Practical Mysticism | Page 6

world of fact is not unlike the
relation between a tapestry picture and the scene which it imitates. You,
practical man, are obliged to weave your image of the outer world upon
the hard warp of your own mentality; which perpetually imposes its
own convention, and checks the free representation of life. As a
tapestry picture, however various and full of meaning, is ultimately
reducible to little squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately
reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of
the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that
machinery cannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countless
suggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real world
presents to you, you snatch one here and there. Of these you weave
together those which are the most useful, the most obvious, the most
often repeated: which make a tidy and coherent pattern when seen on
the right side. Shut up with this symbolic picture, you soon drop into
the habit of behaving to it as though it were not a representation but a
thing. On it you fix your attention; with it you "unite." Yet, did you
look at the wrong side, at the many short ends, the clumsy joins and
patches, this simple philosophy might be disturbed. You would be
forced to acknowledge the conventional character of the picture you
have made so cleverly, the wholesale waste of material involved in the
weaving of it: for only a few amongst the wealth of impressions we
receive are seized and incorporated into our picture of the world.
Further, it might occur to you that a slight alteration in the rhythm of
the senses would place at your disposal a complete new range of
material; opening your eyes and ears to sounds, colours, and

movements now inaudible and invisible, removing from your universe
those which you now regard as part of the established order of things.
Even the strands which you have made use of might have been
combined in some other way; with disastrous results to the "world of
common sense," yet without any diminution of their own reality.
Nor can you regard these strands themselves as ultimate. As the most
prudent of logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the
probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception,
may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive
powers of your loom. Even the camera of the photographer, more apt at
contemplation than the mind of man, has shown us how limited are
these powers in some directions, and enlightened us as to a few of the
cruder errors of the person who accepts its products at face-value; or, as
he would say, believes his own eyes. It has shown us, for instance, that
the galloping race-horse, with legs stretched out as we are used to see it,
is a mythical animal, probably founded on the mental image or a
running dog. No horse has ever galloped thus: but its real action is too
quick for us, and we explain it to ourselves as something resembling
the more deliberate dog-action which we have caught and registered as
it passed. The plain man's universe is full of race-horses which are
really running dogs: of conventional waves, first seen in pictures and
then imagined upon the sea: of psychological situations taken from
books and applied to human life: of racial peculiarities generalised
from insufficient data, and then "discovered" in actuality: of theological
diagrams and scientific "laws," flung upon the background of eternity
as the magic lantern's image is reflected on the screen.
The coloured scene at which you look so trustfully owes, in fact, much
of its character to the activities of the seer: to that process of
thought--concept--cogitation, from which Keats prayed with so great an
ardour to escape, when he exclaimed in words which will seem to you,
according to the temper of your mind, either an invitation to the higher
laziness or one of the most profound aspirations of the soul, "O for a
life of sensations rather than thoughts!" He felt--as all the poets have
felt with him--that another, lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable
wonders, alive with ultimate music, awaited those who could free

themselves from the fetters of the mind, lay down the shuttle and the
weaver's comb, and reach out beyond the conceptual image to intuitive
contact with the Thing.
There are certain happy accidents which have the power of inducting
man for a moment into this richer and more vital world. These stop, as
one old mystic said, the "wheel of his imagination," the dreadful energy
of his image-making power weaving up and transmuting the incoming
messages of sense. They snatch him from the loom and place him, in