thought becomes the light of perception."[87] This fringe-region or
foreconscious is in fact the organ of contemplation, as the realistic
outward looking mind is the organ of action. Most men go through life
without conceiving, far less employing, the rich possibilities which are
implicit in it. Yet here, among the many untapped resources of the self,
lie our powers of response to our spiritual environment: powers which
are kept by the tyrannical interests of everyday life below the
threshold of full consciousness, and never given a chance to emerge.
Here take place those searching experiences of the "inner life" which
seem moonshine or morbidity to those who have not known them.

The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious
experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found
to have expected this experience to be given to them without any
deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. They have lived from
childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have
never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences
with any other world than that of sense. Yet all normal men and women
possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the
transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love. In
some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is
latent and must be developed in the right way. In others again it may
exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering
way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm. Its
emergence, however achieved, is a part--and for our true life, by far
the most important part--of that outcropping and overflowing into
consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as
essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too,
a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.