom.
So that when these full-grown, fully vital mystics try to tell us about
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