Part 3 (1/2)

in our scheht The transition feeling goes, for there is nothing to be ”related” Now ”it is one blaze, about er My consciousness is a unit or a blank, as you please If you say that I am self- hypnotized, I may reply that I have simply ceased to feel myself different from the content of my consciousness, because that content has ceased to allow a transition between its terms

This is, however, not the only possible for loss of the self-feeling

When the sequence of objects in consciousness is so rapid that the feeling of transition, expressed in motor ter of self again fades

Think, for instance, of the Bacchanal orgies The votary of Dionysus, dancing, shrieking, tearing at his hair and at his gare of his sensations all power of relating the circle, every point of which ed into the next without possibility of differentiation And since he could feel no transition periods, he could feel HIMSELF no longer; he was one with the content of his consciousness, which consciousness was no less a unit than our bright light aforesaid, just as a circle is as truly a unit as a point The priest of Dionysus , one with the world without, ”whirled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees” And how perfectly the ancient belief fits our psychophysical analysis! The Bacchic enthusiast believed himself possessed with the very ecstasy of the spirit of nature His inspired madness was the presence of the God who descended upon hi sap, the rushi+ng strea, all the life of flowing things, they were he! ”Autika ga pasa zoreusei,” was the cry,--”soon the whole earth will dance and sing!”

Yes, this breaking down of barriers, this e and sweet self- abandonment must have its source in just the disappearance of the sensation of adjust of personality is based But how can it be, we have to ask, that a principle so barren of eious eht, of creative inspiration? It is not, however, religion or beauty or genius that is the object of our inquiry at this moment, but simply the common element in the experience of each of these which we know as the disappearance of self-feeling How the circuious worshi+p, aesthetic appreciation, and intellectual creation bring about the forht in a more detailed analysis, and we shall then be able to trace the source of the intensity of emotion in these experiences What, then, first of all, are the steps by which priest and poet and thinker have passed into the exaltation of selfless erims of all three realal of their confessions The religious ecstasy, however, eht into the nature of the experience; and will therefore be dealt with at greatest length

The typical religious enthusiast is the mystic From Plotinus to Buddha, froht the saious rapture There is one God, and in contemplation of Him the soul becomes of his essence Whether it is held, as by the Neoplatonists, that Being and Knowledge are one, that the procedure of the world out of God is a process of self-revelation, and the return of things into God a process of higher and higher intuition, and so the hest rather than a form of worshi+p; or whether it is expressed as by the hu of God as a fish in water,'--the kernel of the mystic's creed is the saher states, in ecstatic union with Hi, is the only true life Not all, it is true, who hold the doctrine have had the experience; not all can say with Eckhart or with Madame Guyon, ”I have seen God in my own soul,” or ”I have become one with God” It is from the narratives and the counsels of perfection of these, the chosen, the initiate, who have passed beyond the veil, that light ical conditions ofaccount of her actual iven by Madame Guyon, the first of the sect or school of the Quietists This gentle Frenchwoh her style is neither poetic nor philosophical, I th her naive and lucid revelations The following passages, beginning with an early religious experience, are taken alraphy:--

”These sermons ly in God, that I could not open my eyes nor hear as said” ”To hear Thy name, O my God, could put er the saints nor the Holy Virgin outside of God; but I saw theuish them from HimI could not hear God nor our Lord Jesus Christ spoken of without being, as it were, outside of ly that I remained absorbed, in a profound silence and a peace that I cannot describe IhI could ask nothing forbut this divine willI do not believe that there could be in the world anything more simple andmore, because it evades all expression,--a state in which the creature is lost, engulfed All is God, and the soul perceives only God It has to strive no rowth, for approach to Him, for union All is consummated in the unity, but in a manner so free, so natural, so easy, that the soul lives from the air which it breathesThe spirit is e fills the void, which is no longer painful, and the soul finds in itself an i can either limit or destroy”

Can we fail to trace in these siious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madaher key than most of this dull and relaxed world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative worshi+p Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit

Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St

Teresa, the countless e, and of the followers of Buddhises to the Charles Two characteristics disengage themselves to view: the insistence on the unity of God--IN whoin and the saints are seen--froical point of view only; and the ious ecstasy But without further analysis, we may ask, as the disciples of the mystics have always done, how this state of blissful union is to be reached They have always been minute in their prescriptions, and it is possible to derive therefrom what may be called the technique of the mystic procedure

”The word mystic,” to quote Walter Pater, ”has been derived fronifies to shut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; but the Platonists the the eyes, that one may see the more, inwardly” Of such is the counsel of St Luis de Granada, ”Imitate the sportsman who hoods the falcon that it be made subservient to his rule;” and of another Spanish mystic, Pedro de Alcantara: ”In s temporal, and let him collect himself within himself Here let hih there were no other in the world save God and hi herself up within herself”

Vocal prayer could not satisfy her, and she adopted es of her experience--which she na rather than speaking), ”union” (blissful sleep with the faculties of the ressive steps in the sealing of the senses The yoga of the Brahmins, which is the same as the ”union” of the Cabalists, is made to depend upon the same conditions,--passivity, perseverance, solitude The novice , andthe formless, ineffable Buddha But it is useless to heap up evidence; the inference is sufficiently clear

The body is first brought into a state either of nervous instability or irritability by ascetic practices, or of nervous insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer disturbance; and the le object,--the one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible Recalling our former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality, we shall see that we have here the two poles of consciousness

Then, as the tension is sharpened, what happens? Under the artificial conditions of weakened nerves, of blank surroundings, the self-background drops The feeling of transition disappears with the absence of related ter, the positive pole of consciousness, is an undifferentiated Unity, hich the person one with that on which it rests, and its loss is joined with an overwhel sense of union with the One, the Absolute, God!

The object of mystic contemplation is the One indivisible But we can also think the One as the unity of all differences, the Circle of the Universe Those natures also which, like Amiel's, are ”bedazzled with the Infinite” and thirst for ”totality”

attain in their reveries to the saht on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched at full length upon the beach,over the Milky Way Will they ever return to onic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!” The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted by Matthew Arnold, reveals the sareater than we are, and everywhere i passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment” In the coincidence of outer circuht, the attitude of repose--round, similar to that of the mystic worshi+per? And in the Infinite, no less than in the One, must the soul sink and melt into union with it, because within it there is no detere

The contemplation of the One, however, is not the only type of mystic ecstasy That intoxication of e of to-day, as it did upon the Delphic priestesses two thousand years ago, seeically with the blessed nothingness of Gauta of personality and the sense of possession by a divine spirit are the same How, then, is this state reached?

By eneral for To repeat the monosyllable OM (Brah the while, about a sacred ire; to listen to the ic drum; to whirl the body about; to rock to and fro on the knees, vociferating prayers, are methods which enable the members of the respective sects in which they are practiced either to enter, as they say, into the Eternal Being, or to becoation of the self The sense of personality, at any rate, is more or less completely lost, and the ecstasy takes a for as the worshi+per depends on the rapidity rather than on the round drops, inasmuch as every rhythmical movement tends to become automatic, and then unconscious Thus e are wont to call the inspired madness of the Delphic priestesses was less the expression of ecstasy than the means of its excitation Perpetual ulfment of the self in the object The ious emotions, IN SO FAR AS THEY PRESENT VARIATIONS IN THE DEGREE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, are thus seen to be reducible to the saical basis

The circle, no less than the point, is the sy unity” that lays hold on consciousness fro of transition comes in the unrest of enthusias of Nirvana

At this point, I am sure, the reader will interpose a protest

Is, then, the hest to be shared with the meanest of fanatics? Are the rapture of Dante and the trance of the O from the same root? There is no occasion, however, for the revolt of sentiment because we fail to emphasize here the important differences in the emotional character and value of the states in question What interests us is only one aspect which they have in common, the surrender of the sense of personality

That is based on formal relations of the elements of consciousness, and the explanation of its disappearance applies as well to the whirling dervish as to the converts of a revivalist preacher

The mystic, then, need only shut his senses to the world, and contemplate the One Subject fuses with object, and he feels himself melt into the Infinite But each experience is not the exclusive property of the religious enthusiast The worshi+per of beauty has given evidence of the sas

And yet, in his aesthetic rapture, the latter dwells with deliberation on his delights, and while luxuriating in the infinite labyrinths of beauty can scarcely be described ason an undifferentiated Unity So far, at least, it does not appear that our for arises in the contemplation of a beautiful object But what o still further back, just what, psychologically, does contemplation e of it, and to dwell upon an idea o even further, and say it is the carrying out by virtue of which we grasp the idea Hoe think of a tall pine-tree? By sweeping our eyes up and down its length, and out to the ends of its branches; and if we are forbidden to use our eye muscles even infinitesie In short, we perceive an object in space by carrying out its estions; more technically expressed, by virtue of a complex of motor i it Contemplation is inner imitation

Now a beautiful object is first of all a unified object; why thischapter

In it all impulses of soul and sense are bound to react upon one another, and to lead back to one another And all the elements, which in contemplation we reproduce in the form of gested energies The symmetrical picture calls out a set ofon one centre; the sonnet takes us out on one wave of rhyth us back on another to the sa circle” of the drama, not a word or an act that is not indissolubly linked with before and after Thus the unity of a work of art round of attention an inable, an invulnerable circle

Not only, however, are we held in equilibrium in the object of attention; we cannot connect with it our self-background, for the will cannot act on the object of aesthetic feeling

We cannot eat the grapes of Apelles or ehten Juliet; and of impulse to interfere, to connect the scene with ourselves, we have none But this is a less important factor in the situation That the house is dark, the audience silent, and all motor impulses outside of the aesthetic circle stifled, is, too, only a superficial, and, so to speak, a negative condition

The real ground of the possibility of a momentary self- annihilation lies in the fact that all incite to the indissoluble ring of the object itself--have been shut out by the perfection of unity to which the aesthetic object (here the draround satisfies, incites no movement; and with the disappearance of the possibility of action which would connect the two, fades also that which dwells in this feeling of transition,--the sense of personality The depth of aesthetic feeling lies not in the worthy countryman who interrupts the play with cries for justice on the villain, but in hiain in hi before him, and loses hi circle of impulses, as you like to phrase it At any rate, out of that unity the soul does not return upon itself; it remains one with it in the truest sense