Now bear in mind that it is not we who are looking out upon Nature, but that it is the Reality, which, by means of the physical, is persistently striving to enter into our consciousness, to tell us what? [Greek: Theos agape estin] (God is Love). As in Thompson's suggestive poem, "The Hound of Heaven"--the Hidden which desires to be found--the Reality is ever hunting us, and will never leave us till He has taught us to know and therefore to love Him, and, as seen in our first view, the first step is to try to see through the woof of nature to the Reality beyond. To this may also be added the attempt to hear the "silence" beyond the audible. Try now to look upon the whole "visible" as a background comprising landscape, sea, and sky--we shall get help in this direction in a later View--and then bring that background nearer and nearer to your consciousness. It requires practice, but it can be done; it may help you if you remember the fact that the whole of that visible scene is actually depicted on the _surface_ of your retina and _has no other existence for you_. The nearer you can get the background to approach, the more clearly you can see that the whole physical world of our senses is but a thin veil, a mere soap film, which at death is pricked and parts asunder, leaving us in the presence of the Reality underlying all phenomena. The same may be accomplished with the "audible," which is indeed part of the same physical film, though this is not at first easy to recognise. As pointed out in View No. 1, there is little in common between our sense of sight and hearing; but the chirp of birds, the hum of bees, the rustle of wind in the leaves, the ripple of a stream, the distant sound of sheep bells, and lowing of cattle form a background of sound which may be coaxed to approach you; the only knowledge you have of such sounds is their impression or image on the flat tympanum of your ear; they have _no other existence for you_; and again you may recognise that the physical is but a thin transient film. With the approach of the physical film all material sensation becomes as it were blurred, as near objects become when the eye looks at the horizon, and gradually escapes from consciousness. I have tried in the foregoing to suggest a method by which our Window may be unshuttered; it has necessarily been only an oblique view and clothed in symbolic phraseology, but those who have been able to grasp its meaning will now have attained to what may be called a state of _self-forgetting_, the silencing or quieting down of the Physical Ego; sight and sound perceptions have been put in the background of consciousness, and it becomes possible to worship or love the very essence of beauty without the distraction of sense analysis and synthesis or temptation to form intellectual conceptions.