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Weld lovable humorous vigorously practical human life with spirit. Welcome and accept all natural human instincts, all the savoring of life, but permeate them with the vitality of the spirit. Those who savor even the highest in life - without this permeation of the spirit - will stagnate, sink backward, imprison themselves in matter.
It is absolutely essential that you realize one thing fully: the necessity of something besides intellectual recognition of truth. You must not only read and understand, you must do until you absorb into the substance of yourselves. There is, in that, the difference between the athlete and the person who has read the rules of the game; the art critic and the painter who has struggled with pigments. You must not only see that it is so: you must make it so. This is not knowledge. It is development.
.....For the moment, assume that you are living in and surrounded by a finer more powerful substance. You can call it God, ether, electric field, spirit vibration. When you are pervious, you are permeated by it and obtain from it various elements of expansion and growth. But ordinarily, in your world-absorbed consciousness, there is no chink or cranny by which its influence can enter. You are like people swimming in a sea completely encased in diving suits that admit no drop of life-giving water. Only on comparatively rare occasions, when you are off-guard, do you permit yourselves to be reached by it...even unconsciously.
What is this spiritual contact like? An analogy may be helpful.
Suppose you go for a walk. Most people proceed through life ‘busy with their own thoughts.’ The teeming inner life of your mental activities holds you, so that you are cramped within yourself and things outside are half-noticed or, perhaps, not noticed at all. Now, stop short and let things about you into your consciousness. You will be surprised to find how many actually have no existence in you. For example, birds singing - a moment ago you literally did not hear them. The line of trees on the hill - you sensed vaguely that they were there because you were staring straight at them, but the cast of them against the pale sky behind, the light on their leaves, the curious molten look of the foliage en masse, those things simply were not there. You saw the fields perhaps, but you did not sense them. The effect of the landscape - whatever it might be - was shut out, because you were occupied within the narrow confines of yourself.
Until you voluntarily threw open your spirit to the wider spirit influences, than those of yourself, they could not claim you. Now by this shift of attention, I do not mean a detailed intellectual appraising of the surroundings, a cataloging, an enumerating of features and species and lines of composition. I mean simply the expansion that is the result of the shift - from a busy mental concentration within - to a voluntary wide opening to influence from without. That, in itself, is a simple form of spiritual contact. Appreciation of beauty - in the sense of surrender to its influence rather than a critical analysis - is another example. Some may find the hidden spark in a jewel, others in a temple drum or a Buddha.
Beauty is a great and quiet teacher. In your response to beauty, what I am asking here is that you notice the difference between the outgoing expanded feel - versus - the indrawn close-huddled concentration of ordinary affairs.
There is no doubt that the pleasure and benefit would be greatly enhanced could we maintain that outreaching expansion, could we continue to see and admit within ourselves, the influences outside. But we don’t. We hold it for a minute, then something reminds us of something, and our busy brains are off like dogs on a scent. Our established habit is against us.
It is the habit of keeping open to the outside that you must acquire. Otherwise, the instant you relax vigilance, your thoughts and emotions will drag you back into their busy little cozy lair. ...The gaining of this does not mean straining or striving, it is more a matter of how often you think of it. Just live it, calmly and comfortably. S. E. White