The success with which he follows this way to freedom and full life will depend on the intensity of his love and will, his capacity for self-discipline, his steadfastness and courage. It will depend on the generosity and completeness of his outgoing passion for absolute beauty, absolute goodness, or absolute truth. But if he move at all, he will move through a series of states which are, in their own small way, analogous to those experienced by the greatest contemplative on his journey towards that union with God which is the term of the spirit's ascent towards its home. As the embryo of physical man, be he saint or savage, passes through the same stages of initial growth, so too with spiritual man. There is only one road from Appearance to Reality.
Men pass on, but the States are permanent for ever.
However widely these forms of transcendence may seem to differ, the mystic experience is the key to them all. Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us. Their attainment is the earnest-money of our eternal life. The ordered sequence of states, the organic development, whereby his consciousness is detached from illusion and rises to the mystic freedom which conditions instead of being conditioned by, its normal world, is the way he must tread if that sonship is to be realized.