(7) A writer well says of this particular state of newly awakened consciousness: "Although this feeling of separateness and apartness grows less acute as the man grows older, yet it is always present to a greater or less degree until a still higher stage is reached, when it disappears. And this self-conscious stage is painful to many. Many find themselves entangled in a mass of mental states which one thinks is himself, or inextricably bound up with himself, and the struggle between the awakening Ego and its confining sheaths is very painful in some cases. And this becomes more painful as the individual advances in self-consciousness and nears the end at which he is to find deliverance. Man eats of the Tree of Knowledge and begins to suffer, and is driven out of the garden of Eden of the child consciousness in which the individual has lived like the birds, concerning not himself about the affairs of his higher nature. Man pays dearly for the gift of Self-Consciousness—yet it is worth it all, for finally he reaches heights of higher consciousness and is delivered from his burden." With the dawning awareness of one's own mental states, one comes to the realization that other human beings possess similar states, and one begins to speculate and reason about the working of these states in others. Then comes the desire to communicate one's ideas to the mind of the others, and to appeal to his feelings or reason. All this promotes the development of Intellect and logical thought, which is a marked characteristic of evolving human consciousness. Man begins to seek for an answer to the many "whys" which are presenting themselves to him, and he seeks to reason from the known to the unknown. He proceeds to invent appliances conducive to the accomplishment of things which lie desires. He harnesses his Intellect to the chariot of his Desires, and drives it along by command of Will, the chariot-driver.

(2) All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

(7) Now the rational soul in man abounds in marvels, both of knowledge and power. By means of it he masters arts and sciences, can pass in a flash from earth to heaven and back again, can map out the skies and measure the distances between the stars. By it also he can draw the fish from the sea and the birds from the air, and can subdue to his service animals like the elephant, the camel, and the horse. His five senses are like five doors opening on the external world; but, more wonderful than this, his heart has a window which opens on the unseen world of spirits. In the state of sleep, when the avenues of the senses are closed, this window is opened and man receives impressions from the unseen world and sometimes fore-shadowings of the future. His heart is then like a mirror which reflects what is pictured in the Tablet of Fate. But, even in sleep, thoughts of worldly things dull this mirror, so that the impression it receives are not clear. After death, however, such thoughts vanish and things are seen in their naked reality, and the saying

(348) Give up what is before, give up what is behind, give up what is in the middle, when thou goest to the other shore of existence; if thy mind is altogether free, thou wilt not again enter into birth and decay.

(1) "Blessings on those who guard themselves against the heritage of death, which is the burdensome water of darkness. For it will not be possible to conquer them in a few moments, since they hasten to come forth from the error of the world. And if they are conquered, they will be kept back from them and be tormented in the darkness until the time of the consummation. When the consummation has come and nature has been destroyed, then their thoughts will separate from the darkness. Nature has burdened them for a short time. And they will be in the ineffable light of the unconceived spirit without a form. And thus is the mind, as I have said from the first.

(2) The man whose mind is not under his control has no Self-knowledge and no contemplation either. Without contemplation he can have no peace; and without peace, how can he have happiness?

(22) 'The wise who knows the Self as bodiless within the bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as great and omnipresent, does never grieve.'

(8) Yet this first Will in the Mind ought not to stay behind in the Abyss of the sour Fierceness, (in which the fierce Malice is,) but ought to go forward in the Center of the Breaking forth out of the Darkness into the Light, for in the Light there is mere Meekness, Lowliness, Humility, Good- Will, and friendly Desires, that it might with its re-conceived Will go out of itself, and to Or earnest Will. open itself in its precious Treasury. For in the re-conceived Will to the Birth of the Light, there is no Source of Anxiety, but only mere friendly Desires; for the Glimpse rises up out of the Darkness in itself, and desires the Light; and the Desiring draws the Light into itself, and there the Anguish becomes an exulting Joy in itself, an humble Chearfulness, a pleasant Habitation. For the re-conceived Will in the Light is impregnated, and its Fruit in the Body is Virtue [or Power,] which the Will desires to generate, and to live therein; and this Desiring brings the Fruit out of the impregnated Will, [and presents it] before the Will, and the Will discovers itself [glimmers or shines] in the Fruit in an infinite pleasant Number; and there goes forth, in the pleasant Number, in the discovered [or manifested] Will, the high Benediction [or Blessing,] Favour, loving Kindness, pleasant Inclination [or yielding Pliableness,] the Taste of Joy, the Well-doing of Meekness [or Affability,] and [further] what my Pen cannot express. The Mind would much rather be freed from Vanity, and live therein without Molestation or Disturbance.

(3) "But for these emotions I should not be. But for me, they would have no scope. So far we can go; but we do not know what it is that brings them into play. 'Twould seem to be a soul; but the clue to its existence is wanting. That such a Power operates, is credible enough, though we cannot see its form. It has functions without form. "Take the human body with all its manifold divisions. Which part of it does a man love best? Does he not cherish all equally, or has he a preference? Do not all equally serve him? And do these servitors then govern themselves, or are they subdivided into rulers and subjects? Surely there is some soul which sways them all. "But whether or not we ascertain what are the functions of this soul, it matters but little to the soul itself. For coming into existence with this mortal coil of mine, with the exhaustion of this mortal coil its mandate will also be exhausted. To be harassed by the wear and tear of life, and to pass rapidly through it without possibility of arresting one's course,—is not this pitiful indeed? To labour without ceasing, and then, without living to enjoy the fruit, worn out, to depart, suddenly, one knows not whither,—is not that a just cause for grief?

(6) 'Having understood that the senses are distinct (from the Âtman), and that their rising and setting (their waking and sleeping) belongs to them in their distinct existence (and not to the Âtman), a wise man grieves no more.'

(6) Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as their object; what they have not been able to achieve by the direct path, they hope to come at by the circuit.

Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind: their success is the laying up of a vision. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind?

Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the Soul can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper.

This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further; the contemplation, in one so conditioned, remains absorbed within as having acquired certainty to rest upon. The brighter the certainty, the more tranquil is the contemplation as having acquired the more perfect unity; and- for now we come to the serious treatment of the subject-

In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge.

As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or Soul remain idle.

Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own.

The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees as a stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a realm which these do not see.

For, it is a not a complete thing: it has a lack; it is incomplete in regard to its Prior; yet it, also, has a tranquil vision of what it produces. What it has once brought into being it produces no more, for all its productiveness is determined by this lack: it produces for the purpose of Contemplation, in the desire of knowing all its content: when there is question of practical things it adapts its content to the outside order.

The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contemplative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the object of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by observation. It leaves its native realm and busies itself elsewhere; then it returns, and it possesses its vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted. The self-indwelling Soul inclines less to such experiences.

The Sage, then, is the man made over into a Reason-Principle: to others he shows his act but in himself he is Vision: such a man is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards what is one and at rest: all his faculty and life are inward-bent.

(5) But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity?

What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about? Could either welfare or happiness be present under such conditions? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing "Miseries of Priam."

"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely... until the body's appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate's distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body's sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness."

(43) The Will now standing thus in the dark Anxiety, it rgets another Will to fly out of the Anxiety again, and to generate the Light; and this other Will is the Mind, out of which proceed the Senses [or Thoughts] not to continue in the Anxiety: And the Will [appears,] discovers itself in the Essences of the Sourness, as in the fierce Hardness of Death; and the Glimpse [or Glance] breaks through the Essences of the sour Hardness, as a swift [or sudden] Flash, and sharpens itself in the sour Hardness, that it becomes [pale, white, or] glimmering like a Flash of Fire, and in its sudden Flight breaks the sour Darkness; and there stands the Hardness, and the harsh Sourness of Death like a broken turning Wheel, which with the Flash of the Breaking flies swiftly as a Thought; as also then the re-conceived Will (which is the Mind) appears so very suddenly. And seeing it cannot fly forward out of the Essences, it must go into the turning Wheel, (for it cannot get from that Place,) and so it breaks the Darkness. And when the Darkness is thus broken, [then] the sharp Glance discovers itself in the pleasant Joy without [or beyond] the Darkness in the Sharpness of the Will, viz. in the Mind, and finds itself habitable therein, from whence the Flash (or Glance) is terrified, and flies up with strong Might through the broken Essences out of the Heart, and would go out at the Mouth, and raises itself far from the Heart, and yet is held by the sour [or harsh] Fiat, and it then makes itself a several Region (viz. the Tongue) wherein then stands the Shriek [or the Crack] of the broken Essences. And seeing then it reflects [or recoils] back again into the Heart, as into its first Dwelling-house, and finds itself so very habitable and pleasant, because the Gates of the Darkness are broken, then it kindles itself so highly in the loving Will, by Reason of the Meekness, and goes no more like a stern [or fierce] Flash through all Essences, but [it] goes trembling with great Joy; and the Might of the Joy is now many hundred Times stronger, than first the Flash [or Glance] was, which yielded [or discovered] itself through the sour harsh Essences of the Death, and goes with strong Might out of the Heart into the Head, in the Will [or Purpose] to possess the heavenly Region.

(1) The wise, therefore, speak as follows: The soul having a twofold life, one being in conjunction with body, but the other being separate from all body; when we are awake we employ, for the most part, the life which is common with the body, except when we separate ourselves entirely from it by pure intellectual and dianoetic energies. But when we are asleep, we are perfectly liberated, as it were, from certain surrounding bonds, and use a life separated from generation. Hence, this form of life, whether it be intellectual or divine, and whether these two are the same thing, or whether each is peculiarly of itself one thing, is then excited in us, and energizes in a way conformable to its nature. Since, therefore, intellect surveys real beings, but the soul contains in itself the reasons of all generated natures, it very properly follows that, according to a cause which comprehends future events, it should have a foreknowledge of them, as arranged in their precedaneous reasons. And it possesses a divination still more perfect than this, when it conjoins the portions of life and intellectual energy to the wholes from which it was separated. For then it is filled from wholes with all scientific knowledge, so as for the most part to attain by its conceptions to the apprehension of every thing which is effected in the world. Indeed, when it is united to the Gods, by a liberated energy of this kind, it then receives the most true plenitudes of intellections, from which it emits the true divination of divine dreams, and derives the most genuine principles of knowledge.

(17) In the soul sleep a strange process occurs, namely, the preparation for the sloughing off of the lower sheaths of the soul, leaving it free to enter the life on the Astral Plane clad only in the garments of its highest stage of spiritual attainment reached by it. Each soul awakens on the Astral Plane prepared to dwell on the plane of its highest and best, leaving the rest behind it. It awakens on the plane in which the highest and best in itself is given a chance to develop and expand, and to make progress, for the soul may, and does, make great progress in these between-births sojourns on the Astral Plane.

(2) Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father.

And as to our own Soul we are to hold that it stands, in part, always in the presence of The Divine Beings, while in part it is concerned with the things of this sphere and in part occupies a middle ground. It is one nature in graded powers; and sometimes the Soul in its entirety is borne along by the loftiest in itself and in the Authentic Existent; sometimes, the less noble part is dragged down and drags the mid-soul with it, though the law is that the Soul may never succumb entire.

The Soul's disaster falls upon it when it ceases to dwell in the perfect Beauty- the appropriate dwelling-place of that Soul which is no part and of which we too are no part- thence to pour forth into the frame of the All whatsoever the All can hold of good and beauty. There that Soul rests, free from all solicitude, not ruling by plan or policy, not redressing, but establishing order by the marvellous efficacy of its contemplation of the things above it.

For the measure of its absorption in that vision is the measure of its grace and power, and what it draws from this contemplation it communicates to the lower sphere, illuminated and illuminating always.

(11) A well known writer has said of Man in this advanced stage: "If we are willing to believe in this mastery over the body, we must be prepared to believe in the mastery over our own inner thoughts and feelings. That a man should be a prey to any thought that chances to take possession of his mind is commonly among us assumed as unavoidable. It may be a matter of regret that he should be kept awake all night from anxiety as to the issue of a lawsuit on the morrow, but that he should have the power of determining whether he should be kept awake or not seems an extravagant demand. The image of an impending calamity is no doubt odious, but its very odiousness (we say) makes it haunt the mind all the more pertinaciously and it is useless to expel it.

(4) We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase of the Soul. This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the Soul and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its choice: but more is required; we must begin by forming a clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the Soul.

In general terms it means the centre about which we recognize the affections to be grouped; and by affections we mean those states upon which follow pleasure and pain.

Now among these affections we must distinguish. Some are pivoted upon judgements; thus, a Man judging his death to be at hand may feel fear; foreseeing some fortunate turn of events, he is happy: the opinion lies in one sphere; the affection is stirred in another. Sometimes the affections take the lead and automatically bring in the notion which thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty: but as we have explained, an act of opinion does not introduce any change into the Soul or Mind: what happens is that from the notion of some impending evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in turn, becomes known in that part of the Mind which is said under such circumstances to harbour fear.

But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind?

The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. It should, however, be quite clear that the Soul or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation- both the higher representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the "Nature" of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the body, belongs to the sense-order; trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. The Soul, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited.

None the less, there is an affective phase of the Soul or Mind and this is not corporeal; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form.

Now Matter is the one field of the desiring faculty, as of the principles of nutrition growth and engendering, which are root and spring to desire and to every other affection known to this Ideal-form. No Ideal-form can be the victim of disturbance or be in any way affected: it remains in tranquillity; only the Matter associated with it can be affected by any state or experience induced by the movement which its mere presence suffices to set up. Thus the vegetal Principle induces vegetal life but it does not, itself, pass through the processes of vegetation; it gives growth but it does not grow; in no movement which it originates is it moved with the motion it induces; it is in perfect repose, or, at least, its movement, really its act, is utterly different from what it causes elsewhere.

The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity; it operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the Soul or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently- and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not- but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the strings of his instrument, and once more, the Melodic Principle itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody.

(44) Therefore, thou child of man, be not discouraged, be not so timorous and despondent; for if thou sowest in thy zeal and earnest sincerity the seed of thy tears, thou dost not sow it in earth, but in heaven; for in thy astral birth thou sowest, and in thy animated or soulish birth thou reapest, and in the kingdom of heaven thou possessest and enjoyest it.

(12) Such is the Mind which is energized before energy, while yet it had not gone forth, but abode in the Paternal Depth, and in the Adytum of God nourished silence.