The Soundless Trumpet

I

IT will happen suddenly, under almost any combination of circumstances that may enter my life, that I become aware of a soundless warning to stand still, cease from the activity of the moment, take note — take note. A constraining call to attention that I ignore, if I must, at the cost of a peculiar sense of frustration and loss. If I respond to the mysterious summons, as usually I do, what results is so elusive, so inconsequential from the point of view of the immediately practical, that I have nothing to show as justification for interrupting my day’s work to give myself up to these moments. I am called to make a journey from which I shall bring back no popular souvenirs, hardly an intelligible report. Yet I go, again and again, gladly, with a tension of expectancy unlike any other experience of waiting and wanting.

As nearly as possible I must remain in the position in which the warning overtook me. In bodily movement, in delay, there is danger of breaking the magic contact. The order is, Attend — now! But sometimes a minimum of delay is unavoidable. Perhaps I was cooking; I must at least turn off the gas. Or the room is cold; I’m likely to get chilled, and thereby hindered in concentration, unless I wrap up or put a log on the fire. Whatever preparations I am obliged to make, it must be with the fewest possible motions, automatically performed, while I hold in check all thought and emotion; a state of inner suspension to float me safe over the snags of distraction to the quiet pool of receptive concentration.

Surrender is the essence of the state of receptivity within which, as within a sealed crystal, the ineffable transaction takes place. I surrender my concerns of the moment, my habitual code of duty, my responsibility for the use of time. I let go without and within. One single activity occupies me at last: an intense assent, as if every cell of my being were chiming yes, yes, yes, Amen — so bo it. I wait. I am still. I am open. The moment, at first, has nothing to do with anything; it is, and of me there is nothing left but the desire to explore that moment.

How to hold it, how to press it closer, how to stay with it long enough to pierce the last film of obtuseness, to complete the mystical osmosis by which I feel myself being absorbed, particle by willing particle, into that which is! It is here, where I can least afford distraction, that distraction sets in in a most unmanageable form: an unruly surging of words, words, words that want to tell me what is happening, thus chaining me to a spectator’s post when I am ready to slip over the last threshold of mere apprehending.

I know the danger of breaking my immobility to spear the foolish words that come boiling into the net of surface consciousness. I have gone far enough with the mystery on occasion to know that words of which I am aware are my great peril at these times; yet the meddlesome pen thrusts itself in again and again, till it seems essential to the completed state of nonresisting by which, as by a Jacob’s ladder, I seek to climb out of the pit of mere cognition, to turn it also loose, this absurd irrelevant splinter of metal and hard rubber. Go, then, go, go, you shallow words, go all of you there are, till I am altogether cleansed of wording, till I rest from thoughts and slip through the I-barrier.

I will accept it as a penance, this trampling of hollow words through my holy moment. Words are tools, and I have put by all tools for the time being. I will let them pass, the tyrannical bodiless creatures, uncensored symbols of my poor storehouse of personal experience. I will even bless them, so as to hasten their departure. In the world there is a place for words. My place is in the secret silken seed pod of perfected stillness. My business is to hear the soundless trumpet of unrevealable gospels.

II

When the warning has sounded, — that unmistakable web of inner tension that stops me in my tracks, — nothing remains unchanged. Objects retain their relative bulk, color, and position, but all things together are suspended in a matrix of enhanced significance. Every shape and sound presses on me with some urgency of meaning, and I reach out, out, in a corresponding urgency of desire to touch and know. Between the two waves of tension, the incoming and the outgoing, I have a curiously compact sense of myself, as if I were the living core of the moment of time concerned. I feel myself gathered into a hollow cocoon woven of layers and layers of spun light. My cocoon seems to be anchored in the centre of a great velvet stillness. An ancient stillness: it was always there; I have only just penetrated to it. Sounds that reach me, strained through that stillness, are at once muted and intensified; lowered in pitch but amplified in volume. And every sound an accent of importunity.

Everything warns me of a consummation pending: some special cooperation seems to be required of me. I respond with that reiterated yes — yes, struck out deep down within; yes, I am present, I listen, I wait. But I never quite touch it, the thing that seems to be straining toward me as I toward it. The tight kernel of concentration begins to diffuse; I find myself centring my attention on separated objects. Every object within its own sheath of clarity. That huddle of housetops outside my high window, the lichened flowerpots on my window sill, the brass paper knife lying across an open book on my writing table — familiar in shape, color, position, but steeped in that transforming clarity, pressing on me with a pressure not of inanimate things.

This narrow view of housetops across the narrow street, as I stay with it, begins to contemplate me in turn. It is a response comparable only to the response of a living being. And this statement cannot be thrown out, except as the whole report is thrown out. For there are no inanimate things now: everything lives. The intricate sky line besieges me with a clear admonition: Receive me, and know. The same invitation, with the same inherent guarantee of its supreme importance, holds me on the stretch whether I grapple the flowerpot or the paper cutter or my own faint shadow on the floor: Receive me into yourself, and know.

My vigil at the high window is a voiceless river carrying me from pool to pool of contemplation. From time to time, like a sea gull rising from a quiet inlet, some external object detaches itself from the serene totality and faces me steadfastly across the living stillness; and here, where no speech or language is, it beats out syllables of uncorrupted significance. Afterward I put a name to it, the least mystifying I can find: Arise! Behold! Attend! WHAT IS is here! And having written it, I suddenly remember Moses at the moment when he had to translate the Voice of Sinai into the tables of the law.

Two men take shape on a roof in the foreground of my entranced view. They move back and forth, they stoop and rise, they do something or other with a stretched cord or tape, they manipulate a skylight. Two drab puppets going through trivial motions against the drab November sky. Then, suddenly, with lances of insight weaving through and through me, I see them, I see what they are: they are the one who sits at the window watching! I have been looking at myself, as I might absently look in a mirror and fail to recognize the reflection. The two men on the roof are distinct from me as the fingers of my hand that I spread in front of my face; they are united with me as the several corpuscles in a drop of blood. One — we are one, indissolubly one. This knowledge is rest.

III

Is revelation the primary function of all created things, and we only perceive the fact in moments of spiritual quickening? Every single thing as it stands, even such commonplace and sometimes sordid objects as my attic window frames in, is capable of blossoming out, under the right conditions, — say when the dew of higher Heaven falls! — in the unmistakable calligraphy of ultimate truth, like a message in invisible ink that only needs a few drops of the proper fluid to bring it out. Usually some degree of blissful shock accompanies the revelation — a clean stab of poignancy, of wonder instantly passing into glad recognition: the summons and response, Lo and Amen, in one single sudden stroke of a gong resolved into a golden humming. On the widening ripples of that vibration I ride, I ride to the rim of infinity. If I had to choose a state for the indefinite suspension of my mortal existence, I should choose one of these timeless moments of the troubling of consciousness by a prick of clarity.

The mystic lances rain on me to-day. Behold my neighbor the seamstress, in the street-floor apartment directly across the way, who has been sitting in her window all the while I am sitting in mine. This woman has been a shadow on my life these three months past, ever since I came to the neighborhood. All day long and every day, from early morning till after lights begin to show in the windows of less economical tenants in the block, she sits close to the window, bent over her sewing, with one panel of the cheap cretonne curtains savingly folded back, for a better light. Her apartment is dark and dingy; I have been there, with small jobs of sewing that I was ashamed to let her do when I saw how sick the woman was, how strained her poor eyes, how harried her existence with mean cares. Her desperate respectability shamed me most of all. Here was as good a woman as I, and I went my ways, in a comparative splendor of personal freedom and cultural opulence, — yes, in my shabby attic, — doing nothing to ward off the daily injuries to her human dignity. My own intimate sorrows aside, — for who lives to be over fifty and does not carry a sword in the heart? — my lot compared to hers was as a brook through a sunny meadow compared to a choked miasmic pool. I never went up or down the block without greeting her; she would raise her eyes from her work long enough to recognize me, with her slow, melancholy smile. Did she ever read the apology in my salutation? When I ventured to bring her a trifling gift, — an aristocratic grapefruit wrapped in its coat of arms of printed tissue paper, or a handful of calendulas from a street vendor’s basket, — did she guess that it was a propitiatory offering to my own conscience? Her station at the window, facing mine, kept me from forgetting my unliquidated responsibility. Of all that the situation demanded of me, I gave nothing but compassion.

So for three uneasy months, till my memorable hour of revelations. I did not mark the point when the familiar silhouette of the seamstress entered my abstracted consciousness; I do not recall any moment of the discharge of tensions, in this case, any transitional shock or strain. In all quietness, in the space of a serene inhalation, the tableau at the opposite window faded as under a purging light, and in its place I saw — as naturally, as inevitably as if I had turned a page in a simple text I was reading — a prismatic marginal note on the flame-white scroll of human destiny. Again, as in the case of the sky line, an external phenomenon — in this case loaded with moral discomfiture — resolved itself into pure reconciling significance.

This is how I now translate the identifying phrases on my scribbling pad intended to pin down this particular fragment of that morning’s experience; for of course only the briefest tags were set down at the time; what I am writing to-day is an expansion, in terms as close to the core of the original experience as I can find, of the unsought words and broken phrases that whirled in my head in clouds, in the wake of each successive moment of illumination. The note reads: Seamstress at her window — stitching humanity’s robe of immortality. And an additional note in pencil, to indicate that it was put down after reflection had played on the original memorandum: Awake! Awake! Awake, my sister! In my private vocabulary, these phrases have elaborate and explicit connotations, like a page in an artist’s sketchbook. Translating, I find that on that day of flickering clairvoyance the seamstress in her servitude and I in my comparative mastery appeared as interchangeable members of an algebraic equation where X equals the Oneness of life. To catch an intimation of the Oneness of life through eternity is to see the obvious degradation of the seamstress and the hidden trouble in my own life canceled out, as all partial things cancel in the infinite curve of cosmic evolution. And something of that moment’s transfiguration has remained as a permanent film of tenderness across the cold fagade of the sewing woman’s dwelling; her bent figure, in the unrelaxed economy of black wear, remains to underline all that I have found in high esoteric teachings of the nullity of our human categories of good and evil. I greet my neighbor now with a more spontaneous recognition of our sisterhood; my compassion, purified at last by cosmic humor, now includes us both, seeing how we are equally babes crying in the dark, when to see the unquenchable Light we only need to pray to have the scales taken from our eyes!

IV

With a violence as of water bursting a dam, the school down the street breaks out for recess. The air is beaten into a froth of shrillness. Jets of little girls’ laughter break over my head; individual cries, like unruly drops of quicksilver, flash out and scatter; a shrill yelping, it might be of a pack of frolicsome puppies, spatters my immobility. The web of concentration trembles under the impact, but does not break.

I dive into the vocal vortex, full-conscious, and am made acquainted with the beat of the cosmic pulse. Rising slowly to the surface again, I wonder that I never before recognized the patterned rhythms of a school of children shouting at their play. Bright, brittle, intricate, like the tracings on a thickly frosted windowpane; a pattern, not a confusion.

The thin tinkle of a hand bell snips all the threads of the pattern at once. A hundred children are choked off as abruptly as they were released. Silence like a velvet curtain. I sit very, very still while the inundating insight of this moment condenses into a word: If the universe could be wiped out this instant, leaving only the auditory vibrations of the school recess just ended, it could be reconstructed, complete in all its myriad aspects, from this one etheric record of an infinitesimal moment of earth history!

All of the universe in everything. Voices of a thousand enlightened ones, speaking in every tongue, in every possible dialect of accommodation to my ignorance, have tried to tell me this thing before; but the hearing of the inner ear comes slowly, with longing and waiting and devotion.

V

Consider how surprised and confused you would be if a stranger whose advances you repulsed on various occasions returned one day with credentials identifying him as an old friend whom you had forgotten, and a dignitary in the places of his sojourn since you last knew him. This is exactly what I suffered, except that I was spared the embarrassment of trying to explain my ungracious behavior, when the piebald alley cat that I was always chasing off the fire escape came into view on this day of days. Grimy, haggard, with caved-in flanks and the tentative movements of a creature never sure of its welcome, the miserable tramp, who had been crouching on my rear window ledge, hunched herself for flight, startled eyes focused to catch my least movement, the moment she saw me looking her way from my post the length of the room away. This creature had been the object of my indignant midnight apostrophes, and the subject of my morning complaints to the house agent, for all the weeks of my residence in this house; for it was she who, by habitually making her last stand at the top of the fire escape at my back window, drew all the tomcats in loud amorous pursuit to within a few feet of my pillow. When I first moved in, before she had discovered my inhospitable temper, she regularly entered my attic apartment at night, with a flying leap over the radiator under the open window that startled me awake. Once she actually curled up on my bed, which was that night occupied by a guest. My unsuccessful efforts to obtain relief had reduced me to a state of belligerence unrelieved by a spark of compassion for the wretched homeless creature. Her occasional daytime appearances, in bad weather, when she was looking for cover, affected me as the insult added to injury; we would glare at each other through the window glass, in mutual hostility, till I made some threatening gesture and she doubled herself and streaked down the fire escape.

On the historical November morning when I discovered her humped on the window sill, I was worse startled than the cat. If I had voiced my quick surprise, I should have exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s you!’ I was looking into the eyes of a comely being I had known from before I knew anything; a wise impersonal being whose presence somehow linked me with large benevolent mysteries. I do not wish to suggest anything esoteric; the experience was too native to this earth, too uncomplicated for that. As if you had been absorbed in a trifling book and were annoyed by someone turning on the radio, till the music finally caught your attention and you picked up the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a familiar passage of a Beethoven symphony, and gladly gave yourself to it. Mystery there is in the metamorphosis of my alley cat under a flicker of spiritual illumination, but need it be a more esoteric mystery than the simultaneous presence of an orchestra playing in New York in every corner of the globe where someone chooses to manipulate a tiny disk? We are told that ‘only one octave, out of the sixty-two octaves of wave lengths that are known to exist, is now perceptible to human consciousness.’ Perhaps the mechanism of such seeming recoveries of deeper relationships as are implied in my changed view of the alley cat — in all of the fleeting illuminations here recorded, in fact — will be found, eventually, in some one of those sixty-one dead octaves. The whole story of science is only that: the recovery of hidden knowledges and latent values through amplified faculties.

VI

When I look at my untidy notes, pages of coarse scribbling, such as I sometimes produce when making notes in the dark, I wonder that I caught so many veridical symbols out of the swarming hour, seeing that my attention was on the inner event, not on the transcription. It is really as if my pen found its own words: but they are strictly words in my personal idiom, symbolic precipitates of intimate experience, so that from a word, a broken phrase, an ejaculation, I can refashion the distinctive incidents of that entire morning; as a woman sorting a drawerful of calico scraps can describe the gown that was made of that stuff, in each instance, and how she came by her samples. But this is as far as the analogy carries: for while any needleworker could piece together a patchwork quilt from any collection of pieces, my pieces — my raw notes — would suggest a design only to someone who has had similar experiences of modifications of consciousness. The average thoughtful reader, for whom this record is intended, could make very little of my original notes. He might feel through them a pulse of life, but whether of bird, beast, or archangel, he would be at a loss to tell. And the unfolding of these compressed symbols is a dangerous exercise. Dealing with matters not reducible to strict definition, all I can do is pile simile on simile, parable on parable.

It is a pantomime I am writing, a shadow play, requiring an informed interpreter; a smoke signal sent up from a desert height, in the hope that some fellow explorer somewhere may catch the message and reply, or at least be heartened to continue his own quest.

Nothing is more characteristic of the state of subtler perception, no matter how brief its duration in any given case, than the feeling, already alluded to, that there are no inanimate things anywhere in nature. And not only is everything alive, but everything is in that state of tension of which I can only say that all things yearn toward me in a desire to penetrate to my intelligence. Everything is trying to speak to me. I cannot touch this point too often, it lies so close to the heart of this whole matter: nothing so trivial, so debased by everyday use, so buried under habitual sense reactions, but may put on life, in an hour like this, and speak direct to my intuitive perception. Behold the accidental pattern of my breakfast dishes piled in the dish drainer, with the interlacing arcs of its bowls and cups and saucers; the swirling reflections on the surface of a bowl of chocolate pudding I was just now stirring over the gas flame; the curve of the stem of a single yellow chrysanthemum in a plain glass holder against the light — all these things vibrate with the same life, all pronounce one warning syllable that wakes a muted string truer than intelligence.

And that syllable? I have tried again and again to spell it out, in this essay, one tentative letter at a time, testing the accuracy of it by the eye, by the ear, by heart and conscience; afraid of the power of words, in matters where language is only a remote intermediary, to bewitch both the speaker and the hearer. Great evocative phrases catch at my breath as I study my skeletal notes in the effort to reduce them to an honest and intelligible report. Representative images of flaming splendor strain against my caution, like horses breaking out of a corral. The temptation to use the strong and lovely phrases is very great: is it not a strong and lovely experience I am reporting? And who has signed me up to write a scientific diary, where the natural impulse is for the delight of release through any symbolical medium at my command? I might let myself out in a great drunken cry, like the man Tomas speaking in the pub, in James Stephens’s poem: ‘I saw God!’ That would merely advise my readers — all except the few initiated — that I had some sort of inner experience that left a deep emotional track. But I undertook to reconstruct the event itself, to produce a seismographic tracing, as it were, of the inner excitement, which should serve as a check on my claims to a sort of clairvoyance that descends on me at times.

Of course the only conclusive proof of the actuality of such experiences, and of their worth, is to be sought in the afterlife of the subject — in modifications of personality and conduct. If something has happened in me that makes me a little less obtuse, a little less hard than I was by nature, my friends and neighbors would be the best witnesses to call. In an attempt to speak for myself — to communicate my discoveries, if discoveries they are, to persons who can have no personal contact with me — I am thrown back on the written word, with all its liability, in these matters outside the sphere of language, to suggest too much or too little or to fail altogether to cut a path in the reader’s consciousness.

VII

What is the nature of the miracle that at certain times advises me to trim my lamp, for the bridegroom cometh; that shows me the bridegroom — if I have heeded the warning, by shaking off the dust of external activity — in the form of a world transfigured, drawn close in an all-embracing kinship? It seems to me, looking back to those exceptional moments, that I do not know what tenderness is except at such times. At the end of one of the seeming interludes of non-knowing, — which I suspect were only thinnings in senseperception, — I was brought into contact with a small, repetitive, musical sound which at first was pure sound to me, without identity. A sweet, deliberate, tinkling note, over and over, coaxing me, admonishing, searching out my heart. Why was the effect intensified, instead of being dissolved in anticlimax, when I presently realized that I was listening to the drip-drip of the melting ice into the pan under the refrigerator? A warm tenderness not far from tears overflowed me entirely. I said a thing — whether vocally or not I do not know — that remains over, as summation and explanation sufficient for me who said it: This is IT — This is IT; and everything came close, everything was warm and dear. Sweet as absolution, a moment like that.

The finger of illumination seems to have touched almost everything in my small place, on the day of record. I omit this and that: it is not by bulk that my testimony is likely to convince. Occasionally I find a complete sentence, underlined in a way to indicate special stress of desire to preserve the significance behind the feeling of the moment. Thus: The painted ship on the wall IS the ship; my outflow of poor words, barrier against meditation, IS my meditation. Sometime in the course of the morning it rained. I find: The uneven drumming of slowed-up rain on tin gutters: the voice of the holy silence of the farthest desert that ever instructed one of His prophets.

So after all I have slipped into the use of an analogue too august by far for the slender thread of experience I can honestly claim. I am no prophet or initiate; I am less than a beginner in the mystic way. What have I to show as the fruits of my stumbling approach to contemplation that could be prefaced with an authoritative thus saith the Lord? Any adept who chances on these confessions will understand my predicament and view it with compassion. Here is a woman subject to minor degrees of elevation of consciousness for which common speech provides no name; obviously untrained in the inner techniques necessary to the development of her embryonic faculty; with only a thimbleful of information out of the vast ocean of recorded experience in the field of her tentative excursions; endowed with a dramatic imagination which shows her everything in a dazzling nimbus of implication and association; driven by the peculiar compulsion of the innately articulate to cry out to the world, Behold a new thing! — like a child seeing the moon for the first time — whenever a fresh experience, of whatever order, comes her way, while at the same time she is checked by a degree of scientific prudence which makes her fearful of overstating or misrepresenting — fearful of seeming to boast of eagle’s wings, when she knows she has hardly a butterfly’s power to rise above the ground.

This, I fancy, is how an initiate will read me. The beginners in the way, who are the ones most likely to pounce on a record like this, judging from my own responses, have now been warned against overestimating my contribution. At the same time, I must not disqualify myself unduly. Meagre and abortive as my experiences have been, they yet suffice to afford me first-hand knowledge of the nature and meaning of genuine mystical experience; of what happens, and how it feels, and what effect it may have on everyday life. In every field of human activity, even a little practice brings one closer to the heart of the matter than much information without practice. The nature of scientific method is clearer to me than to most laymen who read popular science, because I have sometimes assisted a naturalist in the field and in his laboratory, and to that extent experienced at first hand the rigor of the scientist’s standards of truth, the humility of his subordination of personal desire to impersonal fact. A boy who has passed his first swimming test comes nearer to realizing how Gertrude Ederle felt midway of the English Channel than the most ardent fan who is up on the detailed histories of swimming champions but has never been in the water himself.

In the field of mysticism the gap between mere information and practice is even greater, because here we enter a mode of experience for which language was not made, as an expert has expressed it. The language of mysticism, it turns out, is a universal code, the key to which each aspirant has to find for himself in his own inner experience. The most expert instruction, the most clarifying commentary on the texts of mysticism, cannot put anyone in possession of the key: they only tell the seeker where to look. And the first genuine illumination crystallizes into a humble realization of one’s ignorance. Says the author of Lives of a Bengal Lancer, after years of more or less persistent seeking that brought him into contact with more advanced teachers than I have ever known: ‘I knew little then, except by instinct, and to-day I have learned only the extent of my ignorance, but I know that even that is worth reporting, for others will take up the tale.’

VIII

What the programme note is to the symphony, the description of mystical experience is to the actuality. Even minor mystical experiences can only be annotated, they cannot be divulged. In my little sheaf of programme notes I have testified again and again to a feeling of being called, sought, reached out for, by the indwelling spirit of my several objects of contemplation. It is this sense of being summoned that inaugurates the series of flashes that I have ventured to call insights; and I felt the nature of the summons as Receive me into yourself and know.

Know what? What profit in the promised knowledge, were the promise capable of fulfillment? These are questions that never arise. It is a compulsion, not an argument, that procures my obedience to the nameless Ultimate that inhabits those fugitive moments; like the response of the grass blade to the sun that draws it up and up. A beneficent compulsion: for that which my spiritual tentacles touch, as I respond, feels good. By some such outstreaming influence, I suspect, the Holy Grail drew Galahad on and on. But this is again one of the superlative symbols I have forbidden myself. I have not gathered in the ocean; I have only dipped up a few drops in my cupped hands. Let me choose cautiously what name I give to the event.

It will be apparent to anyone reading this not too carelessly that in my testimony I seesaw between confidence and caution. I have absolute confidence in regard to the specific order of life my abortive experiences belong to; my doubts touch only my own attainments on that plane. Hence so many warnings to the reader, so many qualifying phrases snarling the smooth thread of assertion. And in my tendency to caution I find three distinct elements: the scientific — I have an inbred preference for accuracy; the ethical — one wants to be decently careful not to mislead the unwary, the less experienced; and the self-protective — I am afraid of the penalty for bearing false witness in these inmost things. I know intuitively that to be less than scrupulously truthful in speaking of those things would be to block my own progress. The false Messiah is the chief victim of his own deception. The magnificent abnegation of Krishnamurti will have raised him to a higher spiritual pinnacle, in the end, than a world-wide following could secure to him, on any basis less than the truth as he saw it.

One’s immediate perception of what takes place in those transcendent moments proves to be as unstable as a cloud in a windy sky when the time comes to peg down the vision for inspection. ‘What can be described and handed down is not the vision itself,’ writes that expert, Dean Inge, ‘but the inadequate symbols in which the seer tries to preserve it in his memory.’ Is there nothing, then, that I can guarantee as to the value of my transcription? any reason why a serious reader should pay attention to me? Here is a test the reader himself must apply: If I am not deluded, — if something does happen to me, on occasions such as the one described, different from everyday experience, — my fumbling for the revealing word, the illuminating symbol, will be sure to hit on something of intrinsic veracity; some fresh phrase, some metaphor newborn from the shock of spontaneous discovery; some novel application of a familiar parable, some inevitable paradox. Sincerity, fortunately, has an accent of its own; a genuine experience sooner or later supplies the witness with the one unmistakable certifying word. Like the olive leaf brought back by Noah’s dove, my flight of symbols, if they were wrought out in genuine experience, will guarantee that I have touched, however briefly, a recovered land.

For myself, ever on my guard against self-deception, — for I know too well the possibilities for unconscious spiritual posturing in imitation of models assimilated through reading and reflection, — I have yet another sign. I have learned that the puny flights of the novice are part ache, part exaltation. The exaltation may be induced by imitative experience, too; by the emotional contagion of a collective exercise in prayer or meditation, for instance. The genuine mystical flight, with a beginner like me, leaves an ache behind — the ache of incompleteness, which is most keenly felt on the path to completeness. I know I have not really been over the horizon. My fleeting glimpses into the heart of things, the nostalgic sweetness of my moments of absorption into the world about me, the thrill of the soundless trumpet summoning me to cross the barrier of sense — all these are only the faintest tremblings of the Veil in the inconstant breath of my too feeble aspiration. I know what to look for, but I have not seen it.