Moreover, this is no mere question of handing on one single tradition. The mystics describe their movement from appearance to reality in many different ways, and use many incompatible religious symbols. The one constant factor is the discrimination of three phases of consciousness, no more, no less, in which we can recognize certain common characteristics. “There are,” says Philo, “three kinds of life: life as it concerns God, life as it concerns the creature, and a third intermediate life, a mixture of the former two.” Consistently with this, Plotinus speaks of three descending phases or principles of Divine Reality: the Godhead, or absolute and unconditioned One; its manifestation as _Nous_, the Divine Mind or Spirit which inspires the “intelligible” and eternal world; and _Psyche_, the Life or Soul of the physical Universe. Man, normally in correspondence with this physical world of succession and change, may by spiritual intuition achieve first consciousness of the eternal world of spiritual values, in which indeed the apex of his soul already dwells; and in brief moments of ecstatic vision may rise above this to communion with its source, the Absolute One. There you have the mystic’s vision of the Universe, and the mystic’s way of purification, enlightenment and ecstasy, bringing new and deeper knowledge of reality as the self’s interest, urged by its loving desire of the Ultimate, is shifted from sense to soul, from soul to spirit. There is here no harsh dualism, no turning from a bad material world to a good spiritual world. We are invited to one gradual undivided process of sublimation, penetrating ever more deeply into the reality of the Universe, to find at last “that One who is present everywhere and absent only from those who do not perceive Him.” What we behold, that we are: citizens, according to our own will and desire, of the surface world of the senses, the deeper world of life, or the ultimate world of Spiritual reality.