7. If the mind reels before something thus alien to all we know,
we must take our stand on the things of this realm and strive thence
to see. But, in the looking, beware of throwing outward; this
Principle does not lie away somewhere leaving the rest void; to
those of power to reach, it is present; to the inapt, absent. In our
daily affairs we cannot hold an object in mind if we have given
ourselves elsewhere, occupied upon some other matter; that very
thing must be before us to be truly the object of observation. So here
also; preoccupied by the impress of something else, we are withheld
under that pressure from becoming aware of The Unity; a mind gripped
and fastened by some definite thing cannot take the print of the
very contrary. As Matter, it is agreed, must be void of quality in
order to accept the types of the universe, so and much more must the
soul be kept formless if there is to be no infixed impediment to
prevent it being brimmed and lit by the Primal Principle.

    In sum, we must withdraw from all the extern, pointed wholly
inwards; no leaning to the outer; the total of things ignored, first
in their relation to us and later in the very idea; the self put out
of mind in the contemplation of the Supreme; all the commerce so
closely There that, if report were possible, one might become to
others reporter of that communion.

    Such converse, we may suppose, was that of Minos, thence known
as the Familiar of Zeus; and in that memory he established the laws
which report it, enlarged to that task by his vision There. Some, on
the other hand, there will be to disdain such citizen service,
choosing to remain in the higher: these will be those that have seen
much.

    God- we read- is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we
break away from Him, or rather from ourselves; what we turn from we
cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a
child distraught will not recognise its father; to find ourselves is
to know our source.

    8. Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its
movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing line; its natural
course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some
external but on its own centre, the point to which it owes its rise.
The soul's movement will be about its source; to this it will hold,
poised intent towards that unity to which all souls should move and
the divine souls always move, divine in virtue of that movement; for
to be a god is to be integral with the Supreme; what stands away is
man still multiple, or beast.

    Is then this "centre" of our souls the Principle for which we
are seeking?

    We must look yet further: we must admit a Principle in which all
these centres coincide: it will be a centre by analogy with the centre
of the circle we know. The soul is not a circle in the sense of the
geometric figure but in that it at once contains the Primal Nature [as
centre] and is contained by it [as circumference], that it owes its
origin to such a centre and still more that the soul,
uncontaminated, is a self-contained entity.

    In our present state- part of our being weighed down by the
body, as one might have the feet under water with all the rest
untouched- we bear- ourselves aloft by that- intact part and, in that,
hold through our own centre to the centre of all the centres, just
as the centres of the great circles of a sphere coincide with that
of the sphere to which all belong. Thus we are secure.

    If these circles were material and not spiritual, the link with
the centres would be local; they would lie round it where it lay at
some distant point: since the souls are of the Intellectual, and the
Supreme still loftier, we understand that contact is otherwise
procured, that is by those powers which connect Intellectual agent
with Intellectual Object; this all the more, since the Intellect
grasps the Intellectual object by the way of similarity, identity,
in the sure link of kindred. Material mass cannot blend into other
material mass: unbodied beings are not under this bodily limitation;
their separation is solely that of otherness, of differentiation; in
the absence of otherness, it is similars mutually present.

    Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with
us; we with it when we put otherness away. It is not that the
Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards
the Supreme; it is we that become present. We are always before it:
but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order
about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all
should attend: let it but face aright and it sings with beauty,
present effectively. We are ever before the Supreme- cut off is
utter dissolution; we can no longer be- but we do not always attend:
when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of
singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of
God.

    9. In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life,
wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being, fount of Good,
root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme
lessening it as if it were a thing of mass. At that the emanants would
be perishable; but they are eternal; they spring from an eternal
principle, which produces them not by its fragmentation but in
virtue of its intact identity: therefore they too hold firm; so long
as the sun shines, so long there will be light.

    We have not been cut away; we are not separate, what though the