The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX disturbing thoughts which analyse the very process itself. Harder to destroy are they than the others, since they come no longer from memory or physical conditions, but from the practice itself, so that they cannot be shut off, but must needs be faced and conquered directly. In the mystic world, we come to those strange meta- physical ecstasies which (I am convinced) lie behind many philosophical dogmas. St. Athanasius had probably experienced something of this type when he penned his insane creed. So the Hindus with their attempts to affirm Parabrahma by denying him all qualities, their dogma of the “pairs of opposites,” their assertion of Sat-Chit-Ananda as transcending these pairs ; so too perhaps with Herbert Spencer it was direct Samadhic per- ception of this Safifia type that led him to formulate his irrational doctrine of Transcendental Realism, just as (cer- tainly) Berkeley's doctrine arose from Samadhi of the type of Vedana. For the stigma of this class of mystic experience is undoubtedly first its resolution of all concepts into purely formless and passionless perception, secondly (and above this), its transcendence of the laws of thought, as we have been accustomed to understand them. (This is only in part true. Keynes’ “ Formal Logic,” pro- foundly studied, leads one perilously close to the supra- rational. The eminent professor is perhaps hardly aware of how his eagle-flights have brushed the sun with their fiery wings.) If a dweller upon this plane meditate upon a God, his first experience of that God will be no longer of His appearance or of His effect upon himself, but rather of His nature in some 72