11.2 Meditation and Experience

I hope it has become clear that meditation is no retreat from the world but is one pole of our terrestrial conscious activity which is all creative. Not by meditation alone will anyone reach to the greatest heights; the limitations of external life contain the divine teaching in equal measure. To look within and to seek without are the winter and the summer, the day and the night, the left and the right foot of the soul's progress. Just as one who understands may be as thrilled with the beauty of a tiny leaf as with the grandeur of a tropical forest, so may one know that the divine finger is just as much in the small experience that comes to you and me as it is in the great occurrences which make landmarks in history. Our life sways between the inner and the outer poles. Inward thought devises a machine or propounds a theory; outward experience suggests improvements to that mechanism, or declares the theory true or false. Consistency with the laws of nature, in their multifarious Interplay, alone makes a thing useful or proves a theory true. As it was said that there is no bar or wall in the human soul where God the cause leaves off and man the effect begins, so it may be said that there is no point or place in the world of experience where these two do not meet.

Meditation, therefore, is most effectual when its thoughts and emotions are carried out of the chamber into the affairs of life, there to receive correction and modification, there to have attached to them points of experience that will give them new bloom and add to them sister blossoms in future meditations.