THE EQUINOX
total blank, the only relief (strange as it sounds) being the all
but intolerable mental agony of the consciousness. This
agony, belonging to the lower stage of Vedana, is the drag,
ever pulling back the mystic as he endeavours to break down
the blackness of his insanity. Yet the unity of its anguish is
the proof of its Selfhood, and the earnest of its resurrection
from the abyss. Such a mystic state may last through several
days, perhaps through weeks. I should not care to assert
limitations. The slightest error in the process would almost
certainly result in permanent and hopeless melancholia;
suicide might be the most fortunate termination.
XVI
“O how the world hath inflexible intellectual rulers!”
ZOROASTER,
Sankhava.—The reader will notice—I trust with pained
sympathy—the increasing difficulty of expressing these results
of meditation in language. At this point one almost desires
to exclaim with Fichte that if it were only possible to start all
over again, one would begin by inventing a totally new
scheme of symbolism.
Here in Sankhara, hashish-analogy is somewhat at fault.
Possibly the conviction of the irresistibility of the connection
of cause and effect, the consciousness of the necessity of sub-
ject and object to each other through immutable glyphs may
represent it. It may be that my experience of hashish is even
more imperfect than I have supposed, and that more gifted
experimenters might fill this gap.
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