l acceptance of the trials of the Purgative Way. That which we call the "natural" self as it exists in the "natural" world--the " Adam" of St. Paul--is wholly incapable of super-sensual adventure. All its activities are grouped about a center of consciousness whose correspondences are with the material world. In the moment of its awakening, it is abruptly made aware of this disability. It knows itself finite. It now aspires to the infinite. It is encased in the hard crust of individuality: it aspires to union with a larger self. It is fettered: it longs for freedom. Its every sense is attuned to illusion: it craves for harmony with the Absolute Truth. Some believe that God is the only Reality and a human is real only as far as it is in His order, and He is in this person. As stated before god with Luther, God loves through you. Whatever form the mystical adventure may take it, must begin with a change in the attitude of the subject; a change which will introduce it into the order of Reality, and enable it to set up permanent relations with an Object which is not normally part of its universe. Therefore, though the end of mysticism is not adequately Page 4defined as goodness, it entails the acquirement of goodness. The virtues are the "ornaments of the spiritual marriage" because that marriage is union with the Good no less than with the Beautiful and the True. Primarily, then, the self must be purged of all that stands between it and goodness of God: putting on the character of reality instead of the character of illusion or "sin." It longs ardently to do this from the first moment in which it sees itself in the all-revealing radiance of the Noncreated Light.Purgatory is devoted to the cleansing of pride and the production of humility: the inevitable--one might almost say mechanical--result of a vision, however fleeting, of Reality, and an undistorted sight of the earthbound self. All its life that self has been measuring it’s c...
