Practical Mysticism | Page 7

the naked simplicity of his spirit, face to face with that Other than
himself whence the materials of his industry have come. In these hours
human consciousness ascends from thought to contemplation; becomes
at least aware of the world in which the mystics dwell; and perceives
for an instant, as St. Augustine did, "the light that never changes, above
the eye of the soul, above the intelligence." This experience might be
called in essence "absolute sensation." It is a pure feeling-state; in
which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the
senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and
knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand,
that Totality of which fragments are known by the lover, the musician,
and the artist. If the doors of perception were cleansed, said Blake,
everything would appear to man as it is--Infinite. But the doors of
perception are hung with the cobwebs of thought; prejudice, cowardice,
sloth. Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but
we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to
still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry
and goodwill if we would make that transition: for the process involves
a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement
of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the
notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully
charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the
noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they
have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of
morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and
every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life.
There will be many who feel a certain scepticism as to the possibility of

the undertaking here suggested to them; a prudent unwillingness to
sacrifice their old comfortably upholstered universe, on the mere
promise that they will receive a new heaven and a new earth in
exchange. These careful ones may like to remind themselves that the
vision of the world presented to us by all the great artists and
poets--those creatures whose very existence would seem so strange to
us, were we not accustomed to them--perpetually demonstrates the
many-graded character of human consciousness; the new worlds which
await it, once it frees itself from the tyranny of those labour-saving
contrivances with which it usually works. Leaving on one side the more
subtle apprehensions which we call "spiritual," even the pictures of the
old Chinese draughtsmen and the modern impressionists, of Watteau
and of Turner, of Manet, Degas, and Cezanne; the poems of Blake,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman--these, and countless others, assure
you that their creators have enjoyed direct communion, not with some
vague world of fancy, but with a visible natural order which you have
never known. These have seized and woven into their pictures strands
which never presented themselves to you; significant forms which
elude you, tones and relations to which you are blind, living facts for
which your conventional world provides no place. They prove by their
works that Blake was right when he said that "a fool sees not the same
tree that a wise man sees"; and that psychologists, insisting on the
selective action of the mind, the fact that our preconceptions govern the
character of our universe, do but teach the most demonstrable of truths.
Did you take them seriously, as you should, their ardent reports might
well disgust you with the dull and narrow character of your own
consciousness.
What is it, then, which distinguishes the outlook of great poets and
artists from the arrogant subjectivism of common sense? Innocence and
humility distinguish it. These persons prejudge nothing, criticise
nothing. To some extent, their attitude to the universe is that of children:
and because this is so, they participate to that extent in the Heaven of
Reality. According to their measure, they have fulfilled Keats'
aspiration, they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on sensation
rather than on thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe
was that ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with

the essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a few
great mystics appear to have possessed--not indeed in its entirety, but to
an extent which made them, as they say, "one with the Reality of
things." The greater the artist is, the wider and deeper is the range of
this pure sensation: the more sharply he is aware of the torrent of life
and loveliness, the rich profusion of possible beauties and shapes. He
always wants to press deeper and deeper, to let the span of his
perception spread