Excessive Extroversion

The extroversions of the ego block the communication of the Overself. Men absorbed in the ceaseless activity of their five senses can have no comprehension of mysticism’s meaning, no sympathy with mysticism’s practice, no real contact with mysticism’s exponents. For their hidden failure to know themselves underlies their obvious failure to know mysticism. With thoughts and the body living their own egoistic life, the world needs must be regarded as obstructive to spiritual development.

This continuous attraction to outer embroilment is fatal to inner life. It exists only because they abandon the real self for it. It exhausts them, so that neither the desire nor the energy to search for this self are able to arise. The good man or the religious man will take the trouble to weed out bad habits but never dream that his excessive extroversion is not the least of them.

Too much absorption with outward things, too little with inner life, creates the unbalance we see everywhere today. The attention given by people to their outer circumstances amounts almost to obsession. Most men are so smugly content to do their own ego’s will all the time that it never enters their minds to pause and enquire what the Overself’s will for them is.


The soul speaks to us in moments of peaceful realisation and in times of quiet thought. Nay, it is always speaking, but in the fret and fever of active existence, its voice remains unheard, its face unrecognised.