The Vision and the Voice

THE EQUINOX head, and his throat is livid with the pressure of her fingers. Their joint cry is an intolerable anguish, yet it is the cry of their rapture, so that every pain, and every curse, and every bereavement, and every death of everything in the whole universe, is but one little gust of wind in that tempest-scream of ecstasy. The voice thereof is not articulate. It is in vain to seek comparison. It is absolutely continuous, without breaks or beats. If there seem to be vibration therein, it is because of the imperfection of the ears of the seer. And there cometh an interior voice, which sayeth to the seer that he hath trained his eyes well and can see much; and he hath trained his ears a little, and can hear a little; but his other senses hath he trained scarcely at all, and therefore the Aethyrs are almost silent to him on those planes. By the senses are meant the spiritual correlations of the senses, not the physical senses. But this matters little, because the Seer, so far as he is a seer, is the expression of the spirit of humanity. What is true of him is true of humanity, so that even if he had been able to receive the full Aethyrs, he could not have communicated them. And an Angel speaks: Behold, this vision is utterly be- yond thine understanding. Yet shalt thou endeavour to unite thyself with the dreadful marriage-bed. So I am torn asunder, nerve from nerve and vein from vein, and more intimately,—cell from cell, molecule from mole- cule, and atom from atom, and at the same time all crushed together. Write down that the tearing asunder zs a crushing together. All the double phenomena are only two ways of looking at a single phenomenon; and the single phenomenon 138