(3) And when a man is asleep, reposing, and at perfect rest, so that he sees no dream , then he has entered into those arteries. Then no evil touches him, for he has obtained the light (of the sun).

(2) Even thus, relieved from the delay of waiting, That murmuring of the eagle mounted up Along its neck, as if it had been hollow. There it became a voice, and issued thence From out its beak, in such a form of words As the heart waited for wherein I wrote them. "The part in me which sees and bears the sun In mortal eagles," it began to me, "Now fixedly must needs be looked upon; For of the fires of which I make my figure, Those whence the eye doth sparkle in my head Of all their orders the supremest are. He who is shining in the midst as pupil Was once the singer of the Holy Spirit, Who bore the ark from city unto city; Now knoweth he the merit of his song, In so far as effect of his own counsel, By the reward which is commensurate. Of five, that make a circle for my brow, He that approacheth nearest to my beak Did the poor widow for her son console; Now knoweth he how dearly it doth cost Not following Christ, by the experience Of this sweet life and of its opposite.

(21) And we are even as greedy and foolish birds; Every moment our feet are caught in a fresh snare ; Yea, each one of us, though he be a falcon or Simurgh! Thou dost release us every moment, and straightway We again fly into the snare, O Almighty One! Sleep of the body the soul's awakening. Every night Thou freest our spirits from the body And its snare, making them pure as rased tablets. Every night spirits are released from this cage, And set free, neither lording it nor lorded over.

(2) 'As a bird when tied by a string flies first in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down at last on the very place where it is fastened, exactly in the same manner, my son, that mind (the gîva, or living Self in the mind, see VI, 3, 2), after flying in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down on breath ; for indeed, my son, mind is fastened to breath.

(20) Nor yet dead so as to feel the power of 'Isa's breath. His blind soul wanders in every direction, And at last makes a spring, but springs not upwards. A man captured a bird by wiles and snares; The bird said to him, "O noble sir, In your time you have eaten many oxen and sheep, And likewise sacrificed many camels; You have never become satisfied with their meat, Let me go, that I may give you three counsels,

(1) 'When a man being asleep, reposing, and at perfect rest , sees no dreams, that is the Self, this is the immortal, the fearless, this is Brahman.' Then Indra went away satisfied in his heart. But before he had returned to the Devas, he saw this difficulty. In truth he thus does not know himself (his self) that he is I, nor does he know anything that exists. He is gone to utter annihilation. I see no good in this.

(2) The entrance of this spirit, also, is accompanied with a noise, and he diffuses himself on all sides without any contact, and effects admirable works conducive to the liberation of the passions of the soul and body. But sometimes a bright and tranquil light shines forth, by which the sight of the eyes is detained, and which occasions them to become closed, though they were before open. The other senses, however, are in a vigilant state, and in a certain respect have a cosensation of the light unfolded by the Gods; and the recumbents hear what the Gods say, and know, by a consecutive perception, what is then done by them. This, however, is beheld in a still more perfect manner, when the sight perceives, when intellect, being corroborated, follows what is performed, and this is accompanied with the motion of the spectators. Such, therefore, and so many being the differences of these dreams, no one of them is similar to human dreams. But wakefulness, a detention of the eyes, a similar oppression of the head, a condition between sleeping and waking, an instantaneous excitation, or perfect vigilance, are all of them divine indications, and are adapted to the reception of the Gods. They are also sent by the Gods, and a part of divine appearances antecedes according to things of this kind.

(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.

(32) But the memory of friends, children, wife? Country too, and all that the better sort of man may reasonably remember?

All these, the one retains with emotion, the authentic man passively: for the experience, certainly, was first felt in that lower phase from which, however, the best of such impressions pass over to the graver soul in the degree in which the two are in communication.

The lower soul must be always striving to attain to memory of the activities of the higher: this will be especially so when it is itself of a fine quality, for there will always be some that are better from the beginning and bettered here by the guidance of the higher.

The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower: for one reason, there is always the possibility that the very excellence of the lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending to keep it down by sheer force of vitality. In any case the more urgent the intention towards the Supreme, the more extensive will be the soul's forgetfulness, unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with: in this world itself, all is best when human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore, it must be with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that the good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity; it seeks to escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it free from entanglement, light-footed, self-conducted. Thus it is that even in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. It brings there very little of what it has gathered here; as long as it is in the heavenly regions only, it will have more than it can retain.

The Hercules of the heavenly regions would still tell of his feats: but there is the other man to whom all of that is trivial; he has been translated to a holier place; he has won his way to the Intellectual Realm; he is more than Hercules, proven in the combats in which the combatants are the wise.

(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.

(2) He who forms desires in his mind, is born again through his desires here and there. But to him whose desires are fulfilled and who is conscious of the true Self (within himself) all desires vanish, even here on earth.

(5) If one asleep desires no desire whatsoever, sees no dream whatsoever that is deep sleep (suṣupta). The deep-sleep state (suṣupta-sthāna), unified (ekī-bhūta), just (eva) a cognition-mass (prajñāna-ghana), consisting of bliss (ānanda-maya), enjoying bliss (ānanda-bhuj), whose mouth is thought (cetas-), the Cognitional (prājña), is the third fourth.

(27) And therefore when a Man sleeps, so that the Tincture rests, then there are no Thoughts in the Spirit; but the Constellation Air, or Receptacle. rumbles in the Elements, and beats into the Brains what shall (through their Operation) come to pass, which yet is often broke again by another Conjunction, so that it comes not to effect; besides, it can show nothing exactly, except it comes by a Conjunction of Planets and fixed Stars, and that only goes forward, but it represents all [in an] earthly [Manner,] according to the Spirit of this World; so that where the syderial Spirit should speak of Men, it often speaks of Beasts, and continually represents the Contrary; as the earthly Spirit fancies from the starry Spirit, so he dreams.

(11) The disciple's shadow is from that bough. When the shadows in the disciples cease, For, O fortunate one, how can the shadow move, Unless the tree that casts the shadow move as well? Again, the great Creator, as you know, Thus man passed from one order of nature to another, Of his first souls he has now no remembrance, In order to escape from his present soul full of lusts Though man fell asleep and forgot his previous states, Yet God will not leave him in this self-forgetfulness;

(29) And if, through the necessity of life, he spend a small portion of time about his sustenance, he thinks himself defrauded, being diverted by business. Thus not even in dreams does he look on aught that is unsuitable to an elect man. For thoroughly a stranger and sojourner in the whole of life is every such one, who, inhabiting the city, despises the things in the city which are admired by others, and lives in the city as in a desert, so that the place may not compel him, but his mode of life show him to be just.

(4) So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed are thus far in the one place with their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far.

With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the All-Soul, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back.

It has fallen: it is at the chain: debarred from expressing itself now through its intellectual phase, it operates through sense, it is a captive; this is the burial, the encavernment, of the Soul.

But in spite of all it has, for ever, something transcendent: by a conversion towards the intellective act, it is loosed from the shackles and soars- when only it makes its memories the starting point of a new vision of essential being. Souls that take this way have place in both spheres, living of necessity the life there and the life here by turns, the upper life reigning in those able to consort more continuously with the divine Intellect, the lower dominant where character or circumstances are less favourable.

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as "parts," and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience birth.

Of course, where he speaks of God sowing them, he is to be understood as when he tells of God speaking and delivering orations; what is rooted in the nature of the All is figuratively treated as coming into being by generation and creation: stage and sequence are transferred, for clarity of exposition, to things whose being and definite form are eternal.

(5) They who are able to drink in a somewhat more than others of this Sight, ofttimes from out the body fall asleep in this fairest Spectacle, as was the case with Uranus and Cronus, our forebears. may this be out lot too, O father mine! Hermes: Yea, may it be, my son! But as it is, we are not yet strung to the Vision, and not as yet have we the power our mind's eye to unfold and gaze upon the Beauty of the Good - Beauty that naught can e'er corrupt or any comprehend. For only then wilt thou upon It gaze when thou canst say no word concerning It. For Gnosis of the Good is holy silence and a giving holiday to every sense.

(15) Reaching the vibrations of the Astral Plane, the Newly disembodied soul falls into a deep sleep, or state of coma, resembling the condition of the unborn child for several months before its birth. This condition is necessary in order to prepare the soul for its life on the new plane. The soul which has left the earth scene with calmness and peaceful mental attitude soon drops into a dreamless slumber; but those whose minds have been filled with strong desires connected with earth life often experience what are called "astral dreams" in which they revisit the scenes of earth life, and if possible may indulge in more or less distorted and dreamy communications through "mediums" and others. The strong desires and grief on the part of those left behind on the earth scenes, also, sometimes act to set up a "rapport" condition, and thus disturb the sleeping soul and interfere with its needed preparatory rest. In this slumber state the disembodied soul is fully protected from the influence or presence of other beings, and is as secure as is the child in its mother's womb.

(31) At night prisoners are unaware of their prison, Then there is no thought or care for loss or gain, The state of the "Knower" is such as this, even when awake. God says, "Thou wouldst deem him awake though asleep, Sleeping to the affairs of the world, day and night, He who sees not the hand which effects the writing If the "Knower" revealed the particulars of this state, 'Twould rob the vulgar of their sensual sleep. His soul wanders in the desert that has no similitude; Like his body, his spirit is enjoying perfect rest;