The many people who complain that they have no such personal religious experience, that the spiritual world is shut to them, are usually found to have expected this experience to be given to them without any deliberate and sustained effort on their own part.  They have lived from childhood to maturity at the little window of consciousness and have never given themselves the opportunity of setting up correspondences with any other world than that of sense.  Yet all normal men and women possess, at least in a rudimentary form, some intuition of the transcendental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty or love.  In some it is dominant, emerging easily and without help; in others it is latent and must be developed in the right way.  In others again it may exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic outlook; gathering way until it claims its rights at last in a psychic storm.  Its emergence, however achieved, is a part—­and for our true life, by far the most important part—­of that outcropping and overflowing into consciousness of the marginal faculties which is now being recognized as essential to all artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too, a large part in the regulation of mental and bodily health.

All the great religions have implicitly understood—­though without analysis—­the vast importance of these spiritual intuitions and faculties lying below the surface of the everyday mind; and have perfected machinery tending to secure their release and their training.  This is of two kinds:  first, religious ceremonial, addressing itself to corporate feeling; next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which educates the individual to the same ends, gradually developing the powers of the foreconscious region, steadying them, and bringing them under the control of the purified will.  Without some such education, widely as its details may vary, there can be no real living of the spiritual life.

    “A going out into the life of sense
     Prevented the exercise of earnest realization."[88]

Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two extreme classes of extroverts and introverts.  The extrovert is the typical active; always leaning out of the window and setting up contacts with the outside world.  His thinking is mainly realistic.  That is to say, it deals with the data of sense.  The introvert is the typical contemplative, predominantly interested in the inner world.  His thinking is mainly autistic, dealing with the results of intuition and feeling, working these up into new structures and extorting from them new experiences.  He is at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers under control; and instinctively obedient to the mystic command to sink into the ground of the soul, he leans towards those deep wells of his own being which plunge into the unconscious foundations of life.  By this avoidance of total concentration on the sense world—­though material obtained from it must as a matter of fact