The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day by Evelyn Underhill
page 8 of 265 (03%)
page 8 of 265 (03%)
|
dreaming, or thinking, the diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so
that type of philosophy which comes nearest to the religion of the Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of life the workings and strivings of one Power: "a Reality which both underlies and crowns all our other, lesser strivings."[1] Variously manifested in partial achievements of order and goodness, in diversities of beauty, and in our graded apprehensions of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us in the transcendent values of holiness and love. The more deeply it is loved by man, the nearer he draws to its heart: and the greater his love, the more fully does he experience its transforming and energizing power. The words of Plotinus are still true for every one of us, and are unaffected by the presence or absence of creed: "Yonder is the true object of our love, which it is possible to grasp and to live with and truly to possess, since no envelope of flesh separates us from it. He who has seen it knows what I say, that the soul then has another life, when it comes to God, and having come possesses Him, and knows when in that state that it is in the presence of the dispenser of true life and that it needs nothing further."[2] So, if we would achieve anything like a real integration of life--and until we have done so, we are bound to be restless and uncertain in our touch upon experience--we are compelled to press back towards contact with this living Reality, however conceived by us. And this not by way of a retreat from our actual physical and mental life, but by way of a fulfilment of it. More perhaps than ever before, men are now driven to ask themselves the searching question of the disciple in Boehme's Dialogue on the Supersensual Life: "Seeing I am in nature, how may I come through nature |
|