Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/101

82 process, just because it looks to another as its guide, is always a dissatisfied process, — like the finite search for happiness. And now, secondly, the mystics admit that true Being is something deeper than what usually is seen or felt or thought by men. But they add that this is just because ordinary thinking, like Realism, like money getting, like pleasure seeking, like mortal love making, always looks beyond the truly complete immediate, looks to false ideas, to fleeting states that die as they pass, and so indeed looks to what the mystic regards as the contradictory and consequently superficial aspect of experience. “Look deeper,” he says, “but not deeper into illusory ideas. Look deeper into the interior of experience itself. There, if you only look deeper than all ordinary and partial immediacy, deeper than colors and sounds, and deeper than mortal love, then when once rightly prepared, you shall find a fact, an immediate and ineffable fact, such that it wholly satisfies every longing, answers every inquiry, and fulfils the aim of every thought. And this it will do for you just because it will be at last the pure immediate, with no beyond to be sought. You talk of reality as fact. Well,” insists the mystic, “here shall be your fact, your datum, an absolutely pure datum. As pure it will fulfil the purpose of thinking, which always desires its own Other, or in other words always really desires just the cessation of all its strife in peace. Only in the immediate that has no beyond, is such peace. Now that is the Reality, that is the Soul. Or, to repeat the Hindoo phrase: That art thou. That is the World. That is the Absolute. That, as Meister Eckhart loved to say, is the “stille Wüste der Gottheit.”