The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

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. 74