The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX Further, there arises an exceedingly remarkable state of mind, described in the Bhagavad-Gita (I quote Arnold): “T, who am all, and made it all, abide its separate Lord.” The experience could not be better phrased. Zoroaster, too: “Who first sprang from Mind, clothing the one Fire with the other Fire, binding them together, that he might mingle the fountainous craters, while preserving unsullied the brilliance of His own Fire.” “Containing all things in the one summit of his Hyparxis, He Himself subsists wholly beyond.” It is almost impossible to describe so purely metaphysical a state, which involves clearly enough a contradiction in terms. Yet the consciousness is so vivid, so intense, so certain, that logic is condemned unflinchingly as puerile. The best escape for the logician is to argue that the three assertions are closely consecutive, so closely that mind thinks them one ; just as the two points of a pair of compasses pressed upon certain parts of the body are felt as one point only. While the mystic will mutter some esoteric darkness about the true interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity. I think one should add that these results of my introspec- tion are almost certainly due to my own training in philosophy and magic, and that nothing but the intensification of the introspective faculty is due to the hashish. Probably, too, this effect (2) would be suppressed or unnoticed in a subject who had never developed his introspection at all. Yet I am inclined to believe that this effect (a) is the true effect; and that Ludlow’s “access of self-consciousness” is but the same operating on the organisation of a man evidently nervous and timid. 44