The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX hour, so mentally a less definite but far from indefinite number of thoughts makes an hour’s consciousness. Perhaps powerful and vivid thoughts count for a longer lapse of time than weak ones. Deep sleep passes like an invisible electric discharge. The apparently contrary fact that time seems short when we have been reading an interesting book or performing a pleasant and absorbing task is explained thus; the multitude of impressions is harmonised into one impression. Read an unharmonious and dull book, or an essay like this, and the time appears ineffably long. The other contrary fact, that a minute’s Samadhi appears as an eternity, though Samadhi is a single thought, is ex- plained by the intensity of that thought and by other con- siderations which I shall hope to discuss more fully in section xiii. of this essay. This, then, is what happens to the eater of hashish. For each impression he has thousands of glyphs (effect (a)) or in the more common TM* effect (8) the images are so multiplied and superimposed that all harmony is lost; the brain fails to keep pace with its impressions, still less to codify and control them. It finds then that from the idea cat to the idea mouse is a journey through the million dying echoes of cat to the million dawn-rays of mouse, and that the journey takes a million times as long as usual. This analysis of a thought into its dawn, noon, and sunset, is well drawn in Buddhist psychology.+ Often, too, most often, one of the “ cat-echoes” will be so loud that the whole chain is shattered; the cat-echo becomes * More common, judging by the reports of Ludlow and others. I never permitted myself to fall under its dominion. } See Mrs. Rhys David’s book. 46