ABSTRACT
Contemplation is the mystic’s medium. It is to him that which harmony is to the musician, form and colour to the artist, measure to the poet: the vehicle by which he can best apprehend the Good and Beautiful enter into communion with the Real. The education which tradition has ever prescribed for the mystic consists in the gradual development of an extraordinary faculty of concentration, a power of spiritual attention. The mystic, then, has to learn so to concentrate all his faculties, his very self, upon the invisible and intangible, that all visible things are forgot: to bring it so sharply into focus that everything else is blurred. Such mystical education, of course, presumes a something that can be educated: the “New Birth,” the awakening of the deeper self, must have taken place before it can begin. It is a psychological process, and obeys psychological laws: there is in it no element of the unexpected or the supernatural.
