body-nature has closed about us to press us to itself; we breathe
and hold our ground because the Supreme does not give and pass but
gives on for ever, so long as it remains what it is.

    Our being is the fuller for our turning Thither; this is our
prosperity; to hold aloof is loneliness and lessening. Here is the
soul's peace, outside of evil, refuge taken in the place clean of
wrong; here it has its Act, its true knowing; here it is immune.
Here is living, the true; that of to-day, all living apart from Him,
is but a shadow, a mimicry. Life in the Supreme is the native activity
of Intellect; in virtue of that converse it brings forth gods,
brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, brings forth all
moral good; for of all these the soul is pregnant when it has been
filled with God. This state is its first and its final, because from
God it comes, its good lies There, and, once turned to God again, it
is what it was. Life here, with the things of earth, is a sinking, a
defeat, a failing of the wing.

    That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the
soul; hence the constant linking of the Love-God with the Psyches in
story and picture; the soul, other than God but sprung of Him, must
needs love. So long as it is There, it holds the heavenly love; here
its love is the baser; There the soul is Aphrodite of the heavens;
here, turned harlot, Aphrodite of the public ways: yet the soul is
always an Aphrodite. This is the intention of the myth which tells
of Aphrodite's birth and Eros born with her.

    The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him
in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to
human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up
with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

    But one day coming to hate her shame, she puts away the evil of
earth, once more seeks the father, and finds her peace.

    Those to whom all this experience is strange may understand by way
of our earthly longings and the joy we have in winning to what we most
desire- remembering always that here what we love is perishable,
hurtful, that our loving is of mimicries and turns awry because all
was a mistake, our good was not here, this was not what we sought;
There only is our veritable love and There we may hold it and be
with it, possess it in its verity no longer submerged in alien
flesh. Any that have seen know what I have in mind: the soul takes
another life as it approaches God; thus restored it feels that the
dispenser of true life is There to see, that now we have nothing to
look for but, far otherwise, that we must put aside all else and
rest in This alone, This become, This alone, all the earthly
environment done away, in haste to be free, impatient of any bond
holding us to the baser, so that with our being entire we may cling
about This, no part in us remaining but through it we have touch
with God.

    Thus we have all the vision that may be of Him and of ourselves;
but it is of a self-wrought to splendour, brimmed with the
Intellectual light, become that very light, pure, buoyant, unburdened,
raised to Godhood or, better, knowing its Godhood, all aflame then-
but crushed out once more if it should take up the discarded burden.

    10. But how comes the soul not to keep that ground?

    Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the
time of vision unbroken, the self hindered no longer by any
hindrance of body. Not that those hindrances beset that in us which
has veritably seen; it is the other phase of the soul that suffers and
that only when we withdraw from vision and take to knowing by proof,
by evidence, by the reasoning processes of the mental habit. Such
logic is not to be confounded with that act of ours in the vision;
it is not our reason that has seen; it is something greater than
reason, reason's Prior, as far above reason as the very object of that
thought must be.

    In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that
order, or rather we are merged into that self in us which has the
quality of that order. It is a knowing of the self restored to its
purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help
talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the
achievement of unity. In this seeing, we neither hold an object nor
trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed, no longer
himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into
it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher
plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there
duality; by our holding away, the Supreme is set outside. This is
why the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the Supreme to
state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of
the Supreme which is to be known only as one with ourselves.

    11. This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing
Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme is not to be made a common
story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any
that has not himself attained to see. There were not two; beholder was
one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity
apprehended. The man formed by this mingling with the Supreme must- if
he only remember- carry its image impressed upon him: he is become the
Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no
movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is
achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to
dare the word, the very self; caught away, filled with God, he has
in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he
turns neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself;
utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the